by Wolfman Jake » Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:30 pm
- Motto: ""A mountain with a wolf on it stands a little taller."
-Edward Hoagland"
- Weapon: Retractable Mecha-Fangs
"Mini Masterpiece" can be overused or even abused, but it's still a very valuable description for current Transformers toy collectors, especially now that toy design has advanced so far over the past several decades. I would definitely call many of the War for Cybertron Trilogy figures "Mini Masterpieces," like Earthrise Optimus Prime, Wheeljack, Bumblebee, Hoist, and Starscream, just to name a few. Others are merely "very good" modern toys. But, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, so whatever really impresses you can be a "Mini Masterpiece" of sorts.
The term "Mini Masterpiece" really just means a high quality figure of a character at a retail-line scale and price. That's what we've been getting lately from Hasbro and Takara Tomy. Your mileage may very, and the quality and value varies from figure to figure. The point is that we're coming up on a point where designs in the regular retail lines are catching up to the "Masterpiece" line, giving us very good looking figures in both robot and alternate modes, in a smaller scale, at a more affordable price. This is especially poignant as what Takara Tomy believes a "Masterpiece" figure entails has changed drastically over the past 20 years. We've changed scales, aesthetics, and articulation, to the point where a single character can costs hundreds of dollars. And they keep redoing older characters every time the line changes direction, so it feels like it will never really be finished. Many collectors, myself included, are cashing out of the Masterpiece line and "downsizing" to the much more affordable, space efficient, and complete "Generations" offerings in Transformers. Generations is quickly becoming the new standard of "definitive" modern Transformers collections.
Last edited by
Wolfman Jake on Tue Apr 13, 2021 2:35 pm, edited 1 time in total.
Wolfman Jake - Spendin' the day howlin' away.
