Age of Sigmar: Slaves to Darkness: Start Collecting Box Magnetization & Conversion

This article is about using the 2019 Warhammer Age of Sigmar Start Collecting! Slaves to Darkness Box. This box comes with 1 Chaos Lord on Karkadrak, 5 Chaos Knights with Cursed Lances, and 10 Chaos Warriors with One Handed Weapons and Shields. Neither the Knights nor the Warriors have a Musician or Standard Bearer (although both have a Champion).

I decided to magnetize my models as much as possible. I also expanded my Warriors unit to 15 using 5 of the older 2016 Chaos Warriors. Below I'll describe a few of the mods I did as well as provide some information to maybe help others with their conversions.

Old Chaos Warriors vs New Chaos Warriors

The old 2016 Chaos Warriors are roughly the same size as the new Chaos Warriors and can be run side-by-side without standing out too much. Their feet are a bit larger and their legs are a bit thicker, but overall the only real stand-out difference is that their heads are a fair bit bigger. This seemed like a problem I could remedy. Your Start Collecting Box's Warriors come with 10 helmeted heads, and 10 bare heads. So if you are happy mixing and matching you've got 10 spare heads right there. However I like my armored Warriors to wear helmets. What kind of a dufus goes to war without a helmet on? So I had to find other helmeted heads that were the right size.

• Of course the heads from the new 2019 Start Collecting Box are the right size
• The heads from the 2016 Chaos Chariot are the right size
• It turns out that both the Khorne Bloodreavers box and Bloodreavers from the 2018 Goreblade Warband have the right size heads as well. Even better, you can get helmeted heads with an exposed mouth from some of them (which I like for my Musicians)

See the picture below for a comparison (from left to right) of a new Warrior with new stock head, new Warrior with Bloodreaver head, old Warrior with Bloodreaver head, and old Warrior with old stock head. I left the shields off the old warriors as to not obscure their heads. Sorry about the black undercoat. I didn't think to take this photo until I had undercoated my converted old warriors.

And here is a picture of old & new sculpts painted up together. Some of the old sculpts have new heads, some have original heads. I think they all work well together and, in hind sight, I wouldn't bother trying to get new heads for the old sculpts.

Here are a pics of the 5 Bloodreaver heads and 1 Chariot Champion heads I used for my Chaos Warriors. I replaced the head of the new Chaos Warrior because I wanted him to have his mouth exposed so he could use the Horn in his hand. The other 2 Musician's didn't get that style helmet because I only had 3 and I needed the other 2 for Chaos Knights. Notice that I had to flip some of the horns upsidedown because they were interfering with the Warrior's shoulders. I also had to fill in the back of the helmet with greenstuff and create a neck for the Bloodreaver helms (although I forgot to take a pic of the back of one of their heads).

Converted Standards, Shields, & Horns

I always like variety in my models that, could otherwise, look like twins or triplets. Furthermore I hate when Musicians and Standard Bearers are modeled as if they went to war with no weapons at all! I created a left hand standard, a left hand standard with shield, 2 shield hands holding weapons, 2 left hand horns (only one shown), and 2 back mounted shield. Everything is magnetized. See below for photos of these conversions.

Magentizing the Warriors

Magnetizing the old Warriors is a no brainer given how they are pieced together. Here is a pic of an old Warrior with magnetized elbows. See the photos just above for magnetized weapons, shields, etc. For these guys I decided to leave some magnet exposed (and not mount them flush) as the magnets themselves seem to provide a good "forearm". The 3mm diameter (1mm height) magnets are about perfect for the Chaos Warriors forearm.

Magnetizing the new Warriors is a bit more complex since they are monopose and don't all split at the elbow like the old guys. I ended up evaluating how easy/hard it would be to magnetize each arm of each new Warrior and only did what was easy. Check out the table below for my take on how hard it is to do each guy.

Legend:

• easy: a straight cut with a hobby saw
• hard: requires some greenstuff and/or more than a straight cut
• impossible: molded into the body, would take a lot of work to magnetize

Instruction #	Right Hand	Left Hand
7	hard	easy
8	easy	impossible
9	hard	easy
10	hard	easy
11	hard	easy
12	easy	easy
13	easy	impossible
14	easy	easy
15	easy	easy
16	hard	impossible

Here are some pics of the new Warrior crew showing off the magnetization. Note that Warrior 16 (the last one) has no magnetization done.

Standard Bearers and Musicians

For my 15 man block of Chaos Warriors I put together 3 Standard Bearers and 3 Musicians. It was an obvious choice to make the 5 Old Warriors into these guys and since I needed 1 more I had to convert a new Warrior as well. While these dudes are "Chaos" I'm not really into the idea that they're all dragging around severed body parts all the time so I converted the new Warrior holding a severed head into one holding a Horn. Here are some pics of my Standard Bearers and Musicians (plus a couple pics showing 2 guys' shields magnetized to their backs).

And finally (even though I'm not running them this way) here are 3 pics showing how you could, easily convert a new Chaos Warrior into a Standard Bearer. The last pics shows one of my shield hands holding an axe.