Sylvaneth: Lady of Vines

M’Lady Of Vines

Grown from the dismembered hand of the goddess Alarielle, The Lady of Vines lashes her foes with vines that stretch the woodlands twice over. Born once more into the fray, her opponents will find no mercy at the end of her spear, Kurnotheal’s Wrath.

As one of the newest additions to the Sylvaneth faction, Lady of vines has to make a huge impact on the field if she wants to fight alongside the current heavy hitters, such as alarielle and drycha hamadreth.

So, let’s get stuck in!

Overgrown Treasures

To bring this Sylvaneth leader back to the realms of the living, you’ll need the resources to assemble her. Inside this box you’ll find the following:

Several sprues of pieces to build 1 x Lady of Vines model

• 1 x Instruction booklet
• 1 x 80mm round base

Just from the pictures, you can tell that this is going to be a very spindly model. These hunches are confirmed when you remove the sprues from the box.

The body and weapons are easy to cut and build, but the real challenge is the tendrils. Be really careful when you remove these pieces as the thorns, branches and leaves are prone to snapping and are hard to glue back on.

For the paint scheme, I wanted to try the traditional wooden look for this model, as I felt it would really suit the style. To start, I based the model in black and added a zenithal highlighting before dry rushing the model with white. I then used a dark brown contrast on all the wood and dry brushed with a lighter brown. To finish, I gave all the armour panels a gold coat and dry brushed with silver to dull the colour.

My aim with this paint scheme was to get an effective look in a short amount of time, and the entire model took around an hour and a half to paint.

Battering Bark

You’ll be pleased to know that in terms of loadout, the Lady of Vines has it all. Spells, ranged and melee options mean that no one is out of reach of our woodland lady.

The Lady of Vines can cast and unbind two spells each turn, which is huge, and opens up a lot of opportunities. Her unique spell is ‘Aspect of the Everqueen’ which casts on a 7+ and gives units within 12″ a ward of 5+.

Although our lady only has one range option, it’s a hard hitter. With a range of 18″, it has one attack that hits and wounds on a 2+ and deals D6 damage. Which is absolutely insane when it comes to picking off small ranged units with three models, or knocking the final healthpoints off an opposing leader.

After all that, we still have the melee left. Our range weapon can also be swung around as a melee weapon for 3 attacks of D3 damage.And the lashing vines can whip away 4 attacks of 2 damage each turn. To sweeten the deal, both melee attacks have a range of 3″ to allow you to catch more value in close combat.

Final Thoughts

As you can probably tell, I love this model. It looks stunning on the battlefield, deals some serious damage if your positioning is right, and if she gets knocked out, she can get back up and do it all again if the roll is in your favour. Unfortunately, she does feel a bit too glass cannon for my liking.

When building a competitive roster, there are other units that have a better synergy and therefore are more worthwhile. Spirit of Durthu has much more value, especially when run alongside a unit of spiterider lancers.

But even if you’re not going to run this leader in your roster, she is an absolute joy to paint and thematically base. The small indented details really lend themselves to dry brushing and you could even go as far as to paint changing seasons on each tendrill if you had the patience. For that alone, she’s worthwhile picking up.

So, that ties up my review of The Lady of Vines. I hope you found the insight useful, and if you do lend your brush to this model, we’d love to see your finished work!