well, and advantage of wiating to pick up stuff at stores or Joecons, means there is some leeway time in between waves. I JUST bought flash last week. and Im not really pre ordering stuff as you know theyre gonna flood the marked come late october-November before Black Friday.

what IS fatuiging is the amount of repaints and re releases that are being spit out, almost as raidly as brand new sculpts. I mean, its only been 2 years, and theres been like 5 different Dukes and Snake Eyes.

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There's too much stuff right now. Too many figures, too many vehicles. A toy line is a toy line and should, at its heart, be aimed at kids. This means that if a kid wants to buy every figure/vehicle put out, he/she should be able to do so.

Clearly, the Joe line is really more geared towards the collectors, but even collectors have a limit to the disposable income they have. Not to mention the space.

There so much stuff now it's almost a task- not a treat- to open up boxed items. Remember how it was fun as a kid to take a vehicle out of the box, assemble it, and then put on the decals? That fun has been replaced with lots of untwisting inconvenient wires.

The unrelenting overuse of Duke, Snake-Eyes, Cobra Commander, and Storm Shadow hasn't really helped me embrace the amount of figures put out. Even if Hasbro used the "new head/old body=new figure" approach when these slots were filled, I'd be happier. Instead of those four over and over, we could have had a slew of different characters.

Right now $80 of stuff sits in my basket at HTS. EIGHTY DOLLARS of product at once.

I don't buy Joes anymore, I collect calendar YEARS at once!

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Once you do the math, the money becomes fairly significant. I had one of those life-changing moments a few years back. I was saving up to buy my own place and I basically laid out where all my money was being spent. After seeing the hard numbers and seeing how much was being spent, I knew I had to cut back. I threw a bunch of stuff on eBay to help supplement my income during those lean months where every leftover dollar was being saved for my down payment. The funny thing is after I moved into my home, I realized how little of the stuff I bought over the years would actually be displayed, so I did another massive purge on eBay. One thing I can say, after buying a home, your spending habits change. I still waste money, but in different ways. Instead of running around town buying things, I'm more likely to save for vacations and other activities. The amount of money I've thrown down this season for my snowboarding pass and gear has been obscene, but at this point in my life, it's more enjoyable then the rat-race of chasing down whatever new figure has hit the pegs.

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I wish they'd slow down a bit. Like most folks, money's a bit tighter as of lately, so I've been really cautious of my buying. Even my customs have been just from fodder or stuff I've acquired from trades. As with my previous addiction, Star Wars, I've come to a point where I'm just going to pick up the ones I really want and not everything that's released (and pray for great clearance deals on the ones I've missed down the line).

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