I got my Clone Wars 2012 Wave 3 case - which as luck would have it includes all four of the Wave 2 figures carried forward, so it was actually a semi-decent case to purchase online, especially since I hadn't yet picked up some of the older-repack figures for the MOC collection yet.
I always open at least two of every Clone Wars figure, but with the way distribution has been, if I find more in the wild, great, if not, well, at least I have one open and one MOC of each of the "new" Clone Wars figures from 2012, plus MOC versions of all of the 2012 CW re-packs.
Anyway, now that I've had a chance to open them all, I gotta say, I'm REALLY disappointed in many of these figures. The Wolfe and Rex figures could have VERY easily just used the same legs from either the Jetpack Rex or Jetpack Cody releases since the rest of those figures borrow from a lot of other previous Clone figure parts for the rest of their bodies, I just don't see what tooling up new, unarticulated legs really saved Hasbro here.
For the entirely new sculpts, the Ahsoka is probably the biggest disappointment, the lack of knees or ankle articulation means that you can't put her in a "swimming" pose at all and well, she's a figure that's meant to be "in the water", but all you can really do with her is stand her up and make it look like she's standing on the ground waiting to go scuba-diving.
And I still just don't get the 2012 versions of Anakin and Obi-Wan - is this what they said: "We're gonna give them better head sculpts, but take away wrist and ankle joints to save money"? Again, it just doesn't make sense to me - they already had nicely articulated bodies, if you wanted to take another crack at the headsculpts, just make new headsculpts for those bodies. Wouldn't that save you money?
The most obvious thing that the de-articulation of the figures, and train-wrecks like the new Movie Heroes sculpt stuff shows me is that Hasbro, in order to support both Avengers and GI Joe: Retalliation, have most likely moved everything except the Vintage Star Wars line to their B-Game factory or sub-contracted a new factory, where the cost of having, for example a leg that is comprised of 3+ parts and having those distinct parts painted and assembled far exceeds the tooling costs of just making a new 1-piece leg. I find this hard to believe, but with more-and-more of China's labor force waking up to the fact that they are essentially treated like slaves, I guess it was only a matter of time.
The REALLY crazy thing about all of this it's not like Hasbro kept the figure prices the same. In fact, they raised them all a $1 this year, so if the prices had stayed $8/figure and the articulation dropped, I would sorta be okay with that, but to raise the prices AND lower the quality, just says "hey, we know you Star Wars morons are gonna buy this **** anyway, Darryl DeRetard wants a new Lexus" - and I point the finger still at DDR because everything we're seeing now was planned on his watch, so I ultimately hope that during this year, while the Movie Heroes and Clone Wars lines languish on the pegs and the only problem with the Vintage line is the LACK OF PRODUCT on the pegs, that the new brand manager takes note and realizes that focusing on the Vintage line is the way to go, and to help manage the overall costs of that line, perfectly great sculpts ALREADY exist that can merely just be put out on a Vintage Cardback - especially when it comes to figures that could be released in support of Attack of the Clones.
