The tax laws changed this year, lowering the 1099 threshold significantly. If you saved shipping and shipping material receipts you can defray that bit of your "earnings" through tax write-offs. It's a big part of why I do my listings as free shipping for the customer, to have that included as a part of the sales number at the end of year.

It stinks that to sell on eBay now you will have to consider it business these days. And the change to eBay payments wasn't the issue, because PayPal now observes the lower threshold too for any payments that aren't  "friends and family" there.

It appears my Troopers have shipped from shop Disney as well. I am disproportionately excited about a box of repacks!

These look cool, and I’ll pick them up.  Is it wrong that I actually prefer these to the regular retro collection figures?

Not at all. I am right there with you. Never before made Kenner style figures are so much easier to get excited about than modern resculpts aiming to faithfully replicate figures that have been available for 40 years.

I mean if that first wave had been Luke and Leia in Yavin outfits, Han and Chewie with medals, removable helmet Vader and Stormtrooper Han I would have been over the moon! As it is, they were kind of headscratchers to me.

No idea if it’s nonsense, but someone at RS is claiming that someone from Target said they underestimated demand and have ordered more x-wings.  If that’s even tue, I have no idea how long they would take to arrive.

Ordered more? Who, the local store management? Checking the nearest distribution center?

This was an exclusive item made specifically for this order. If more were being made, the word would come from Hasbro like it did for the Bad Batch 4-pack and the Walmart Jabba's Palace.

I guarantee this nugget was dropped by a red shirt trying to placate a weirdo star wars fan so they could go about their day.

I did get mine, I am able to set my schedule around this stuff for the most part when needs be. I shouldn't have to arrange my day for Star Wars toy preorders, though.

And it just puts ice in my heart for this hobby that the cycle of announcement-to sell out is under a day now. If I considered any of this essential (and not the gravy it is to me) it would really sap the joy from my collection.

If the new Fig'rin Dan or an eventual Sim Aloo wind up on a marketing schedule of 20 hours between reveal and sell out like this Boba Fett did, I don't think I will be able to take it.

Thanks, Nick...I get sheepish about self-promoting here and pushing stuff on people when I'd rather be reading your posts.

The backdrop is only selling through tomorrow night, then I will take the final numbers and make just that many of them, so there's a little time crunch on it.

And if you don't do Insta, here is a link on Facebook too: https://www.facebook.com/CardboardGalaxy/

I think the problem with the Star Wars line of late has been the lack of the kind of collector mentality that all of us using these forums built over the years. During the 30th AC, Legacy line, Clone Wars line, and the beginning of the Black Series, the Hasbro Line Lead was Darryl DePriest, a hardcore "army building" style collector himself. When he left it switched off to Steve Evans, a very outspoken and fan-connected collector who barely got a chance to reboot TVC and launch the Sail Barge HasLab before being shifted over to the Marvel team.

From him we switched to Patrick Schneider, who I have not heard is himself a collector at all, in fact I have no knowledge of the man outside of his marketing speak. As far as I can tell from how the Star Wars collector lines have developed the last two years, his strategy for a successful collector line is to mimic the profitable Funko Pops model: leverage repaints in the main line, create new sublines consisting of repaints (or "expressions" as he put it way too many times Wednesday,) and develop new figures and tooling with a priority weighted towards future reuse of the molds in repaints and other "expressions."

I am not saying it is not a viable strategy to continue the Black Series and Vintage Collection lines, but it is very different from the mentality of the previous 15+ years--a period that contains what most of us consider the "golden years" of the modern line.

Quote from: Nicklab on September  9, 2021, 12:12 PM

Thinking about this particular vehicle, I've got to wonder something.  And this is probably the result of WAY too much time reading posts in The Vintage Collection Facebook group.  Is it possible that some people could wind up buying as many as 3 of these to check some boxes in their own collections?

-1 to open
-1 to take out the General Merrick figure for display as a carded figure
-1 to keep completely sealed

Just writing that down I can see all sorts of collecting OCD spilling out.  I will personally be content with one of these X-wings.

This was my plan - to get three for those exact three reasons.

If they were releasing him in a wave and I would be able to get him separately, this would NOT be an issue. By getting three, I'm already taking a hit on the numbers of any single TVC figure I collect. (I get minimally two of every figure to open). So I will be okay with the idea that there is a MOC one sight-unseen in the un-opened X-Wing box, one that I will keep MOC from one opened X-Wing and then a third that I will open to put in the cockpit of the fighter. I don't what I'll do with the spare X-Wing, may hang it from the ceiling in my basement or I may offer it up for $30 - $40, I'm sure there's someone who will find that price (even without the figure) a good deal.

Devils Advocate here...if the only option to get this is as shelf stock and not shipped from the warehouse, you can never be sure that the figure wasn't removed and the box returned to the store without opening it up.

Pilfered packages are gonna be a real issue I expect, as the loose carded Merricks wind up going for big bucks on ebay.