Sometimes Repaints/Repacks Can Make People Happy

Pouring over the 14,200 character submissions has been eye opening in many ways. Not everyone who collects follows the hobby obsessively as we do. Seventeen people voted for Baylan Skoll. They're probably going to be really happy in a few months. A handful of people voted for the Tonnika Sisters. They'll probably be really upset when they find out that they missed the boat. Another thing that jumped out to me is that a handful of collectors have the MagnaGuard among their top ten most wanted figures on the planet. It makes sense. Not all of us collecting today were collecting fourteen years ago, and the TVC 1.0 figure is prohibitively expensive on the secondary market.

2024 has had some very huge high points, but they were dotted in amongst a sea of uninspired repacks, repaints and minor retools. As we've said several times, we get the need to pivot to a less intensive tooling year. The somewhat sudden delay of The Skeleton Crew must have had Hasbro scrambling to find ways to use existing tooling to fill out the year. Plus, there's an extra play set this year that probably sapped some tooling bucks away from the main line. But just because a year needs to be light on the new tooling doesn't mean that it has to be so dull. The repacks and repaints don't always have to be met with groans when they are pipelined.

The MagnaGuard is the perfect example. Imagine if one of the repacks of Finn, Cassian, Axe Woves, or Bo-Kata with a different shoulder were replaced with a repack of the movie-based MagnaGuard. Instead of sending fans out the door, there would have been some celebration. The tooling should be readily accessible since it was just used for for the Jedi Survivor 3-pack. Moreover, a completely legitimate on-screen repaint was available to entice those that already own the TVC 1.0 version:


The repack of Finn is what ended my carded completism, which then freed me up to skip the all too expensive Escape from Order 66 set. If that Finn had been the blue MagnaGuard from Utapau, not only would I have celebrated the release, but my compulsion to buy every single carded release would still be intact.

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