Now you've got me paranoid about how many polygons my sword has, BB.  :)

what is more important is HOW  you have them arranged on the model, any sort of twisting of the poly faces look awful when a reflective metallic material is applied, so long as you add enough polys to avoid this, most of the time you can skimp a little in other places, ive seen some cracking models that hardly seem to have many polys at all, just skill and experience i suppose, like most things in life.

Yeeeaah, I, uh, I think I went a little crazy.