is there a ml scale x-force set coming out at sdcc?
if so, what kind of availability will it have? will hasbro have it on their site? this is an absolute must-have for me.
Yes, it includes Archangel, Wolverine and Psylocke. Supposedly it will be available on HTS after the show, but as shown in the last couple years, that could prove to be disastrous. Good luck.
define "disastrous". we talking how matty used to be a couple years ago?
Almost every Hasbro Toy Shop SDCC day for the past several years has been as bad or worse than the all-time worst days at Matty. Expect constant errors, incredibly slow page loads and 45 minutes before you can complete checkout after backing out and reentering to remove items from your cart that sold out while you were waiting.
Also, Hasbro doesn't clearly and officially announce the date and time of the sale. The expected day of the sale might leak out at some point, but you'll basically be spending your spare post-SDCC time refreshing their site 24/7 for a few days. Last year they didn't put all the items up at once either, so if you wanted to ensure you got everything you had to place multiple orders, getting what you could before other items were posted to the site.
Also, this year has an absolutely incredible line-up of items that every collector from multiple toy lines is going to want. They've never done anything to improve the quality of their ordering process from year to year despite the experience being consistently horrible, the technical problems getting worse each year and the items selling out faster each year. The demand this year will probably be bigger than ever and the ordering experience is likely to be the worst yet.
Almost every Hasbro Toy Shop SDCC day for the past several years has been as bad or worse than the all-time worst days at Matty. Expect constant errors, incredibly slow page loads and 45 minutes before you can complete checkout after backing out and reentering to remove items from your cart that sold out while you were waiting.Also, Hasbro doesn't clearly and officially announce the date and time of the sale. The expected day of the sale might leak out at some point, but you'll basically be spending your spare post-SDCC time refreshing their site 24/7 for a few days. Last year they didn't put all the items up at once either, so if you wanted to ensure you got everything you had to place multiple orders, getting what you could before other items were posted to the site.
Also, this year has an absolutely incredible line-up of items that every collector from multiple toy lines is going to want. They've never done anything to improve the quality of their ordering process from year to year despite the experience being consistently horrible, the technical problems getting worse each year and the items selling out faster each year. The demand this year will probably be bigger than ever and the ordering experience is likely to be the worst yet.
Jonesie is not exaggerating at all. I primarily collect G.I.Joe and Marvel Universe, but I have not acquired the SDCC exclusives for either line in 3 years. Unfortunately, 2 out of the 3 years I was unemployed, so I had plenty of time to sit at the PC hitting F5, and still failed. I would put one of each exclusive in my cart, and by the time the page had been refreshed 3-7 times just to get to the payment stage, all the items were sold out. This year, I'm just giving in and looking for the best price on eBay pre-orders. And it's not like I'm on a weak internet connection or such(40 MBps+), the suckage is purely on HTS' end.
While it might seem tough to get something off the hasbro toy shop page at first it's really not. For the last 3 SDCC's or so I've been able to order their exclusives off the website. Sure they'd sell out quick after the initial hype but then they'd come back in stock the next day. And the next day, etc. I was able to order Nemesis Prime and Cobra Commander off their site for weeks until they were no longer available. And only just recently did the First Edition Prime finally disappear. Heck those NY Toy Far Arcee/Bumblebees were available FOREVER and if you missed those you must have been in a coma for three months.
I doubt these $100+ exclusives are going to fly out of the shop where nobody can get them.
That is the one saving grace of the Hasbro site: restock. The initial run on the site is indeed worse than a bad Matty sale day (though Hasbro would have to work very hard to be worse than Matty overall), but things do pop up later, as well. Still, having people saying that their site is comparable to Matty on ANY day is something I think they'd want to fix, and it does leave a bad taste in the mouth of someone who might be trying to buy from the site for the first time.
It's true that at times items they "sold out" of popped up on subsequent days. Although I think there was much less of that last year and almost nothing truly popular showed up again after the first day last year.
One thing they did do last year is delay everyone's shipments while they spent days afterwards going through everybody's orders and deleting and refunding any items where someone ordered more than Hasbro's stated limit (Which you can do by placing separate orders. I guess you can do that on Matty too.). Despite them doing that though, and nipping away figures people had paid for like my second Zarana, I don't remember hearing of extras of the hotter items like Zarana being put on their site for sale again.
This just shows the overall chaos of their process. The fact that they don't always put all the items up for sale the first day just makes it more likely you'll miss out on the big day. But if you want to continue the 24/7 refreshing for the next week or two, you might get lucky. I did score a Triple-T Slaughter by doing the 24/7 refresh thing for a week and being there at the right time when about 10 additional copies went up and sold out in 5 minutes. That's the only time out of 4 tries that I was able to get the "variant" Joe figure from HTS.
The price of some of the items is not going to be a deterrent to people. Some of the hottest items in the last two years have been big-ticket ones like Galactus, the Starscream Skystriker and the Star Wars Vintage Death Star package. And in this case being less popular means it sells out in an hour instead of 5 minutes, which usually means those slower-selling items are available for about 10-15 minutes of non-error-prone ordering. The only items that usually last longer than that I can remember are Superhero Squad or Mighty Muggs items.
I'm wondering if Hasbro will release Psylocke on a single card in the future, maybe with her purplish/pink belt sash. She's the only reason I would be considering this set. They would be nuts not to.
For a harbinger of things to come, BBTS has a sale page up for all the SDCC exclusives at inflated prices. They are sold out of 14 out of 46 items so far. The sell-outs include 10 of Hasbro's, 3 of Mattel's and 1 other. The only thing from Hasbro they aren't sold out of is the Jem Fashion doll. It's easy to see that Hasbro's SDCC offerings this year are pure gold while most of everyone else's are same old-same old. If Hasbro decides to at least triple their production numbers this year, then that's a good thing. Otherwise it will be such a bad day on HTS that I wouldn't be surprised if they have to shut the whole sale down and cancel it before it's over.
I'm almost relieved the Shockwave Hiss tank doesn't truly excite like last year's Starscream. I'll take a shot at it but if I miss out, it won't leave a sore spot like Starscream did. I've only recently pulled the trigger on one from ebay.
Regarding items lasting forever: A couple exclusives even made it to the discounters, Sunfire (at Marshalls) and Blaster (Winners in Canada). Did HTS list them as sellouts or did they just vanish from the site?