It sucks to see Target jumping on the dollar increase bandwagon now with these. They were much more fun, and the repaints were more stomach-able, at just $4.99 a pop. But at a buck more than that across the board now, with the future of the line consisting of 95% repaints (and some likely EU later, I'm guessing), I think this line is probably going to start struggling a bit on a go-forward basis. No backing out at this point for me though, since I'm complete aside from that damned gold X-Wing exclusive which I passed on at C2...

But in an effort to combat last week's price hikes at Target, I found one store today that still had all their $4.99 tags up on the pegs (though the ships were scanning at the new $5.89 price. So I took their entire stash of 9 ships, along with several of their price tags, and went to the register and asked for them all at the price shown on the tags, which they fortunately went along with. So I'll just hang on to them all for a while, and then return them in place of the new waves when I eventually find them. Integrity be damned.
And yes, that Viper and forthcoming Cylon Raider look way too sweet to pass up. I've even been fighting the urge lately to pick up several of the Vipers to create a little squadron, since they're starting to pop up all over the place over the past couple of weeks. I'll just stick with my one, hopefully. I assume nothing ever came of the discussion of variant Vipers, right? Just the one classic version is all we know of so far, correct? I think it was 'Bug whose old eyes were seeing a slightly different paint scheme in one of the pix, IIRC...
Lastly, that Paploo Speederbike piece is definitely no longer a "chase" item. It's hanging by the buttload at nearly every store I go into now. Couldn't find it for the life of me for many months, and now they're up to 6 or 8 deep at many stores. I guess that's cool for anyone still in need, but it's gonna become a pegwarmer at this pace.