L is for Lady Luck

There is within the hobby an expression used by the dealers on the show circuit; "He was spotting my mistakes!", it refers to those occasions when a dealer known to be a bit 'tight', to have cobwebs in his wallet, suddenly buys something another dealer thinks he has priced for 'all the money' without a question, during the pre-opening 'trading'. It means that the other guy has spotted something that is worth more than it's going for.

This post is not about a 'spotted mistake' as the description was quite clear;

15mm SCALE PLAINS INDIANS

Made of hard plastic Painted and based figures, make unknown but 20+ years old.

Comprises a total of 69 figures.

...and the photograph was reasonable;

However, when I spotted this a few weeks ago, I though "Plastic?...15mm?...I'll have to have a look at this!" and realised immediately that it was a old-school war gamer's American Indian force made from Merten figures (first bit of luck), loads of them...69! Of course they are really 18mm, but with war games bases added (and very thin bases originally) were clearly fitting in with 15 mil figures. And if they hadn't been Merten they could only have been Starlux with that description!

So I bid and got them for the start price, which was the second bit of luck, no one else bid? They were in the right category and the photo is clear?! However there was still the gambol that I'd be able to get them off the bases without ruining them, and/or that they hadn't been touched-up with non-factory paint.

When they arrived the rest of the 'luck' slipped into place, they had been based in/around the 1970's with something resembling sun-dried porridge (I suspect a non-rawlplug 'plastic-wood' that dried faster than the war gamer could base the figures!) and apart from the odd cracked - Merten - base as they came out, they all came away with relative ease.

A set of the six poses as they would have originally come out of the box, I have a few spare boxes in storage and at some point will see if any have the right background paper via the old catalogue, if there is a correct one; Lady Luck will have brought a near-mint boxed set to the collection!

We looked at some of the other sets in this range back in the early days of the blog so click on Merten in the tag-list to find that, I didn't know this set off-hand so a really nice find.