We asked your opinion on the exclusive deal between Toys R Us and Diamond Select Toys, and here’s what you had to say:

What’s Your Take on the Toys R Us Deal?

So, it seems like the majority recognize the necessity of the deal. It actually is an important business relationship, since it gets the Minimate brand in a major retail chain, and it nets us some characters and variations that we’d likely never see otherwise. I doubt we’d have gotten the last of Battlestar Galactica without the TRU deal. We also likely wouldn’t have seen Union Jack, Molecule Man, Beyonder, Photon, Old Man Hawkeye, Swordsman, and updated versions of Wonder Man and Spider-Woman II. So, despite the problems with distribution, we can all be happy in knowing that new Minimates ARE getting made.

A great many of you are still having problems finding the exclusives though. In the smaller regions of the US, these just aren’t showing up on store shelves. And with the dreaded short pack issue, scalpers are swarming some of the bigger regions and scooping up most of the stock, making it difficult for everyone to find the Minimates that they want. The lack of an online presence of the Marvel Minimates only adds to the frustration, which is why so many are having to trade/buy with other members of the online community, or (worst case scenario) resort to eBay and its high prices. With Marvel series 5, though, it seems that the case ratio has become more balanced, so maybe we’ve turned a corner. We still might not see these on the TRU website, but at least there’s more of them out there to keep the secondary market price down.

Despite the difficulty in finding these for many of us, there are still plenty of people who are snagging them eventually. Be it through slow distribution or just an overcrowded market, there is a bit of a waiting game between when that first sighting is made and when these trickle down to store shelves for many. Still, those with patience are finding them, which is good.

Perhaps surprising, but some people are actually having no trouble finding these. I’m not sure if they’re just in a big enough region where the TRUs carry a wider variety of stock or if they’re the only collectors in their neighborhoods, but there are reports of people just walking into their local stores and picking these up off the shelves with no hassles.

I think one of the saddest parts of this deal is those who never find Minimates in their area, not just the harder to find Marvel exclusives, but anything. Be it lack of retail support, lack of a Toys R Us entirely, or the dreaded embargo that keeps these things out of foreign markets, some people are spared the frustration simply because there’s nothing there to be frustrated about. If anyone has a right to complain, its this group, since they’ve been dealing with the likes of eBay, even for the easy to find stuff that the rest of us take for granted. They’re also the most likely to find the best deals on the secondary market, due to their past experiences, so they may be the least vocal of those having to learn to cope with the huge markups that these exclusives are suffering.

Then there’s the small pocket of people who wish this deal never happened. They’d rather we not get these unlikely pairings if it means huge markups or added hoops to jump through just to secure these exclusives. I guess the thought process is that if they can get made for the TRU deal now, they can get made as a regular release eventually. Better to wait until these show up in comic shops in a few years than to deal with the added hassle now. I can sympathize with the argument, though I’m not sure I agree with it.

And of course, there’s the equally small part of the community that wasn’t aware that Minimates were showing up in Toys R Us stores.

So, with the Toys R Us discussion behind us, let’s look to the end of the year. With the arrival of Marvel series 30, that’s pretty much it for Minimates coming this year (minus the X-Men/X-Factor box sets from Action Figure Xpress and the off chance you can find Secret Wars or Marvel series 5 at Toys R Us).

So, are we happy or sad that Minimate production has come to a close for the year?

We’ll be back in a week to see what you have to say.