How does everyone decided on which figure to buy?

When you go into a store with a pocket full of money excited to buy a new figure for your collection - what is your criteria? for example Price, Realism, Pose, Brand etc..

Is it a unusual specie that i dont have :)

I have some criteria that I use when buying a model:
- Realism! Speaks for itself I think XD
- Anatomically correct. As much as possible!
- Paint work. Nice paint work, details, shading.
- Pose, would actually love to see more dynamic poses in models.
- Species, the more unknown the better haha.
- Brand, I collect all brands so that isn't an issue for me.
- Price, not to expensive, depends on the criteria above.

First I need a pocket full of money.
I tend to choose unusual species or figures that despite representing animals already present in my collection, are able of exciting me. I confess I am much more careful with the sculpting than with the painting. I like a unusual pose but classic poses are also interesting to me. Obviously, I also tend to buy figures of a certain range of prices. Namely the standard sized ones.

Sad to say, money has to be my biggest criterion. I very rarely can buy new figures. Most of mine are thrift store/ flea market/ garage sale finds. For that reason, I also rarely feel free to mail order- postage is terrible! That produces a big crimp in brands, since only Schleich, Safari and Mojo Fun are available locally. If I were to have the freedom to just go and have fun shopping, I'm not concerned about brand. I would seek species that are interesting to me, and where more than one might be available of an interesting species, I would go for the most realistic sculpt. Paint job isn't super important; it might help me choose between two sculpts I like equally, or decide against (or for!) a figure I'm unsure of. I can always repaint! I'm also not set on scale, just that I like the figure.

As it is, I'm stuck with whatever turns up used, and they can be hard to find! So many thrift stores discard the toys they get instead of selling them, and some of the flea market vendors have too highly inflated prices. I pick up things I'm not interested in for myself for that reason, in the hope I can sell them or trade them for something I do want.

I only collect African species so I only buy those who live in eastern Africa. I plan on building a diorama of Africa. I have been for years! So need to get going.

By this order:
First, species (must be a non-domestic, non-prehistoric and non-mythologic species that I don't have already), with preference by the most rare, obscure and amazing species
Second, realism. I never will buy a non-realistic figure
Third, price. I never buy too expensive models (such as hand-made models). I can buy figures by a bit more price that I think they should cost, but just a bit.
And fourth, scale. I can accept some scale divergence to my ideal 1:20 proportion (and with large cetaceans a very big divergence), but they must not be too striking as compared with my other models.

NightLioness wrote:

I have some criteria that I use when buying a model:
- Realism! Speaks for itself I think XD
- Anatomically correct. As much as possible!
- Paint work. Nice paint work, details, shading.
- Pose, would actually love to see more dynamic poses in models.
- Species, the more unknown the better haha.
- Brand, I collect all brands so that isn't an issue for me.
- Price, not to expensive, depends on the criteria above.

For my Synoptic Collection, these are the criteria I use. For arthropods, I am much more liberal.

Money aside I go by:
-species (one I like/collect, or one unusual)
-poses (I really hate static and stiff poses for animals)
-anatomically correct (I tend to lower my hopes when it comes to news horses...)
-paint job (and without paint scraches, it's getting harder and harder to find a figure that is intact, even in toys stores )

I usually only have one figure per species, and I only collect Paleozoic and Mesozoic life, so if it's a species I don't have, it's probably an instant buy. If more than one version of a species is available, I go by:

accuracy (the one that has the fewest features that we know are wrong)
non-accuracy-related aesthetic factors
scale (I prefer 1:40 except for very small animals)
price (I should rank this higher but I have no self control)

Even though I'm always excited about species I don't already have, I must admit I tend to almost always buy whales. When I look at my collection, I see whales occupying a large percentage of the figures I have...

I would very much like to see your whale collection, Valerie. They're something I would like to collect if they weren't so expensive and hard to find. Excluding the easily found dolphins and orcas, I only have a few.
I need to post a figure of one, it reminds me of the Laramies. It is an unbranded right whale.

pipsxlch wrote:

I would very much like to see your whale collection, Valerie. They're something I would like to collect if they weren't so expensive and hard to find. Excluding the easily found dolphins and orcas, I only have a few.
I need to post a figure of one, it reminds me of the Laramies. It is an unbranded right whale.

You can see a large part of it in many pictures in the @Show Us Yours@ Whales and Dolphins link.

