The Energon Pub

One comes free for signing up for club membership before March 16th, i think. The other will be on sale in the spring 2012 alongside Shattered Glass Drift. If you're a club member, the other figure will be somewhere between 40-55 dollars. If you're not a member, it'll be $40 more. With membership only costing $40, theres no reason not to join. Pretty good marketing technique on this pair.

Best move, in my opinion, is wait for the two to go up for sale, then join the club for membership dues. It'll be before Botcon, so if you end up liking the Botcon set, you'll get the discount on that as well.

I lost hope in Hasbro Years ago. Aaron Archer comes up with great ideas like "Transformers Armada", Transformer toys that dont transform, Repaints of the same figures with different heads and power core combiners. He is a genius. 3rd party companies love that he is in charge of the toy line.

@Stormrider

100% correct! A lot of 'cons have been issued. Though I did not include the repaints/exclusives.

bionic_radical wrote:One comes free for signing up for club membership before March 16th, i think. The other will be on sale in the spring 2012 alongside Shattered Glass Drift. If you're a club member, the other figure will be somewhere between 40-55 dollars. If you're not a member, it'll be $40 more. With membership only costing $40, theres no reason not to join. Pretty good marketing technique on this pair.

Best move, in my opinion, is wait for the two to go up for sale, then join the club for membership dues. It'll be before Botcon, so if you end up liking the Botcon set, you'll get the discount on that as well.

hey! yeah you're right! shattered glass drift could be a deadlock stand-in and plus the other two exclusives are runabout and runamuck. guess what im doin soon B)

Dont do it now, hold out until March. Club Magazines are cool, but in my opinion, yield little inside secrets you cant find online. Im sure you can find someone to send you scans over a personal message, if you're nice, heheh. Honestly, wait until either a waek before the cutoff date, or at the same time that SG Drift and Runabout go up for sale, then sign up and buy the extra figs. Itll be before Botcon, and if you don't like this years Botcon assortment, you aren't out anything because you still got your hands on something you DID want with club discount. Plus, with waiting until the last minute to sign up, if Botcon '13 comes up early, you can still be eligible for that discount too.

Looks like I'll have to sign up for TFCC membership. I've never been a member before.

I've read how the figures for purchase in the Club Store run out quickly. Are you guaranteed a free figure if you sign up?

Joetx wrote:Looks like I'll have to sign up for TFCC membership. I've never been a member before.

I've read how the figures for purchase in the Club Store run out quickly. Are you guaranteed a free figure if you sign up?

yeah, you're guaranteed the free one. as you know, you've gotta be on your toes for the exclusives though.

Astronopolis wrote:

Joetx wrote:Looks like I'll have to sign up for TFCC membership. I've never been a member before.

I've read how the figures for purchase in the Club Store run out quickly. Are you guaranteed a free figure if you sign up?

yeah, you're guaranteed the free one. as you know, you've gotta be on your toes for the exclusives though.

The Freebie figures in the stores are leftovers. Production runs are never exact numbers, just rounded ones like 2,000, 3000, 50,000, you name it.

My Classics Autobots outnumber the Decepticons by a lot. I tried to keep my Classics purchases to figures that appeared in the show, so there are not a lot of 'Cons on the shelf.

Joetx wrote:Looks like I'll have to sign up for TFCC membership. I've never been a member before.

I've read how the figures for purchase in the Club Store run out quickly. Are you guaranteed a free figure if you sign up?

As of right now, there are three figures.

Shattered Glass Drift
Runabout (Black)
Runamuck (white)

If you sign up between now and sometime in March (the cutoff date will be announced at a later date), you will receive Runamuck (white). Sometime around then, the club store will offer the other two exclusives for sale, running about $50 - $65 dollars a piece, $40 more a piece if you aren't a member (which is how much it costs to join anyways). Fun Publication has been really pushing the Twitter feeds on all of this, so its best to subscribe or whatever you do to get a Twitter feed. Once that tweet goes up, you're probably going to have an eight hour window to get these two, maybe a little longer to get Drift. Scalpers will grab these up. Collectors will get two of each. Horders will stack them to the ceiling and live in their filth. They are limited in number, and will sell out, so do not wait unless you want to pay aftermarket horder filth prices and want your figure to smell like dead squirrels and feces.

Dude has a point. I'm having to look at other lines that I feel best represents a character, or my ideal, in particular the 'Cons. I admit if I could have my way my shelf would be nothing but C.H.U.R.G., BUT some of the other lines simply look better. I'd like a Shockwave but I'm seriously looking at the Energon one because I feel I could turn in my classics S.W. I sure as hell am seriously looking to Cybertron/Galaxy Force Starscream, or any version of that mold, because at least that is voyager class and the energon Galvatron is, to me at least, better because he's bigger than deluxe class.
With that being said I am eyeing that Sky Shadow guy because if I wanted a Thunderwing I'd try to find a good energon Megatron and kit-bash it into Thunderwing. Any Decepticons that is supposedly Megatron's lieutenant, or even successor - has no business being deluxe please excuse my geek ramblings

p.s. with the exception of maaaaybe Mindwipe and Shockwave, I haven't seen any Movie-verse 'Cons I'm dying to get.

