Acesmcgee wrote:I'm always so amazed that people do their MP without instructions. I'm always so worried I'll ham-hand the damned thing that the first time is always with instructions. After that it's all memory and I take my time to admire engineering and little tricks.
I always use the instructions for the first time I transform a Masterpiece figure for the same reasons. I don't want to do something wrong and break a $100+ figure. By the time I get a new Masterpiece, plenty of YouTubers have already gotten their samples and put up reviews with step by step transformation instructions. I also don't really Transform my Masterpiece figures very often. They're mostly for display and not play as far as I'm concerned. There are some Masterpiece transformations that I can do pretty consistently without the instructions, just because of extensive mold reuse, like any of the Seekers, the Datsun brothers, the Sideswipe Lamborghinis, etc. Others are just relatively easy Transformations, like Soundwave or MP-10 Optimus Prime.
For most other Transformers products, I just try to figure out the Transformations myself. Almost nothing in the Generations line, for instance, is too tricky to do "blind" if you just use pictures of the completed modes as reference. Each one is kind of a little puzzle to solve and makes the process more rewarding. If Masterpiece toys were less expensive and less fragile, I'd use more of that puzzle-solving with them too, but as it is now, I can't afford to be so adventurous.