Dave's Toy Rant: Mystic Knights of Tir na Nog: Ice Lord of Temra For remarks on the line as a whole, packaging and so forth, check out my review of Deirdre. If it's already expired from your server, email me and I can send you a copy. CAPSULE REVIEW Appearance suffers some from lack of painted details (looks like flat cel animation), but the details are there in the sculpt. Great articulation, with 17 points of articulation (4 of them are rather restricted, however). Nice accessories. Recommended. $5.96 at Wal-Mart RANT Packaging: Same well-thought-out packaging as Deirdre has, except that he doesn't have a pop-up, and hence no individual information anywhere. The pop-up is replaced by an extra tray of accessories, a cloak and a scythe. Figure: If you include the horns on the helmet, he stands 5.75" (14.5cm) tall. Knock off a quarter inch if you don't count the horns. Main color scheme is bright purple and a sort of bone color, with a few translucent blue ice patterns and some gunmetal chainmail bits. The figure is missing the really nice ink wash on the bone pieces that's shown on the packaging, so the bone detail is kinda lost. Lots of skulls and bones, and it's hard to say if the Ice Lord has a skull head, or a skull mask. The reallllly deep-set eyes suggest a mask. Like Angus, the Ice Lord's shoulderpads are attached to his torso and flip up to allow movement of the arms. He's got an extra swivel joint just below the elbow in each arm, which lets you position his bracers more dramatically but not much else. His upper arm swivel is blocked by the bulky bone armor over his biceps, so despite having two more points of articulation than the Knights, he's a little less poseable. Accessories: He's got six accessories. The first is a nice plastic cloak (not cloth) which goes into a peg-hole on his back. There's two other holes on his back with no apparent purpose, either the cloak was later modified or he'll have something else to clip into later. At this scale, anything but the finest silk will look wrong in a cloth cape, so I approve of the use of an unmoving plastic cape. It also gives him a "third leg" for some poses. All of the Evil Knights have large shields (well, larger than the Mystic Knights have) with a nifty gimmick...the ribcage-like bones on it split apart to reveal a demonic face and turn the shield into a mancatcher weapon. Unfortunately, the shield REALLY suffers from lack of painting, it looks much better in the packaging picture with more metallic paints and shading. The other four accesories are weapons. There's a so-so wrist-claw thing which doesn't hold on terribly well, but the other three weapons are GREAT. Magnificent detail work in the sculpt, and subtle use of metallic hues to prick out details. The small dagger is especially good here, it takes good light and careful scrutiny to even tell that there's paint there...and putting paint where it's not glaringly obvious is a sign of quality (too bad it wasn't done on the figure or the shield). The scimitar is likewise quite impressive, although the purple skull on it is a bit distracting. And, sharing the second tray with the cloak, the large scythe is 7" (18cm) long with a 2" (5cm) main blade. And it looks quite good, although it's a little on the floppy side and tends to deform if you're not careful in storing it. It's good for two-handed poses, although it flexes in many poses. It could have used handles to make it really good. It's really well sculpted, and the only reason I was able to find a seam was that I knew there had to be one somewhere. Overall: A very good figure. I'd put it a little behind the other two I've bought, mainly because of the coloration and some lack of arm movement range (and hte skirt tends to stay deformed too easily). But given Bandai's track record of unposeable bad guys, this is a welcome change. It looks like Bandai is really trying to make this its breakthrough line, shedding the Power Rangers image. Dave Van Domelen, will probably demonstrate his weak will and buy Rohan and Ivar in the next few weeks....