phantom1592 wrote: However, with Combiners I really never see them as 'individual' figures. They were the team. Even if I only had one (like Motormaster) I would have to get THAT whole team just to use the part to it's fullest potential.



If there was only one I wanted... I'd probably hit Ebay or something.. I just don't see individuals selling really well...

Yeah I can see eBay being useful where people may buy Combiner sets for the idea of selling each member individually and making a bit of a profit those fans who just want a particular member or need to replace a broken one.Some characters in the teams stand out for me more than others. I think this may be because I grew up with the Marvel UK comics and from time to time you'd get a bit of extra characterisation on a member who isn't there with his whole team and maybe you end up liking the character more for that (for example when Blades took on Megatron (or what we thought was Megatron at the time) in London with the assistance of Action Force. Or people like Swindle's personality from cartoon and comics where he's a con-artist and salesman and that gives him a bit more uniqueness amongst combiner members. Friend of mine had Swoop and Divebomb purely because of their battle in the Marvel UK story about Divebomb having been originally Swoop's name in it. Even though the other Dinobots and Predacons were in that story it was mainly about those two characters and my friend didn't own any of the others in those teams.This is similar to reasons why I get a bit annoyed with simple repaints and minor retools where totally unrelated characters or even arch-nemesis' of a sort end up with the same mold. The characters feel like they lose their individuality. The toys are obviously the main focus of the brand but often it's the characterization in the fiction that helps sell them. Even a crappy TF figure can be helped by that.Ok I pretty much babbled there you get what I mean. Some of us TF fans like to have the whole set of something, other TF fans just want their fave characters. =)