I'm kind of sad that Vintage is going out with such a whimper (I refer, of course, to the distribution as opposed to the quality of the figures, which look great), but Hasbro has nobody to blame for that but themselves. I'd like to think that, with the launch of the new Droid Factory stuff in 2013 they'll change things to correct these last two years' issues, but something tells me that they haven't learned anything. You kind of have to admit there's something wrong before you can learn anything too.
Well - back before the EP1 vintage showed up there were reports of various case assortments - and everything up until the Tarkin wave came true.
What didn't come through were all of the ridiculous waves with even more EP1 carry-forwards and just a few new figures from both the lost-line six and the final 12.
Instead, what we're getting is the "lost line six" in a case where it's a complete set on Vintage cards and then a complete set on the lost line look cards.
And then after that, they took the remaining 12 figures and stuck them all in a case at 1-per case.
While this isn't a totally ideal situation for the collector who picks and chooses the figures they want. For the collector who gets one of everything still - these last two cases are ideal.
And at least with the first wave of the new droid factory - there are 12 different figures to build two 6-part droids. And where a figure is an old tooling it is at least a repaint - Red TVC Battledroid, VC45 Clone Repaint, Repaint of Sun Fac, etc...
To my recollection, this will be the first time in a REALLY long time where three cases in a row were ideal for a "one of everything" collector.
We didn't even get this kind of treatment when Legacy launched in 2008 - that first wave had eight new figures and four "Greatest Hits" figures of repacks - and from then on, every Legacy collection wave had at least 4 carry-forwards from a previous wave with changed droid parts so that any one droid was unique to a wave.
Even when Vintage launched - the ESB wave had re-packs (Boba, 4-LOM) as did the Vintage "re-launch" for EP1 (Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan).
So I think they are making good strides to help combat the problems of the past year.
Minimally they're making it so buying-by-the-case online isn't a painful process. As it stands right now, I have 26 "excess" Vintage figures from the cases I have ordered this year and no less than 9 of those figures are Qui-Gon, Obi-Wan and BluRay Luke - that's ridiculous.