TransFormers Collectors' Club 2016/Combiner Wars Needlenose

And so the penultimate year of the TransFormers Collectors' Club's distinctly variable Subscription Service begins. Being an international member, I tend to get my Club figures about three to four weeks after US members, and this year's Subscription Service looks as though it won't be an exception.

It brings with it, just like this year's BotCon Set, a sense of the Club coming full circle: its first Membership Incentive figures were the five components of a Superlink/Energon-style gestalt, Nexus Prime, and so its penultimate Subscription Service is creating a new, Combiner Wars-style gestalt. More than that, just like all the figures from BotCon, this is not a Timelines set, it's labelled in every way as part of Combiner Wars.

When this year's set was announced, I was intrigued, but pretty ambivalent - and hadn't expected the massive glut of awesome Combiner Wars/Unite Warriors stuff that subsequently appeared - so I signed up eagerly. I don't know anything about the Mayhem Attack Squad, or the variation on Thunderwing - Thunder Mayhem - which they combine to form, but the idea seemed cool, and I liked the idea of building another Club gestalt.

Let's see how the first component looks...