when i first started collecting, i felt like Luke's backseater in Empire, wanted to conquer it all...until an AT-AT sized secondary market jaded me.
(and thanks goes to that $%^#-er DJ Soundwave for crushing any dreams i had of being top dog in TF fandom, lol. sigh...)

So i decided to scale back a little. and focus on nailing certain things to at least make my collection unique.
this year, i was thinking about collecting the bases/playsets.
okay, I already
own Max, Metroplex, Supreme, Scourge (RiD), Machine Wars Prime, and G1 Prime.
am in talks with an old high school buddy to snag G1 Scorponok and Trypticon when he gets back home later this year, so that's taken care of.

but at the moment i am really talking about things like the 1989 and 1990 series of Micromasters. I had Skyhopper years ago and i remember him being fun.

since i haven't seen much talk about them here, i was wondering if that would be a good niche area of collecting and would it be relatively inexpensive to work on.
if anyone else has these bases or collects them, i'd like to know what they like or don't like about them.
come on, admit that at least the Autobot rocket base Countdown looks good in launch mode.

 

I got all the micromasters back in the day (well, had to track down two sets on eBay more recently, but other than that I had them all), and yeah, the bases are pretty effective companions to the little guys. IMHO it worked much better than making the bigger bots lug them around to activate their gimmicks. Plus you can make a little micromaster city since the ramps all link up (they were really going for a micro machines angle).