So I just wanted to put this out there for a little discussion after seeing the new stuff at the recent Festival in Japan...

How do you feel about the seeming correlation between the "coolest" figures being the most rare?

This is by no means a scientific study; just what I've seen from my limited viewpoint of this forum/YJA/ebay etc...you know, the normal channels we go about getting figures.

I think a lot of us really liked those new Skull Head Butt guys that are clear/GID but absolutely none seem to be around. VGA also mentioned that he heard they may be limited to like 20 apiece. Even if they were limited to say 40...that is kind of disappointing as that seems to have been the most impressive figure of the show (just based on the reactions of this board).

Also, the new mutant chaos seemed pretty cool but again none seem to be around. There have been quite a few of the new mutant head colorway up on YJA though.

Finally, there seems to have been a bunch of cool new blobpi...the clear orange, feather boa editions, and of course the "last kaiju" sculpt. Again, they seem very scarce.

This is in opposition to the plethora of freestyle bigmouths, wombat figures, deathsquids (which is pretty cool), etc...

Just some base observations...I'm sure eventually we'll see some of these figures over here, at S7 etc., but I guess, what are people's thoughts in making slightly bigger runs of "desirable" figures...not 1000, but maybe 75 or 100 vs 10-40?

Yeah... it always seems like the ones you want are always the ones that are hardest to find, or the ones you want are the most expensive to get.

I think a lot of the stuff is just low run and they had BIN prices set on YJA... I was able to score the Blobpus Last Kaiju figure, but later found that you can order it online from the Blobpus blog site.

The Skull Head Butt figures are ALL limited to 20 pieces it seems... from what I've read (from somewhere), the gold and silver versions are also limited to 20 pieces.

I'm actually surprised that so many of the pieces hit YJA... it seems like a lot of the figures were created just for the summit, so they would naturally have lower numbers. I'm surprised people are willing to part with them so quickly.

The last kaiju will be headed our way, as well as a few of the other version, but no skull butt. sorry.

The best way to correlate this stuff is to garage kits. These are small manufacturers who are making runs based on what they think they can legitimately sell at one time, so that is why many runs are so small. Many of these companies did not sell out single runs a few years back, and sometimes still don't! It is crazy, but, anything that has a run that small, if the figure crosses over from "cool" to "wow!" becomes unavailable rather quickly. We are working with many of these manufacturers to get their runs up so the prices are affordable enough to bring over. Rest assured we are working on getting you the figures you want at prices you can afford.

Yeah, I am actually surprised at how much stuff the collectors here are able to come up with...

Thanks for the thoughts Brian! Forging new relationships/distribution deals with some of these new and very talented artists (RxH, Blobpus etc.) is very exciting and seems to me, beneficial to both them and us (U.S. consumers).