Four years ago, I made mocs of the Toa Mangai. I’m conflicted about how I feel about the remaining seven, but I still like the four officially named ones and still have them built and standing on my dresser shelf to this day. For the purpose of this post, we’re gonna focus on everybody’s favorite traitor, Nidhiki, to whom I’ve made a couple significant changes since that post.
First is the scythe. I just greatly simplified it. The Rahkshi heads at the base of the blade were ridiculous, so I removed those years ago. Also I recently changed the blade itself from a Zadakh blade to a Takanuva blade to better reference his set counterpart. Speaking of…
Second, and more importantly, are the shoulders. I don’t remember where I saw it–so I can’t cite it as of the the time I’m writing this–but I could swear that I saw a quote from Greg saying that of course Lhikan would still recognize Nidhiki after his mutation, comparing it to a family member in a Halloween costume. I was not going to remove the sand green (I think it’s a perfect secondary shade for him), nor was I going to change the chest plate (the Gahlok Kal shield was never produced in black), which left me to tackle the shoulders.
I wasn’t crazy about the obvious appearance of the Technic liftarms, but the original set was full of them in the torso and limbs so I got over it. Something that did greatly concern me was connecting the Metru armor to the shoulder. I wasn’t entirely sure if that connection would work irl, and if it didn’t, I would basically have to start all over. So I constructed a slap-dash prototype and…
Wow, that actually holds together way better than I thought. I’ll definitely be ordering the pieces to make these shoulders in the right colors.