@ bionic_radical - Thanks for the advice.

I plan on registering in early January so I can get in on the next comic arc.

I assume Fun Pub waits until the cutoff date (March 16) before ordering their exclusives?

Do you know how many they order (e.g., 3X # of members)?

bionic_radical wrote:Dont do it now, hold out until March. Club Magazines are cool, but in my opinion, yield little inside secrets you cant find online. Im sure you can find someone to send you scans over a personal message, if you're nice, heheh. Honestly, wait until either a waek before the cutoff date, or at the same time that SG Drift and Runabout go up for sale, then sign up and buy the extra figs. Itll be before Botcon, and if you don't like this years Botcon assortment, you aren't out anything because you still got your hands on something you DID want with club discount. Plus, with waiting until the last minute to sign up, if Botcon '13 comes up early, you can still be eligible for that discount too.

I'll take your word for it, but I am still confused why waiting to join the TFClub in March 2012 instead of next month gives an advantage when purchasing the figures. Can you explain more?

oops. double post.

Joetx wrote:@ bionic_radical - Thanks for the advice.

I plan on registering in early January so I can get in on the next comic arc.

I assume Fun Pub waits until the cutoff date (March 16) before ordering their exclusives?

Do you know how many they order (e.g., 3X # of members)?

No problem! Not sure about when the story arc starts. But January would be a good time to start!

I believe that they order a rough estimate before then, maybe a month before. They have a good idea as to how many are gonna be needed by that time and order a few extra. A lot of times there are a small number of extras, so thats what leads me to believe that. This years figure ran late due to customs.

Thats just the freebie though, the other two are a whole other story. There are a fixed amount, probably the same amount as most Botcon exclusives, so Id say around 1800 of each, if i were to guess. Im hoping that they will order close to the same amount of Runabout, as they do for the Runamuck givaway. Id expect SG Drift to be less.

Stormrider wrote:

bionic_radical wrote:Dont do it now, hold out until March. Club Magazines are cool, but in my opinion, yield little inside secrets you cant find online. Im sure you can find someone to send you scans over a personal message, if you're nice, heheh. Honestly, wait until either a waek before the cutoff date, or at the same time that SG Drift and Runabout go up for sale, then sign up and buy the extra figs. Itll be before Botcon, and if you don't like this years Botcon assortment, you aren't out anything because you still got your hands on something you DID want with club discount. Plus, with waiting until the last minute to sign up, if Botcon '13 comes up early, you can still be eligible for that discount too.

I'll take your word for it, but I am still confused why waiting to join the TFClub in March 2012 instead of next month gives an advantage when purchasing the figures. Can you explain more?

Well, it doesn't give you the upper hand in THOSE figures, per say, but it could give you an upper hand on Botcon figs and the following years exclusive figs. Without being a club member, those figs are an extra fourty. Now, unless they change the way things are scheduled, if one Botcon is in the summer, the next is generally in early spring, giving your membership a chance to lap Botcons. Meaning, if you dont like the Botcon figs one year (i.e. Wings of Honor) you dont have to be completely bummed, as your discount could lap over into the next Botcon. Doesnt exactly help this year, more of next year and when your membership is up. Next years exclusive figs could be great too, and you might not have to renue your membership to get discounts on those either.

bionic_radical wrote:Not sure about when the story arc starts. But January would be a good time to start!

The TFCC website states that a new story arc starts w/ the 1st issue of each year (i.e., February). Has this not been your experience?

Its not that it hasn't, so much as I just haven't followed it. Wings of Honor was the story arc, and I couldn't get into those characters enough to follow it. You get an issue every two months, that ends up being like five pages, and its just hard for me to become enveloped in something that sparse. Artwork is pretty good though, and sometimes there's prose on the site in between issues.

When IDW released Balancing Act + Revelations, I bought a copy. I thought they were much better than IDW's own material.

Too bad IDW or Fun Pub won't mass release the subsequent arcs.

I guess you have to purchase older TFCC material (i.e., you can't access it online)?

The online stories are free and theyre archived, however, you would have to buy the comics that are in the store for purchase.

I honestly never noticed that the 'cons outnumber the 'bots on the shelves.
I buy the TF I want, based on how cool they are... and if they are Optimus Prime or Starscream. If I count the toys themselves, not the characters, I have over 60 and over 50 .
No matter what faction, asside from Starscream and Optimus Prime, factions don't really matter, even if I display them by it. I love them all.

I never really counted them, either. I just buy what I think is cool and I seriously hope that we get Classics style figures for a while to come. There are still a ton of mainstream characters they haven't made and a lot of them really don't seem that hard. I just hope a long break between movies (assuming they even make a 4th) doesn't dry up the public interest in Transformers to the point where we stop getting quality toys.