Today a whole host of Aeldari pre orders are live , but amongst them we have two brand new kits on the way the Eldar Avatar of Khaine and the Shining Spears!

Massive thanks to Games Workshop who sent us both of these new kits to review, and i was super excited at the chance of building and painting these ready for the pre order weekend! We will be looking at both kits, and i’ll be telling you how to make the Avatar fully modular so that you can swap out the heads and weapons on the fly to suit your mood when you go to battle!

If you would like to support the site then why not order your Aeldari Avatar of Khaine through our affiliate Element Games and save yourself some money too!

If you would like to watch this unboxing in video form then check it out below or over on YouTube!

Shining Spears

Before we get dug into the main event, I first wanted to take a look at the Shining Spears! These are a new plastic update of the classic kit and give you a quick and agile close combat unit capable of punching holes though your opponants!

Inside the box you get 2 sets of sprues, along with the usual instructions, transfers and bases – and they look really nice to put together, with a sleek and quick profile capturing their speed and gracefulness!

And here’s what they look like in the flesh! Jay has painted these up in the classic box art colours, and I’m now very temped to add some to my collection too!

Avatar of Khaine – How to Make it Modular

So now on to the main event, the Avatar of Khaine himself! This is an impressive centrepiece kit that well deserves a place in any collection, and I was very excited to tear the wrapper off and get it painted up in time for the article!

Inside you get a single frame, base and instructions to build the model – You might notice that the arms are sculpted onto the weapons – something that makes it very very easy to make this modular either through magnetising it, or like you will see in a moment, by using pins! There are also a neck piece designed to hold each distinct head, but again as you will see shortly that is not the issue I originally thought it would be!

And here he is painted up! As you can see I’ve managed to make it so that each of the 3 weapons can be used in any combination with any of the 3 heads – This didn’t take a lot of prep, and I feel the slight additional time was worth it in order to make it fully interchangeable. To do it you just need to drill some holes and use some cut paperclips!

Firstly all you need to do is build the main body – you do have an option of neck piece with slightly changes the angle of the head on the finished model – but I’ve found that all three heads simply plug into the neck join just by using resistance! This saved in making the heads interchangeable! then snip out all three weapons, but leave the arm armour as a separate piece, you only get one of these – however it simply plugs into the hole on the arm and is quite sturdy once painted

The next job is to drill two small holes in the arm point and superglue a pin in each – I used a paperclip! Once dry trim this down to size so that only a small amount of the pin is still sticking up – make sure it’s not too long here or you’ll find it harder to to the matching drilling in the arms!

Next simply take the 3 weapon arms and drill matching holes so that the pins in the body simply slot into the holes in the arm! The easiest way to do this is put a blob of paint on each pin, and press the arm into place – this will leave the paint on the exact places you need to drill your holes! Just be careful you don’t drill too deep, the pin doesn’t need to be massive, just enough to offer the resistance to hold the pieces together

Once done, paint up those various sub assemblies and your fully modular Avatar of Khaine is complete and ready to go to the battlefield with whatever weapon and helmet suits him each day!

So how does the new Avatar stack up compared to other models?

As you can see, he towers over the Death Jester, finally becoming the impressive icon of Aeldari might he was always meant to be!

For comparison against something a similar size below you can see how he stacks up against Be’lakor!

The Dark Master is a tad taller than the Avatar including his wings, but head to head they are a similar size, which is pretty impressive considering the Avatar is also £30 cheaper than Be’lakor

The Eldar range has had some amazing new kits, but these are both among my favourites! Both are up for pre order today and are released on Saturday 2nd April

Games Workshop provided Sprues & Brews with free review copies of these kits

Published by Matt Crowther

View all posts by Matt Crowther