The Energon Pub

The Toy Aisle Just Got Nuked: Tariffs, Panic, and a Last-Minute Plot Twist in the World of Collectibles

Transformers collectors — and anyone with a pop culture pulse — just took a direct hit in the wallet. On Tuesday afternoon, TFSource and BigBadToyStore sounded the alarm with urgent messages about massive import hikes. Then less than 24 hours later, Trump rolled out a 90-day “pause” dropping most tariffs to 10% — except for China, which got slapped with a brutal 125% rate effective immediately. No delay. No forgiveness. Just full send on the pain.

This tariff rollercoaster affects everything from figures and toys to comics and statues — the lifeblood of collector culture. So we’re cutting through the chaos with a no-BS breakdown of what’s changed, what it means for your wallet, and what insiders are saying. Plus, out of respect for their transparency, we’re publishing full statements from both TFSource and BBTS — two longtime giants in the Transformers game and former sponsors right here on Seibertron.com.

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🔄 What Just Happened? The Pause Heard 'Round the World

According to CNBC and India Express, President Trump’s latest tariff shake-up includes:

• A 90-day "pause" slashing new tariffs to 10% for most U.S. trade partners — including Vietnam and Japan
• A jaw-dropping 125% tariff slapped on China, effective immediately
• A global panic moment, followed by a scramble for negotiations after fierce backlash

Translation:

• Products made in Vietnam or Japan? Still in the game… at least for now.
• Made in China? Say hello to potential sticker shock — especially for Transformers, third-party figures, and collectibles.

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🛒 Straight Talk from Retailers

Before the pause announcement dropped, both TFSource and BBTS sent urgent messages to customers on April 9, 2025. We’re publishing both in full below, out of respect for their candor and longtime support of the Transformers fandom. Their messages paint a clear picture: the collecting world was bracing for impact.


📩 TFSource Customer Update – April 9, 2025



📩 BigBadToyStore Customer Update – April 9, 2025

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🧠 What This Means for Transformers Collectors

With Chinese goods still facing a crushing 125% import duty, expect prices on Transformers preorders, third-party figures, and even official Hasbro imports to rise — unless those products are sourced from Vietnam or Japan.

Both TFSource and BBTS have said they can no longer honor previously announced preorder prices for some items, and surcharges will likely be added as affected shipments arrive.

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📚 Comics: Exempt for Now, But Not Out of the Woods

Many reports — including from Comics Beat — indicate that printed books (including comics and graphic novels) are currently exempt from these tariffs. However, toys, collectibles, and premium box sets related to comics are not exempt.

Image Comics, for example, has raised the price of Spawn from $2.99 to $3.99 — a move attributed to rising production and paper costs, much of which comes from Canada.

With trade tensions shifting rapidly, there’s no guarantee that exemptions will last.

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🚀 Final Thoughts from Seibertron.com

This is a complex, fast-moving situation. If the 90-day pause holds — and negotiations go well — we may avoid the worst of the price surges. But with China excluded from the pause, much of the Transformers toy ecosystem remains vulnerable.

Stick with us. We'll continue reporting as this develops, and we’ll do our part to support fans and collectors through these uncertain times.

— The Seibertron.com Team

Great synopsis!

C'mon man, AI generated art? That makes me a sad panda.

Seibertron wrote:in true reality show fashion, Trump slammed the brakes with a 90-day tariff pause… for most countries.

This isn't correct, though - the new flat 10% tariff remains in place for most countries. It hasn't been "paused", that's just the WH / press framing and is not true.

The only thing that's been "paused" is the enhanced rates on certain countries (other than China). They will get the new 10% rate instead.

Id be curious to how many will manipulate this to add even more price increases to anything. If I paid for a preorder that is the price you get the item at. Its against the law to make a transaction for the price to go up after you have paid. Yes I understand accounts aren't drafted before the product arrives butan agreement has been entered into with the two parties. There needs to be a set date, after that there is no time traveling to get more money from customers. This entire situation is ridiculous.

Maybe this is a good time for all you man-babies to grow up and stop playing with toys?

Maybe this is a good time for you to leave your mom's basement and find your own hobby?

morganprime wrote:Maybe this is a good time for you to leave your mom's basement and find your own hobby?

Sounds like a textbook case of projection to me...

Aren’t most Transformers made in Vietnam now, though? I get that the Chinese tariffs will affect a lot of the industry, but most TF stuff is probably safe from this due to being in Vietnam, yeah?

muddyjoe wrote:Maybe this is a good time for all you man-babies to grow up and stop playing with toys?

Brother why are you on a Transformers Collectors website

#1 Signal Lancer fan wrote:

muddyjoe wrote:Maybe this is a good time for all you man-babies to grow up and stop playing with toys?

Brother why are you on a Transformers Collectors website

I like to keep up on the comic and movie news.

