Finally Got Some of the Digimon Fusion CCG packs!

I picked these up off of ebay, got the first pack for $5.50, and then found a listing a few days later with 3 packs for $10. This will probably be all I get of this set of cards, as the cards are fun and have good art, but it's just a 60 card set and by the last pack I opened I pulled all but one duplicate card.

I did some pack-opening videos for them on youtube, and I'll link them below, so give them a watch if you're interested!

No Luck Toy Hunting Today....

I went to the city today to see the touring production of American Idiot (which was great, by the way), and I figured I'd do some toy hunting while I was at it.

 I only had a couple things in mind - first off was the new Funko Blind Box pony figures. I found this one about a week ago at a Target, and only picked one up because I wanted to see about what they were like/quality/etc. I LOVED the figure, as it actually seems to be of higher quality than the regular size Funko pony figures, and immediatly wanted more. But, of course, Target had none, Hot Topic had none - couldn't find a single one.

Next up was one of these new Digimon CCG booster packs. They were released last week, and I've had zero luck finding any at quite a wide range of places that I've visited. I'm not so much into getting them for the card game itself, I kind of just want to get them because a lot of the card have REALLY good new art for the Digimon - kind of weird to want the cards for the art, I know, but it really is my driving force behind getting some. I may end up just giving up and ordering some of the $6 packs off of ebay.

Lastly, I was looking for either a Generations Skids figures of (by some miracle) Generations Rhinox. I'm sure Rhinox won't show up around here for another month or two, but the Skids/Waspinator wave has been makings its rounds. I've seen all of them but Skids over the past two weeks, but today, literally every single store I visited had an empty Transformers sections aside from some Construct-Bots and a couple Beast Hunters figures. *Sigh*

So, I suppose it was a decently disappointing day for finding toys, but not all was lost because seeing the play was fantastic.

Digi-Fusion Shoutmon Project

I recently purchased the entire first wave of the new Digimon action figure line, called Digi-Fusions. They're a pretty fun line to play around with, as all of their parts can be swapped around with the other figures to make new creations, or digivolutions from the show, such as Shoutmon X4 and MetalGreymon. The most fun aspect of the line though is that Digimon figures are back in stores! As a big fan of Digimon, and even bigger fan of the toys, I've been waiting to see this ever since their last release in 2004. Here's hoping the line does well!

Anyways, as fun as the toys were, I still had a few issues with the production of some parts of them. For instance, many of the pieces are nearly hollow, and make for a very light weight and cheap looking figure. Some of these hollow parts are neccesary for the "fusion" ability, but most are not. Therefore, I decided to "customize" some of the figures and try to make them just a bit better.

I am starting off with Shoutmon, just to try things out and see if I even have the skills to do this. I've repainted action figures like Transformers before, but I've yet to venture out into full-blown modifications, even as simple as these may be.

I used a combination of three types of putty/clay, being the Milliput Epoxy Putty, and Mr. Hobby Dissolving Putty. I began though with some simple Air-Dry Clay bought from Wal-Mart. I used this to fill the most of the holes on the figure itself. After this dried, I went over the top of it with a bit of dissolving putty just to seal it in there, and finally placed the epoxy putty over that.

The epoxy putty dries very hard and can be sanded down to be smooth. Any little knicks or imperfections in the sanded epoxy putty can then be fixed with just a bit more of the dissolving putty.

Although it kind of looks like a mess in the picture, the arm piece here is actually extremely smooth, just as the pre-molded plastic is. Putting a bit of primer and paint on this will (hopefully) make it look like it was originally produced this way.

I have about half of the pieces to the figure completed now, and I've been working at it for about a week. Most of the time is spent applying putty, waiting for it to dry, sanding, and repeating the process until you have a nice clean piece. I've also only been working on it sparingly in my spare time so it's going a bit slower than it could because of that as well.

And incase anyone's wondering, I'm using 400 grit sandpaper to start out the sanding, and moving to 600 grit to finish it up and smooth everything out nicely. I hope to get more work on this guy done soon, but honestly I have no clue when I'll get him completed (especially the painting part). Hopefully it will be sooner rather than later though.