I've had enough of these Combiner Wars guys to make a full combiner since Christmas, but I didn't have the right components to make an official team until Thursday.  And so I figured I'd wait to talk about the combined forms until then, when I could show off a completed group.  The first two waves of Combiner Wars staggered the teams, with one or two missing members of the two completable teams held off until the second wave.  (Optimus Prime being a third wheel.)  

Here are the Stunticons!  There are four of the original members here, with two new members of the team.  Wildrider has been replaced by Offroad, partially for "we lost the trademark" reasons and partially for "wouldn't it be nice if one of these guys weren't a sports car" reasons.  You gotta vary up your allotted retail space.  Offroad himself is sculpted to be a new Ruckus, a Triggercon from the late Eighties, but it was determined for one reason or another that his toy would instead become a new guy in colors that would look like Wildrider when in combined mode.  (I think "Ruckus" itself is another lost trademark, but I'm not sure.)  

The other new member of the team is Blackjack, who was originally a Micromaster from the Sports Car Patrol, but is now the guy who forms Menasor's chest.  The original Menasor had a little black car-like drone on his chest that came with Motormaster, the semi truck torso guy, and Blackjack is the new approximation of that.  The new Blackjack toy itself, like Offroad, was sculpted to be a different guy, Runabout, the Battlecharger.  But they didn't have the trademark to that guy the last time a Runabout toy was made (he was a Transformers Collectors' Club exclusive renamed Over-Run), so that toy became another small black car, Blackjack.  S'just as well, since I'm not ready to replace my Over-Run yet, and am happy to have a new Blackjack.  

(Blackjack doesn't fit super securely on many people's Menasors, but mine is snug enough.)

Wildrider won't be completely forgotten, as he's getting a limited release through online retailers(?) as a Dead End head-retool named Brake-Neck. 

Like the Aerialbot limbs, the Stunticons share some engineering ideas.  Offroad transforms the way most Combiner Wars limbs do so far, with the head placed at the far end of the combiner connector piece, the front of the vehicle folding over onto the back of the robot, the arms splitting off from the sides of the vehicle, and the legs pulling out from the rear.  Dead End and Breakdown differ similarly from this formula in that their heads are not attached to the connector piece at all, but are hidden under the hood of the car during vehicle mode, attached to the front of the torso which wraps over the tops of the shoulders and over the connector piece in robot mode.  Drag Strip's head is done similarly, but without the chest wrapping part.  

Breakdown is super obviously going to be Sunstreaker eventually.  He looks like Breakdown, sure enough, and there aren't really any compromises on Sunstreaker's behalf, but Breakdown's foot/hand/gun is Sunstreaker's car engine thruster dealio, and it can peg onto Breakdown's back appropriately, as well as slot into Breakdown's car mode in a way that better approximates Sunstreaker's vehicle mode than the usual orientation.  Breakdown will likely get some new parts, like a head and chest, and some new colors and be a pretty good Sunstreaker.  

The highlight of these guys, however, is the combination engineering,  The connection points are a dream.  There's no shoving or excessive force, and yet it's incredibly sturdy and poseable.  I'm in awe of its simplicity.  You really can play with the larger combined robot as if it were a single entity, without fear of anything falling off.  (With the exception of Blackjack for some people, as mentioned above.)  

This is probably pretty good, since this is a line titled Combiner Wars, so the combining should probably work.

The number of paint applications aren't just budgeted per figure, but also across a single wave.  Paint can be sacrificed from one toy to give to another and it still adds up for the bookkeepers, since toys are sold to stores by case and not by individual toy.

Which probably explains vibrant Dead End here and his naked pal Airachnid, dontcha think???

Don't get me wrong.  Dead End looks like he has more paint than he has, due to how cleverly his plastic colors are broken up.  Wheeljack, from whom he was retooled, was an all-white dude, while Dead End splits up that white into dark gray and yellow.  (With Wheeljack's grays becoming orange.)  It gives the appearance of more color because, well, there IS more color.  And Airachnid's plastic was required to be almost entirely black.

But he still has a lot of paint.  For example, those painted hubcaps are usually a luxury on Deluxe Class mainline toys.  Many Transformers have them left unpainted, because, hey, that's probably the easiest thing to cut, saving you four paint applications and leaving you with, oh no, black hubcaps.  But Dead End gets to have glorious bright green hubcaps. Which are glorious.  Did I mention they're glorious?

Dead End doesn't actually have any brown, but the combination of yellow, orange, and green sure makes his dark grays look brown.  It results in him looking like a big radioactive cornucopia.  Like he's in Thanksgiving Colors, from the Nineties.  It's pretty damn striking.

Oh, and apparently he's some sort of borderline zombie vampire thing.  He didn't use to be, but whoops.

TL;DR: Way better than Wheeljack

Man, earliest BotCon reveal ever, or what? Sure feels like it.

The theme for this year's BotCon convention figure set has been revealed, and everything's coming up Animated.  You thought it was all over, didn't you?  Ha!  Animated will never die!  It's like the bad guy in the horror film who always springs up that one last time after you thought he was dead, except in this case instead of a serial murderer or whatever, it's a beautiful person of the gender of your choice who will have sex with you all night long.

It looks like the box set is going to be strictly Animated-style Stunticons, and the first one we get to see is Dead End, who's a redeco of Animated Jazz.  He is, according to Animated character designer Derrick Wyatt, who was responsible for helping put this together, a "depressingly dour beat poet."  Which is pretty awesome.  And explains the facial hair he's rocking.

Guess we'll be seeing Motormaster, Drag Strip, Wildrider, and Breakdown some time soon.  (Man, we got a Breakdown last year, too...)  Now we get to speculate who's going to get made from whom.