Welcome to the end of this, the 6th iteration of the 40k 2nd Edition Challenge! I definitely did not plan on making this the biggest challenge we have ever had but due to some poor record keeping in the beginning and not wanting to turn anyone who I told was in away we ended up with 40 contestants! The previous largest group was in Challenge IV where Dr. The Viking hosted 30 2nd Edition fans so that makes this a 33% increase. Obviously, this success is born on his broad Viking shoulders and these points all get added to his contribution to the hobby!
I’m going to start with some data and then end up with some closing thoughts. Our first data point is the June completion rate. As this was the final month there could be no mulligans. You either completed the challenge or you received the dreaded Sanction Redactus, of which one of our contestants sadly fell afoul of! Six of our contestants who finished their army in Month 5 called it jobs a good ‘un and moved on to other projects, leaving us with 25 contestants who submitted either their final entry, a bonus entry, or some combination of the two.
Despite only having 25 entries in June we reversed the decline in points. In fact not only did we reverse the decline we had our second most productive month in terms of points the whole year!
As far as models per month we did reverse our downward trend but our total model count stayed in the bottom half of total points per month. This is still quite impressive as again we had the least amount of entries this month due to the Sanction Redactus total and the early finishers. The previous least amount of entries, May, had 29 entries so this months 25 entries was a 13.8% decrease in total entries and still had an impressive model count. Mørk finally stopped painting infantry to focus on his armor and this also played a big factor in this change. (Not that I’m judging mind you!)
Our model count was pretty evenly spaced and with Mørk taking his infantry break two other contestants, Maddix and Alex Dingle, got to share top model count honors!
This simple chart shows our total completion rate for the challenge as a whole with 80% of our contestants finishing the challenge!
I know you won’t be satisfied with such a simple rendition of the data so I broke it down to show how many contestants used their mulligans versus those who didn’t. Of course a win is a win so this data point doesn’t count for much other than taking up more room in my storage!
Finally lets take a look at how this challenge stacks up to the previous challenges. As you can see Mark VI featured the most competitor’s but Mark III had the greatest percentage of finishers. While it is possible some nutter might run a challenge with more competitors in the future I doubt we will see a 92% completion rate again!
Overall we banded together to paint 1,447 total models worth 49,912 points in just six months. These are massive numbers for a single challenge and brings up the grand total to 5,668 models and 183,387.5 points for all six challenges combined! *
*These numbers are close but not quite official. I know close only counts in horseshoes and Vortex Grenades so you can check out my Dr. The Viking Appreciation Post to see how I came about these numbers.
I am proud to have been allowed to shepherd this many wonderful contestants to the end of the challenge. I was constantly impressed by the output and effort put into every month. I wasn’t sure what to expect with so many contestants and for a while felt we were going to have a mass exodus but when looked at as a percentage I guess we did pretty darn good! With that said 40 contestants almost broke my spirit on more than one occasion. I had big plans for how my challenge would go and thought I would essentially double what I pledged. Unfortunately, for the second challenge in a row I only ended up finishing an already started Leman Russ as my bonus entry. This was the largest number of models I have ever pledged and if I’m counting right the most I’ve finished by a whopping 1 figure so I won’t be too hard on myself considering all that went on this year!
I am glad to say that after taking over for Dr. The Viking and guiding TWO challenges to completion I’m not the George Lazenby of the 40k 2nd Edition Challenge world!
If I run this madness again next year I will certainly have a much smaller contestant pool, I don’t think I’d survive another year of this! Still, much like there have been seven James Bond’s (counting the 1967 Casio Royal James Bond, David Nivens) I’m confident I can say “The 40k 2nd Edition Challenge will return”
-Wachtmeister
The Wachtmeister's Patrol 