Only advice I can give to you mortals?

No matter which 'side' you're on in this, don't allow your emotions to be manipulated. Especially on internet and social media - which specialize in the infliction of emotional stab wounds for the sake of immediate reaction/provocation.

You'll be much better off, and generally happier, when you don't allow anyone else to control your emotions.

This was coming, and now it's here.

Many will likely have to scale down toy purchases and the affected ones will be the manufacturers as they won't be selling as much stuff, and won't be making money to make more stuff.

At the end of the day, toy collecting is a hobby for us and we can live without it, but its a livelihood for those in the industry and they are the ones who no doubt will suffer the drop in sales due to increased pricing.

This is definitely not going to end well for anybody.

And don't expect China to negotiate with Trump any time soon to lower sad tariffs.

Let's keep things civil, nobody has the right to tell other adults how to spend their own money.

Mudwire wrote:Aren’t most Transformers made in Vietnam now, though? I get that the Chinese tariffs will affect a lot of the industry, but most TF stuff is probably safe from this due to being in Vietnam, yeah?

Anything made by Hasbro or in conjunction with Takara Tomy is made in Vietnam, anything made only by Takara Tomy is made in China.

Age of the Primes and Studio Series - Vietnam
Earthspark - Vietnam
Swapticons - Vietnam
Cyberworld - Probably Vietnam
Dramatic Capture - Vietnam
Adamas Machina - China
Dock King- Probably China
Masterpiece - China
MPG - China
Masterpiece Movie - Vietnam (it's Hasbro's initiative)

As for third party (official or not) almost all of that stuff comes from China.

Emerje

Emerje wrote:Let's keep things civil, nobody has the right to tell other adults how to spend their own money.

Mudwire wrote:Aren’t most Transformers made in Vietnam now, though? I get that the Chinese tariffs will affect a lot of the industry, but most TF stuff is probably safe from this due to being in Vietnam, yeah?

Anything made by Hasbro or in conjunction with Takara Tomy is made in Vietnam, anything made only by Takara Tomy is made in China.

Age of the Primes and Studio Series - Vietnam
Earthspark - Vietnam
Swapticons - Vietnam
Cyberworld - Probably Vietnam
Dramatic Capture - Vietnam
Adamas Machina - China
Dock King- Probably China
Masterpiece - China
MPG - China
Masterpiece Movie - Vietnam (it's Hasbro's initiative)

As for third party (official or not) almost all of that stuff comes from China.

Emerje

Canadian and US prices are going to be the same or the US price will be higher. Time will tell.

ScottyP wrote:C'mon man, AI generated art? That makes me a sad panda.

Agreed, so sloppy and ugly. Can't even get the Decepticon insignia right.

Ig89ninja wrote:

ScottyP wrote:C'mon man, AI generated art? That makes me a sad panda.

Agreed, so sloppy and ugly. Can't even get the Decepticon insignia right.

Probably gets the insignia wrong on purpose because of trademark. I assume any big generators are probably trained to avoid those on purpose, but who knows. Agreed though on the rest, like how does the cape here work? It doesn't

DeathReviews wrote:Only advice I can give to you mortals?

No matter which 'side' you're on in this, don't allow your emotions to be manipulated. Especially on internet and social media - which specialize in the infliction of emotional stab wounds for the sake of immediate reaction/provocation.

You'll be much better off, and generally happier, when you don't allow anyone else to control your emotions.

Great advice, Death!

Mudwire wrote:Aren’t most Transformers made in Vietnam now, though? I get that the Chinese tariffs will affect a lot of the industry, but most TF stuff is probably safe from this due to being in Vietnam, yeah?

The CEO had adressed that. Their goal is to keep things affordable (and keep selling), so if they incur higher costs due to some items, they will redistribute the costs across other products. It won't be evenly distributed either, they will redistribute costs at a higher level and determine which products can have higher prices.

So it can very well be that to offset higher costs from Furbies (still made in China), they will increase Transformers targeted to collectors since that's the demographic they know will still buy stuff even after price increases.

Basically, it's like anything else. If Hasbro has any kind of higher cost (due to anything), they will raise prices where they can, it won't be dependent on country of origin.

Glyph wrote:

Seibertron wrote:in true reality show fashion, Trump slammed the brakes with a 90-day tariff pause… for most countries.

This isn't correct, though - the new flat 10% tariff remains in place for most countries. It hasn't been "paused", that's just the WH / press framing and is not true.

The only thing that's been "paused" is the enhanced rates on certain countries (other than China). They will get the new 10% rate instead.

Good catch, Glyph. I was working from various news sources and a lot of stuff was in flux yesterday. I updated the article accordingly. If you see anything else that needs to be improved in the article, just let me know.

