[TheBlueMarvel]

@Trivial Psychic

No worries, man. No one is asking you to apologize for or retract your comment. That would be absurd, there is no arbiter for what is or isn't allowed on these threads. My point was that your consideration of 'weak' (which sounds more like 'unfamiliar') may not be the case for many collectors (even the more casual ones).

You made a point of distinguishing between our varying levels of comic knowledge (I'm not an avid reader by the way), but I don't think one has to travel too far down the rabbit hole to have some passing knowledge of these characters. Bulldozer, Grim Reaper, and Tiger Shark have all had Marvel Universe figs for some time now. A fact that I'm sure had much to do with fan requests for 6" inch versions. Additionally, Grim Reaper and Bulldozer had appearances in the far too short run of the Avengers Assemble 'toon with the former featuring pretty heavily in a story highlighting Wonderman. While they may seem left field-ish, these characters are representative of the current zeitgeist of Marvel comics/toons/toys/fanfare. And to boot, they were done well.

As far as the reasons for the peg warming or the notion that lack of familiarity may or may not be the cause. I'm not sure there is a direct cause/effect relationship there. The reasons could be numerous; late distribution (some of those roll-outs were pretty janky), overstock, or a missed window of opportunity (i.e. not aligned with consumer purchasing habits: beginning of summer/end of summer/too close to back to school etc). The Ultron figs aren't actually peg warming in my section of the NY tri-state. It's the Rhino and Thanos waves. However, that bit of info is pretty anecdotal and there could be some regional factors playing into both of our observations.

I find the dynamic of 'knowing what you are buying' to be a marketing mechanism that we have internalized (sadly) as consumers. When I was a kid, if something looked cool and I knew nothing about it, I was inspired even more to find out what the hell it was (because anything that cool looking had to become a part of my world). I think much of that phenomenon remains true for today's toy aficionado, but 'brand recognition' does play an important role. Neither kids nor adult collectors have any idea who these new characters are for the upcoming Star Wars movie. Yet that lack of knowledge isn't stopping anyone from snatching up what appeals to them. It's enough to know Star Wars as the brand and the rest falls into line. Marvel works in the same way.

In any event, as I said in my first post, you can like whatever you like. Initially, I thought you were approaching the situation from the perspective that if the BAF sucks, then so does the wave. Now I get more of an impression that you just didn't like the characters. I didn't see much of a difference between the Ultron and Hulkbuster waves specifically regarding strength of character selection. The only difference was that the Hulkbuster wave had three Iron-men. A fact that I knew would make it more popular...because? well, because Ironman...However that made it slightly weaker in my eyes...at least Ultron came with four villains...But hey, whatever floats your boat...