Product Review: Faramir - Prince of Ithilien, Duinhir & Kardûsh - The Firecaller RECASTS

Within any Gondor force, Faramir is one model who you can nearly always take due to his cost-effectiveness and his hitting power. Nevertheless, the one version of Faramir I have always wanted to own was the Prince of Ithilien version as he is kitted out in full Gondorian glory wearing his royal robes. But there has always been one issue........the fact he is out of production and eBay/trade prices are about £40 for him, ALAS there was hope after someone within the Facebook Trade group posted a link to a website that sold an obvious recast of him. This immediately caught my eye and I started browsing aliexpress.com for whatever I could find.

Firstly, I found the Prince of Ithilien for a much less price and I know, I know it's a recast but to be honest I don't care because it means I have the model. Once I found Faramir, I went on a search of the web-store on aliexpress.com and found that they have a few various out of production recasts, including one that I particularly wanted, Duinhir, so that I would complete my Fiefdom hero collection as they are relatively hard to get hold of. Finally, after starting a Mordor army back in the summer I saw Kardûsh on the store and after browsing eBay to see prices I thought it was a good idea to get him as some of the eBay prices were astronomical!!

In these blogs I will try to be as truthful as possible, so I paid approximately £28 for the three models and all had free postage, so again I didn't really care that they are recasts especially when the originals are all worth over £30 each. Once I had decided these were the only models I needed at the time, I just had to wait about 3 weeks for them to arrive from China and I wasn't disappointed when they arrived either!!

From the photos of Faramir who can see that there was only the one issue with the casting that couldn't be fixed with a little bit of green stuff. The front left foot of the horse was missing but as a long time hobbyist I had some broken horses around and simply cut the foot off at the correct point and glued it on. Other than that there was no real issues with the sculpt and I am extremely happy that I have the Prince of Ithilien finally.

The next model I was most weary about was Duinhir as over the summer I bought the Blackroot Vale Command and obviously I needed their leader. I only noticed one thing when I inspected the model and that was his fingers on the left had were jammed together and not crisp. However after looking at the original Games Workshop model, Duinhir's hand is already like that so in all it's a very good recast.

Lastly was Kardûsh, I was less fussed about this model if it wasn't very good as I don't know if I would actually use him but it would just be nice to have me in my collection. This model is more delicate than the other two due to the fireball from the hand and his staff, plus the material doesn't seem as strong as the Games Workshop metal.

In all though, all the models are a pretty decent quality for the price I paid so I am really pleased with what I have got. It does mean that I will be going back to this site because they have some of out of production recasts such as Corsair Arbalesters, Dunlending Command and Corsair Commands.

I came. I bought, I painted.