ScottyP wrote:

Ig89ninja wrote:

ScottyP wrote:C'mon man, AI generated art? That makes me a sad panda.

Agreed, so sloppy and ugly. Can't even get the Decepticon insignia right.

Probably gets the insignia wrong on purpose because of trademark. I assume any big generators are probably trained to avoid those on purpose, but who knows. Agreed though on the rest, like how does the cape here work? It doesn't

Actually, it did exactly what I asked for ... including the cape and the "not-Decepticon" symbol. The first images it spat out to me had the actual Decepticon symbol, which I was surprised about. I didn't want it to use *the* Decepticon symbol and wanted it to either make a knock-off looking Decepticon symbol or to turn the letters MAGA into a symbol in the shape of a Transformer symbol. I turned the symbol orange and added the sad mouth during my many Photoshop edits where I mashed up elements from 6 different AI images. If anything, it was staying too faithful to the source material and I wanted it to go more into wacky AI land (especially for this usage). I actually asked it to have the red tie coming out of the Sharkticon's mouth (though I was picturing more like a tongue, but it still ended up looking crazy). It even made the "tariff" blaster with tariff written on the side like I asked it to do.

Honestly, my decision to do my first AI image was I couldn't figure out what image I wanted to use for the news article. I felt like a real world image of Trump would have been most appropriate, but I didn't want to have his actual face on my website so I thought doing a mash-up of a Sharkticon and Trump felt more appropriate on Seibertron.com. I could've drawn it myself but I don't have much skill with coloring my pencils in Photoshop. One day! For now, a fully disclosed bat **** crazy Sharkticon / Trump "Trumpticon" AI-generated image is what we ended up with.

Seibertron wrote:

ScottyP wrote:

Ig89ninja wrote:

ScottyP wrote:C'mon man, AI generated art? That makes me a sad panda.

Agreed, so sloppy and ugly. Can't even get the Decepticon insignia right.

Probably gets the insignia wrong on purpose because of trademark. I assume any big generators are probably trained to avoid those on purpose, but who knows. Agreed though on the rest, like how does the cape here work? It doesn't

Actually, it did exactly what I asked for ... including the cape and the "not-Decepticon" symbol. The first images it spat out to me had the actual Decepticon symbol, which I was surprised about. I didn't want it to use *the* Decepticon symbol and wanted it to either make a knock-off looking Decepticon symbol or to turn the letters MAGA into a symbol in the shape of a Transformer symbol. I turned the symbol orange and added the sad mouth during my many Photoshop edits where I mashed up elements from 6 different AI images. If anything, it was staying too faithful to the source material and I wanted it to go more into wacky AI land (especially for this usage). I actually asked it to have the red tie coming out of the Sharkticon's mouth (though I was picturing more like a tongue, but it still ended up looking crazy). It even made the "tariff" blaster with tariff written on the side like I asked it to do.

Honestly, my decision to do my first AI image was I couldn't figure out what image I wanted to use for the news article. I felt like a real world image of Trump would have been most appropriate, but I didn't want to have his actual face on my website so I thought doing a mash-up of a Sharkticon and Trump felt more appropriate on Seibertron.com. I could've drawn it myself but I don't have much skill with coloring my pencils in Photoshop. One day! For now, a fully disclosed bat **** crazy Sharkticon / Trump "Trumpticon" AI-generated image is what we ended up with.

AI generated?? AMAZING! I love it

I'm concerned about whay will happen with Omega Prime, since we've already paid for him.

I'm also concerned Hasbro won't stay in business to finish Devastator, Superion, Bruticus, and the Thirteen.

morganprime wrote:Id be curious to how many will manipulate this to add even more price increases to anything. If I paid for a preorder that is the price you get the item at. Its against the law to make a transaction for the price to go up after you have paid. Yes I understand accounts aren't drafted before the product arrives butan agreement has been entered into with the two parties. There needs to be a set date, after that there is no time traveling to get more money from customers. This entire situation is ridiculous.

I've had two separate occasions on which I ordered in-stock items from Walmart.com, the price went up on the items while they were preparing to ship, and WM cancelled my orders, claiming the items had gone out of stock, and recommending I reorder it at the higher price. Even if raising prices on a preorder isn't an option, they can just cancel the preorders and relist them.

I'm curious how Hasbro intends to handle the pricing of their Takara Tomy imports. Double tariffs are a thing so they'd be hit with one from China (which Trump is going crazy on) and one from Japan (assuming they're shipped to the US from a Japanese warehouse and not direct from the factory). Future T-Spark releases could effectively double in price depending on where things end up.

Emerje

Good write up Ryan, this is what I was hoping was going to happen, and you didn't disappoint.

It's good to see that you're still passionate about this after all this time.

how exactly is all this garbage making america great again?
i feel bad bad for the collectors
(please do not delete)