More Transformers - the last 2015 arrivals

Arriving home from work to parcels, is always a great end to the day and it is even better when those parcels contain even more Transformers to add to the collection and display.

The first smaller parcel was from Japan, containing the newest Masterpiece figure - MP-26 Road Rage, a red female repaint of the just released Tracks.

The much larger parcel was from the USA and should have arrived before Christmas, but was ultimately delayed with tracking seeming to suggest that the parcel was MIA in Chicago for over a week. Inside were the first Hasbro releases for the 2016 year, a set of the Wave 1 Legends and a set of the Wave 1 Deluxes.

With two new figures, and two repaints, the Legends line up contains some much needed Decepticon reinforcements to compete with the over filled Autobot lineup. Shockwave finally gets a "CHUG" toy, even if it is only at the Legends scale as basically a gun add-on for the combiner Bruticus, the Decepticon cassettes get upgraded for the 21st century with some weird tablet/vehicle mode triple changer with Buzzsaw and Shrapnel gets a repaint as one of the forgotten deluxe insecticons (though it would have been nice to get all new castings for these). The lone Autobot in the mix is Pipes who is just a simple repaint of Huffer, but it works.

The deluxe lineup gives us the limbs for the combiner Bruticus, but compared to the other combiners gets the short end of the stick and mostly ends up as being bland repaints. Hopefully when TakaraTomy release their version in a few months, they correct some of the shortcomings of the Hasbro version. Brawl is the only brand new casting in the mix, with Swindle being a very heavy retool of Rook from the Protectobots. Vortex becomes a simple repaint of Alpha Bravo while poor poor Blast Off loses his space shuttle mode from G1 and becomes a simple repaint of Firefly from the Aerialbots.

Noticeably absent from the arrival was Onslaught - due to late ordering, single Onslaughts were not available and the wave mate was not at all desired.

Rounding out the box, was the Japanese version of Defensor which was a exclusive in Japan and thus was not available for ordering directly from normal suppliers in Japan. Unlike the Hasbro version, Japan has created a brand new deluxe Groove to complete the Protectobot team.

Roll on 2016!