Must have been around the time Infinity Challenge came out. That was the only way to get Ant-Man and Yellowjacket LE's.

And then there was LE Atom and Plasticman and currently Silver Surfer and Invisible Woman.

WK's has been doing this since HC came out.

I'm glad to see they plan on doing more special LE's although this letter seems about 6 months late. When I finished reading it I said to myself, "I thought we were all past this by now".

After reading some of the previous posts, I guess not. Well hopefully this will allow the rest of you to turn the page...

Game balance, what a bogus concept.

Funny thats some of the reasons i quit heroclix!

No. I think he's right. It'll balance out in the end. the Important thing is that the Figures are representitive of the Characters. Eventually, Galactus will be old news. Until then, he'll be formidible and rare.

I'd like to thank Wizkids for creating Heroclixs.

I'd like to give them a big boot to the [edit - RP] for the Galactus fiasco.

Many customers will never have a chance to get to a Con and will never get the big guy or any other Con exclusive. If they want to do exclusives, how about a bloody Elektra, Spiderman, Daredevil or someone else that there are already numerous versions. That way the Con customer gets their exclusive and the rest of us loyal customers don't feel cheated.

Also, Wizkids could have made a lot of money selling Galactus to more customers rather than creating a huge E-bay market for the figure. Perhaps, this is Wizkid's way of profit sharing.

Just my two cents.

Yeah, but I don't know: I still feel -- as a fan of the game and the characters it's based on -- like I'm being punished for not being willing to go to a convention.


They can sell it for $75 dollars at a convention, but not $75 plus $12 shipping & handling over the net?


It seems sometimes like they are playing more off of the secondary market speculators than the true fans of the genre who've waited a lifetime for a game like this.

well i paid $75 for the gman(plus 25 in dark riders boosters to get ig and silver surfer) and $35 for my ticket and my friends so you are getting a deal in my opinion. i dont think wizkids planned this to screw us. rather i think they didnt plan anything and screwed us. but like i said hindsight is 20/20 and its easy to say we coudl have done it better.

i do agree its very late for this thank you but at least it came. i was one of wizkids worst opponents after wwla. to me they ruined my experience there and never truely apologized. but i certianly dont feel that they did it on purpose or that they wanted to be jerks. its weird but wizkids isnt a person, they cant just come out and say sorry. they are a corporation and sorries can be admissions of wrong doing and can bring on lawsuits and whatnot so i understand their silence.

fact wizkids underestimated galactus's appeal.

fact wizkids did correct it as best they could to be financial benificial to them and offering anyone who wanted one a chance at one.

fact you can still get galactus now at a reasonable price on the secondary market.

This answers the "will there be anymore Gaming VIP passes available at future cons" question

No

How very disappointing

it's a nice gesture. I hope as time goes on they develope a method of getting these Con exclusives to the players outside of the U.S.

its really encouraging that they said they will no longer offer exclusives to dealers. that was the thing that bothered me the most. It was like insider gouging.

I like the "promise to keep coming up with more incredible new figures for you to collect and play with" bit.

Little help, Brian, they're not called "Spider-Man," "Hulk" and "Wolverine." Try "Rogue Trooper," "Roger the Golem" and "Savage Dragon."

Just sayin'.

I wouldn't label those points as facts.
First, the most direct, financially benificial action to Wizkids would be to mass produce Galactus and sell it to as many people as want it.
Second, the Average selling price of a Heroclix Galactus on E-bay, according to Andale, is $146.75. Having to pay double what you did for a Galactus because I happen to live in Wizkids home state is not my definition of reasonable. Granted reasonable is a subjective term, but you are the one using the word "fact".
Frankly this whole "Going to a convention is expensive so getting the figure on the secondary market" meme is a load of bunk. If you didn't get $35 dollars worth of fun at a convention that is your bad hang. Don't try and figure it into the cost of a Galactus. Anyways the real question to me is how much would this cost me if it was in the store? Certainly less than $146.75. Probably less than $75 when you take into account the economies of scale.
The reality of this is that Wizkids is just trying to create artifical scarcity in order to lure in speculators.

i dont understand it
after WWE there was no issues getting MW Dropships into the hands of those ppl that wanted them

how is that rocket science

This is all about public relations and damage control, not meeting the needs or expectations of customers. Why is it so hard to do a Galactus mail-in, with weaker stats than the Con version for those who want one but don't want to blow their families hard earned vacation money on a whole convention in order to get one? Download the stats and get a Toybiz version of the big cheese which is easier to store. That was my solution. Time to simply fill out the collection with missing heros and villans, rather than collect complete sets.

WK just seem to follow their nose - there is no machiavellian master plan. The Drop Ship was produced for MW but was a fairly specialist item for the hard-core fans - not really collectable in the same way as Galactus. It made some sense to distribute those at conventions where they would go to venues, battle-masters and other elite players who would use them for special scenarios.

Galactus was then produced to the same pattern in every way. Except that, because Drop Ship sales dried up at the end of the 2003 season, they scaled back production of Galactus. In going from WW Texas at the end of 2003 to WWLA at the start of 2004 they were taken by surprise.

Since then they've tried various distribution schemes as they have been forced on them. The lottery scheme was forced on them at San Diego Comicon, right - it wasn't their idea. They found that it worked fairly well for them and so they have stuck with it.

Anyway, all this announcement seems to be saying is that there may be more convention-only figures and, if so, they plan to sell those by lottery too. This is good news for convention organisers and folk who go to lots of conventions. I still don't see how its especially good for the ordinary supply chain - from WK through to the ordinary retail customer.

And I suppose that this annoucement has been triggered by an internal decision within WK - they are clearly making their production plans for 2005. Someone has decided what figure to make and how many copies to produce. Let's hope he guesses better than seems to have been done for the Drop Ship (too many) and Galactus (too few).

Andrew