To be honest I never enter my local toy shop without knowing what to get first. If I'm entering toy shops I have not been in or rarely visit I look for the figures that are on my wish list. There is one particular shop that I love as it has so many Schleich and Papo for me and my brother.

I have to preface my response by saying what my collection is (since I'm in and out of here for months at a time and don't know who knows what I'm doing). My collection is an attempt to reconstruct the ecosystems of Canada at the end of the Pleistocene, around 12,000 years ago. This is part just plain personal interest, part inspiration for the books I'm writing about the Ice Age in Canada, and part for education purposes when I teach.

So my first criteria is representation: do I need that animal to fill out my collection? The Wild Safari North American porcupine is ridiculous, but it's the only commercially available North American porcupine figure, so I gotta' do what I gotta' do. I might also buy completely other animals to represent something that has no actual figure. For example, I have a CollectA onager that represents the North American stilt-legged horse in my collection.

My next criteria is size: I'm trying to keep it around 1/24 scale for the megafauna (which is anything over 100lbs). That's the scale of the last Carnegie Collection woolly mammoth. Most megafauna are around that scale, so that keeps it fairly easy. But sometimes you find things that are just too big or too small. I was very glad that they made the Wild Safari American mastodon in about 1/24 so it fit perfectly. If it was as small as the Wild Safari woolly mammoth, I might have thought twice about buying it. I did, however, buy the Wild Safari bowhead whale for the sake of representation, even though it's way too small. It should actually be slightly larger than my Monterey Bay Aquarium humpback whale (which is a beautiful, HUGE figure). I ended up replacing my Schleich African lion figure with Wild Safari's lioness, which is actually closer in size and appearance to an Ice Age American lion. I keep the Schleich figure to show the size difference between them, since that actually scales properly. Anything under 100lbs is a over-scale by necessity. I just gotta' deal with slightly large birds, mustelids, rodents, and things.

My third criteria is quality: this includes pose, paint, and general attractiveness of the figure. I replaced my Schleich cheetah with a Papo one, because even though Papo's has a derpy face, it's a WAY more dynamic pose. I just like it more.

Fourth, favourite animals: there are some cases where I already have a good quality representation of a particular animal, but because I happen to like that animal so much, I might buy multiple different versions. I've got a small herd of American buffalo from Safari, Schleich, Papo, and Mojo. I've got two different Schleich killer whales. I did buy the Wild Safari woolly mammoth, which sits beside the Carnegie mammoth and calf as a juvenile.

And finally extraneous circumstances: there are some things that I pick up for reasons that have nothing to do with my actual collection. I bought a Wild Safari park ranger figure on my trip to Yellowstone. When we went to Petrified Forest National Park last summer, I picked up the Wild Safari coelophysis and postosuchus because those are the animals from there! I also got the Wild Safari tree fern because I have fossils of tree ferns in my fossil collection and I wanted the visual representation. I have the Wild Safari dunkleosteus because it's one of my favourite prehistoric animals. I have a bin of dinosaurs found in my province that I use to teach with... That kind of thing.

Anyways, yeah, there you go!

widukind wrote:

Is it a unusual specie that i dont have :)

I agree, I prefer the rare specie.

A good question. I try to concentrate to European Ice Age fauna, but I have already failed and bought almost everything.

- I try to avoid buying Schleich. It's the most common brand here, but I'm not a big fan of it anymore. Too much cartoonish figurines. Some very nice, though.
- So I prefer realistic ones, but I must to say that I have bought some not so well sculptured/painted models only because they are rare and fitting to my Ice Age collection (like Papo's awful cave man!).
- I order almost all my figurines from webstores, so I can't usually choose the individual model by myself. But the quality is important. I trust Papo most, and CollectA, too. But you never really know what you will get if you order from a webstore.

I don't really buy new figures anymore. My thing used to be Schleich horses, but lately the new models just don't cut it for me. My family gives me models on my birthday - usually farm animals and wild animals, which I really like. And I bought a lot of horses second-hand online a couple of months ago. There were newer models in it, and they've grown on me.

To answer your question, though, my criteria when buying back when I was a kid was primarily whether a model belonged to a horse's "family". I also bought models based on how cool they were (ex. old Schleich black rearing mustang stallion)

I feel that I don't really choose my figures. It's more like they choose me: if they are 1:32 scale, I must have them, I have no choice