Can you imagine an expensive comic book without its bag and board? You know, pay $50 for it, then just roll it up and stuff it under your arm. No? So why are your $100-plus toys being exposed to the elements? Well where would you go to get the backing boards cut? Where would you go to get the bags? With comics, you just pick up fifty slips and boards for a few bucks and you’re on your way.
Well just in time for the Blob series, we’ve put it all together for you! Hasbro’s new packaging made all us collectors a little nervous. Our Legends were suddenly naked without their rugged clamshells. Hang tags were getting bent, corners dented, blisters ripping free…

Soon we’ll offer protective packaging as an option on older Toybiz toys, but it will remain standard on Hasbro toys because of their cardboard cards. It will also become standard on more expensive figures.

Should I be calling him “Magnus” right now? There’s really no way to abbreviate the House of M storyline here, but it’s all written up on Wikipedia if you want to catch up, so let’s leave it at this: the uniformed, leader of Genosha Magneto is cool. Xorn just got a figure, so why not Magnus? Switch the head out and retune the paint and they could even have a complimenting Quicksilver variant.

When we devised the DorkToys rating system, we followed the K.I.S.S. strategy: Keep It Simple, Stupid. Of course, not everybody approaches things the same way…

Instead of using a simple ordinal scale like ours (Mint, Near Mint, Very Fine…), A.F.A. actually applies a percent score to every toy. While I suppose they could assert that a 100% toy is absolutely perfect, and a 0% toy is one that has been reduced to dust, you can’t possibly tell me they can differentiate between two 73% and 74% toys. Scores like those have to be quantitative, measurable and “average-able,” and their ratings are none of those things. They are both complicated and meaningless at the same time.

Also, they cost a lot! If you have a moment, check out their price list and you’ll see your cheapest figures will cost $18.00 to grade, and that’s before you pay to ship it to them and back to you. Oh and if you want one of those nice acrylic cases that they always picture (as opposed to the plastic bags that come standard, but they oddly never display), well those run an extra $20. At roughly $58.00 per figure, how many toys would you encase?

A standardized rating system and protective packaging are both long overdue for collectible figures, but A.F.A. isn’t the solution.