Matchbox Best Of Series

Over the years that I have been collecting, there have been a few premium offerings from Matchbox - the Lesney Edition from 2010 and 2011, the 60th Anniversary Collection from 2013, the cancelled Supreme Heroes from 2015 and now in 2016 the Matchbox Best Of series has finally made it out to retailers.

Based on Lamley preview videos, I was pretty excited to get my hands on this set and eventually started seeing the single cars for sale (at a marked up price) on eBay and decided that I would wait until I could find a seller who was offering sealed cases at a reasonable price. Eventually I found that seller and organised to ship the case first to my USA shipping address and then eventually onto New Zealand.

From my years of collecting, one thing I have learnt is that Matchbox cases are all the same in the United States (and thus in New Zealand when offered at retail), so I was confident based on opened images that the sealed case would give me all 10 cars of the first (and only?) wave.

Sadly as I opened the case on camera, I started pulling out doubles I wasn't expecting to see and even a triple; and by the time I had gotten to the end of the case I was missing several cars from the set ... a look at the box under different light shows another piece of tape that didn't match the factory sealed and I guess my sealed case luck ran out.

Several days before the sealed case arrived from the USA, I was shocked and surprised to see not only the Jeep series at my local Toyworld, but also the Best Of series hanging on the pegs. Since I was the first one to see them, I was able to check them all out and along with the Jeep set, I purchased several vehicles as openers ... as it turns out, the majority I purchased as openers came in the case as unexpected doubles, but I did also thankfully pickup one car I hadn't received from the sealed case, the BMW 1M.

Fingers crossed that other collectors in New Zealand reply to my request for assistance to track down the missing cars, or my local Toyworld brings in another case ...