I finished one of my longest-running collections this week. You might recall my comics collection and the jewel of it, the Warlord published by DC from 1976 to 1988. Well, after a lot of delaying, I decided to just order to last of the issues over the last few months, and then once I had everything on my checklist, I went through and made sure I had all 133 issues and 6 specials and discovered I was missing two. So I ordered those and they finally arrived putting an end to that collection.

It's weird to finish something like that. I don't feel much accomplishment or anything, after all it was just purchases. But I do slowly feel myself feeling happy that I can now read them.

I wonder how much I've changed? I wonder if I could even really enjoy them now? I'm not the silly kid I was twenty years ago. I'm a silly adult now. Well, as much as I'll ever be probably.

Well in celebration of finishing that collection, I figured I'd show off a few others that I think are pretty neat.

You might recall my Heroclix collection, and so you know I'm a fan of superhero stuff. I mean, I was just talking about comics so I guess it isn't a big leap to assume I like their merch, too.

So in the mid 90s, Fleer got the rights to make a collectible card game based on Marvel characters. Marvel was going through a lot of financial hardship at the time, coming pretty close to going bankrupt, so getting the rights for that kind of thing wasn't hard at all. It's that period that led the Sony and Fox getting their hands on the rights to make a ton of Marvel movies with their most popular characters. Fun fact, when the MCU first launched it was with a bunch of characters that were considered kinda on the B or even C lists.

The shtick is basically you pick a team of four dudes and have them duke it out with another team of four dudes. They also introduced character cards that represented entire teams which I kinda think is asinine but what can you do.

Later on, DC and even Image got in on it and the game allowed you to do these awesome crossover battles years before Heroclix brought it out in miniature form.

I was introduced to this game in 1998, right around when it was dying really. The guys at the shop next to the middle school really enjoyed it and it was cheaper than Magic. I got a cool little collection together and would play with a small group fairly regularly.

The coolest cards at the time were from Image, and they are the rarest today. The few Image characters I have are def the jewel of my collection.

My favorites were some of the DC villains though, like Parallax and Darkseid.

Most of my old stuff is in storage, but last year I ordered a few of my old favorites just to have them and was a bit amazed at how expensive they could be. It was frankly ridiculous.

That's when I discovered that the game had actually been relaunched with a new company having bought the rights. The rights to comics characters are a bit more expensive now than they were back then, so the game has been launched with both public domain characters as well as characters from the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

I was intrigued, so I ordered some starter decks. There is something delightfully trippy about putting the likes of Dracula and Cthulhu up against Billy the Kid and John Carter of Mars.

And they're pretty cheap to boot. A friend of mine showed interest when I showed them the game, and hopefully when they're settled in to their new life we can take some time to play it.

So you already knew I loved Star Wars. Back when I was growing up it was the most amazing movie series ever (up until the Lord of the Rings, obvi). Christmas was the only time I ever got to see them playing on TV and I always loved taking the whole day to watch all three movies.

I even loved the prequels when they came out. I was a big fan of the Expanded Universe.

So when they made a miniatures game, I was absolutely there for it. I couldn't tell you how much I blew on these little bastards.

After the game was discontinued, they really dropped in price and I was able to get all the ones I had wanted but never encountered at the height of the game, though lately they prices have shot up again.

The game is played by assembling your team based on factions from throughout the Star Wars universe, and by the end those factions ranged from the far future to the far past allowing for some truly wild crossovers.

Some of my prized figs include some obscure Sith Lords, though I never got a Darth Revan since that one never reduced in price and I don't feel like belting out two hundred bucks. There was an extremely OP combination that could be used with Grand Admiral Thrawn and Mas Amedda (the blue tentacle guy who shouts in the senate) to basically allows you to drop a heavy hitter like Darth Vader right into the middle of the enemy. My personal brutal combo was Mace Windu with a bunch of Clone Trooper Snipers with Mas Amedda which basically allowed everyone to get extra attacks and perforate the enemy.

Those were good days, but the fans of the game could be so absolutely snotty. Some folks didn't want to even acknowledge Expanded Universe characters existed at all and some of them would refuse to play against them or even leave the game. Others rejected new versions or reprints of previous characters 'cause it would devalue their collection.

Y'know, just normal fan gremlin shit.

I mostly use them for minis in Star Wars Roleplaying, not that I've done that in the last decade.

So I mentioned these recently. They're really really cool.

Mythic Legions is a line of action figures launched by Four Horsemen Studios, an independent toy studio founded in the late 90s in New Jersey. They've previously done sculpting for McFarlane Toys and launched their own lines in the mid 2000s. In 2015 they launched a Kickstarter for Mythic Legions, a line of dark fantasy figs.

The really cool thing about the line, aside from the style and the detail, is that all the parts are modular. You can combine various figs together to make custom guys of just about any stripe.

I've done that for a few of my guys, most notably the vampire princess who is a combination of two really rare figures.

Most of the earlier figures are very rare and stupidly pricey now. I paid some unreasonable prices for a couple and those prices have since doubled.

I do adore them, but my waning interest in toys combined with the recent inflation has made me rather satisfied with what I have, which is nothing to shake your head at.

I'd like to see about getting some photoshoots with them sometime, if I can ever be bothered to get my hands on some 1/12 scale sets and furniture. I think that'd be bitchin'.

So yeah, I am definitely a treasure hoarder. It's been a while since I've brought them out. I wonder when I'll have that rainy day that I'll treat these as something other than glorified museum pieces.

Ah well, they spark joy still.