Well, well, well, here we are. After six long months the 40k 2nd Edition Challenge Mark VII is a wrap! Dr. The Viking did a post on stats and a final wrap up video for the Race to Terra which I’ve linked to at the bottom of this post. I will be showing off what I did and a few thoughts I had about Mark VII overall.
This is my initial pledge painted up and on their display board. Knowing I couldn’t paint much of anything in the first two months I decided to do the Assassin force, after all it has always been part of the challenge that you didn’t need to paint a legal army. I did take some (mostly) good natured ribbing throughout the challenge from the other contestants but there was a precedence for this sort of thing as the good Dr The Viking himself pledged 7 characters back in Mark VI of the challenge! I’m happy with how it came out and it will look pretty neat in one of my display cases!
In Month 6 I managed to convert and paint a deodorant tank, and paint two Forgeworld Leman Russ variants. I intended to write rules for all three and put them on a datafax but ran out of time. Hopefully I’ll get around to that before the next challenge begins!
Finally, everything I managed to paint this challenge. Obviously it was well above what I pledged, but it was somewhat my plan from the get go. The Race to Terra (or Hobby Bingo as the Dr insisted on calling it) certainly helped motivate me to get more things painted. I have mixed feeling about my involvement in the Race to Terra. I’m glad I finally had the excuse to paint a backdrop (even if it is way too tall, and not quite wide enough), I loved making the terrain, and I took unexpected joy in my army display board. On the other side of the coin I still don’t like how my Tallarns came out, and while the two tanks easily count as painted I still think they need work. The Tallarns may end up being outright stripped and even if they aren’t I don’t know when I’ll get around to fixing them.
One of the things the Dr and I have talked about is how we get people to challenge themself. Some people pledge 1,000 points and paint 3,000 points and in some years people have finished their challenge in 4 months and have to be told they need to do something in month five otherwise they haven’t actually done the challenge. The Race to Terra challenged me, but I’m not sure if that was a good thing. In four of the other six challenges I painted Imperial Guard regiments with the same model count as the Tallarns in this challenge. The only difference is I didn’t save 30 infantry models for a month, or three vehicles. While I got them done I’m not happy with my work. Even though I proved I can paint more in a shorter period of the time ending up not happy with your work certainly isn’t the goal. I guess to thine own self be true is a big part of the challenge overall, and the concept I’ll bring forward to future events.
This was the first challenge in which two people ran the event together. It provided some challenges as we needed to learn how to work together but by month two we had hit our stride. The Dr definitely saved some people from the proposed procedural mulligan by handling most of the data entry, but I did notice more than a few contestants required some follow up with. Considering my workload was minimized because the Dr was doing the data entry I’m ok with this! We had a fairly high turnover rate this challenge so we didn’t need anyone dropping out because they couldn’t fill out a form!
There was a slight SNAFU with the Race to Terra as at some point there was a copy paste error with our entry form. One of the challenges was to paint an original monopose Space Marine but at some point it dropped off the monthly form so only two contestants completed this. The Dr said I might have had an advantage as I was running this whole thing but I only remembered because I created a list of the goals and plotted them out in month 1. German efficiency saved the day! While I had achieved all the goals there were two others who were right behind me, only missing the monopose Space Marine goal so at the end of the day the Dr decided to randomize the prize winner. I’m ok with this as I was running the event so didn’t want the prize, but if anyone asks I’m absolutely saying I won The Race to Terra!
I was accused of gaming the system, and I think that goes to my Month 3 entry. The Tallarn Command Squad was worth a whopping 75 points as it achieved: Use a new technique (5), Paint leopard print on a model (5), Include OSL on a model (10), Convert every model in an entire squad (20), Paint models owned for 10+ years (15), Metal model squad (15), and Hand sculpted details with green stuff (5). While this may appear gamey I earned most of those points a few times over the challenge, so in reality this squad only earned me Convert Every Model in an Entire Squad, and OSL. Everything else was achieved elsewhere more than once. The reason I opted to do the Deodorant tank was because I didn’t like my choice of entry for Rouge Trader color scheme. I didn’t quite realize what that meant at the beginning of the challenge and so I used my original Rogue Trader assassin for that, but really all black didn’t fit the theme for me once I saw people using bright colors so I figured bright pink stripes on a vehicle made of junk would be much better!
After a year and half of painting challenges I’m looking forward to getting a few months off with only DreadTober (and Orctober!) dictating what I paint. I enjoyed the camaraderie and the jokes and look forward to seeing what everyone is working on in the off season!
Be sure to check out the Dr’s posts wrapping up the challenge by following the links below!
https://cowabungajournal.com/2026/08/30/40k2ndac-vii-stats-central-end-of-challenge/
https://cowabungajournal.com/2026/09/09/40k2ndac-vii-recap-and-hobby-bingo-reveal/
-Wachtmeister
