Advent of Decay offered Mythic Legions fans a chance to bolster their Vampire Legions with not one, but two army builder figures. Today we’re going to look at the Vampire Legion builder, a female soldier in service to the Vampire Hordes of Illythia.
The Vampire Legion builder comes in the now familiar collector friendly packaging with some fairly familiar accessories.
She comes with a spear, long sword, shield, shield handle, weapons holding strap, two removeable shoulder pads, a removeable feather plume for her helmet, a masked head, three connector pieces to add wings to the the figure, and two scythe like swords.
The weapons are very familiar to the Mythic Legions collector as the sword and spear came with quite a few figures and they are great weapons, if a little over-large for the smaller figures.
The sculpts are still razor sharp. I also like this shield in all black. The scythe-like swords are something new for Advent of Decay and they rule.
They’ve got a wicked shape to them that is an elegant cross between a scythe and a scimitar and feel like perfect weapons for a vampire. A nice feature of these two weapons is they can be combined into a double bladed staff weapon.
The feather plume for the helmet where you can see the face is fungous, but surprisingly doesn’t over-balance the figure as badly as I was expecting.
The closed visor helmet is re-used from the Elven army builders, but I think it works very nicely for the Vampires and is a great inclusion if you want to build more faceless vampire hordes.
The connector pieces plug into the back securely. I remembered I had some Raven wings, so I tried those out here with the connector piece and they work well functionally.
I don’t think Raven wings work with this character aesthetically very well. The skeleton wings work a little better, though demon/dragon/bat wings would be most welcome eventually.
With the strap, shield, sword, and the shoulder pads, you can load up a pretty heavily armed soldier, but all of the pieces can be added or subtracted for a lighter armored look. I especially like the way the soldier looks with no extra armor wielding the scimitar staff.
The sculpt features a lot of the same pieces as the Vampire Knight and Gwendolynne Heavensbrand.
I’m impressed at the different builds they get by just using different torsos.
I like that the Vampire army builder does have a visible face, since their fangs would probably be one of their secondary weapons, and the helmet is really cool with the spikey chin guard.
I think it would be cool if the next vampire in the line had an open mouth in mid-bite pose.
The articulation is pretty great, with a lot of movement for such heavily armored characters. I do find myself wishing for just a tad bit more knee range of movement the more I play with these figures, but it’s mostly good with:
- Swivel/hinge shoulders, elbows, hips, wrists, knees, and ankles
- Ball and socket head and mid-torso
- Swivel forearm, waist, and thighs
Paint is pretty minimal since this is one of the lower-priced legion builder figures, but it’s a nice gloss black overall and the skin tone has some subtle gray shading that adds a bit of depth to the face.
Overall, I’m glad I cracked this figure open and took a look at it prior to the 4H sale so I could add one more of these to my Vampire crew.
They are looking really slick lined up together and I’m looking forward to ordering the Vampire Brute when that becomes available.
