Now that it’s streaming in D+, I was able to take another look at these Merc Droids.  Having just watched TM&G when it was On Demand, I was looking forward to this figure, but I assumed I’d be disappointed for reasons I’ll get into in a minute.  Picking through a few scenes, I caught something I missed the first time around.  Zeb refers to these droids as members of the “Droid Gotra.”  Looking that up on Wookieepedia, we get this:

The Droid Gotra was a droid group that supported droid rights. It was originally formed by a band of lethal repurposed battle droids with grievances against the Galactic Empire for having been abandoned after their service during the Clone Wars. At one time, the group was confined to an industrial complex in the bowels of the planet Coruscant, but it later managed to expand. They were known to support droid emancipation and served as muscle for the Crymorah Syndicate and the Hutt Clan. The group continued to operate into the New Republic Era.

I assumed that somewhere in the history of the Gotra, there were ties to the small droid uprising that occurred on Kessel as seen in Solo , but apparently not.

Watching TM&G the first time, I got the sense that the droids protecting the Hutt Twins were a hodge podge mess of random droids. But after my piecemeal rewatch and reading on Wookieepedia, it seems there were only 3 types, so it was a bit more organized and uniform than I first thought.  That means that making figures for these guys should be easy, since you only need 3 sculpts.  Well, here’s one.  Any bets on whether or not we’ll get the other two?  We should also get The Twins, especially since we’re getting Rotta, and that they had already appeared The Mandalorian TV series.  Once again, however, I’m not holding my breath.  Back in the day, this would be a near guarantee.  But not today.  So I fear we’ll have this random droid, and neither of its fellow Gotra soldiers, nor the folks that hired them as security in the first place.

So back to my first comment about thinking I’d be disappointed.  I didn’t really look too closely at the promo images, but I just assumed this was a simple retool/repaint of the recent B2 Super Battle Droid that we got in the 4-pack.  Well, as you probably know, that is far from the case.  It looks like it’s nearly a completely new figure, with the exception of the upper arms, hands, and feet.  The forearms are slight retools, but just about everything else looks new.  I’m pleasantly surprised Hasbro was able to put this much new tooling into such a figure.

The execution is quite nice.  The sculpt is excellent, with plenty of detail throughout.  One of the most striking things about the outstanding Super Battle Droid figure is the metallic paint job.  That is not present here, and correctly so.  But the character makes up for it by having some decent grime on almost every part of the droid.  The mismatched parts and paint, particularly on the legs, gives it that battle-worn/used look, and it’s done well.

The cape - dare I call it a shmata - is plastic.  While I understand (but disagree) that VC408 Devon Izara might benefit from the sculpting allowable with a plastic cape, I see no aesthetic reason for this droid to have a plastic shmata. It should have been soft goods.  The good news is that even in plastic, it doesn’t really inhibit the articulation range of the figure.  Part of that might be because this figure lacks the extreme JLA range of motion present on Devon, so there’s just less here to restrict.  While separately sculpted, the cape is non-removable and attached to the droid’s back.  Further, the bandolier is also not removable, and is secured under the cape.

For accessories, this B2 Merc Droid has a pair of removable wrist blasters, and an additional one that is firing a red laser blast.  One little detail I didn’t like is that non-laser blasters are sculpted a little differently than the one with the laster blast.  Not sure why that is, but it’s not an exact match.  In any case, they are swappable to create some different looks.  If you take the laser blast from a second droid, you can have one droid firing both simultaneous.  But that seems like a lot of work.  Finally, the Merc Droid comes with a big knife.  It fits well in either hand, but wish it also had a sheath or a peg hole so it could attach to the figure somewhere.  The bandolier and the knife could probably use some shiny metallic paint details, but no such luck.

For articulation, this figure is about the same as the B2 Super Battle Droid.  That is to say, it’s got most of what you’d expect, although as a droid, the range is less in most joints than a human figure.  Again, it’s lacking the ability to twist the forearm in that familiar B2 pose, but this character didn’t really do that, so it’s not missed nearly as much as in the AOTC version.  One thing that I found myself annoyed at, is that in the card art, you can see that the neck is articulated.  So when I looked at the figure, the separately sculpted head looked like it might be articulated.  Surprise - it is not.  That was a bit of a bummer.

While I really like this figure, I think it would have been great if we got a 4-pack that was similar in style to the Mandalorian Shriek-Hawk set.  Maybe this B2, a couple of B1’s, and one of those flat-=head security droids.  And we should get The Twins.  But that’s about 0% chance.  I think the chances of the other merch droid styles is also pretty low.  But here we are.  This is the state of world-building. 

And (once again) for the record, I include The Mandalorian in my scope of things worth world-building because we have so much of it already.  It’s been decently covered to this point, so I’m all for a fair share of annual tooling to go to the Mandoverse as a source.  I think a few more New Republic pilots, bounty hunters/heist crew, and aliens would do okay in the line.

Overall, it gets a 9/10.  My biggest gripe is the cheap looking plastic cape, but all the other nitpicks amount to a single point deduction.