Collector spotlight 2 – Nikola Todorovic aka Sammael

Spotlight number two, almost two years after the first one. Maybe a bit symbolic but most definitely perfect opportunity to introduce one guy who will without a doubt stand out in this miniseries by his unique collecting principles and philosophy. This time, with great pleasure I present a guy who, unlike most of us collectors, didn’t make any breaks during collecting and knowing that, he brought something new we didn’t have before...Diversity in collecting and expanded our knowledge of the passion we all share, the TRANSFORMERS!
 




Who are you and what do you collect?


I am Nikola Todorovic aka Sammael,36 from Belgrade, Serbia, Project manager in IT company, and I collect many things out of which most are not so common in collector community here.My collection consists of Masterpiece, CHUG, G1, Beast Wars and uncommon here, third party Transformers.


Introducing Sammael



When did you start collecting, why and what’s your first Transformer toy ever?


 
Ha ha ha (he laughs), that’s  very easy question to answer. The first Transformer I've ever gotten was G1 Skywarp, Mexican IGA release, since IGA was the only thing you could buy in our stores at the time. I got it way back in ’89, from my dad in the summer, and interesting thing was that I had no clue what it was. Robot that turns into a plane, good enough to go with my MotU toys that was very popular at that time. And not long after that, my mom got me a VCR for my birthday along with some friends who gave me cartoon tapes and one of them was Transformers. At that moment I got hooked. I knew I had to have more of them, and more, and more...




What’s your favorite toy line and why?


 
I prefer straight lines over curvy ones (alluding on design style) and I cannot really say that I have certain toy line that I like more over the others. I like different things on different figures from different lines. When the figure is interesting character, engineered nicely, well painted, with interesting transformation, not frustratingly complicated nor KO simple. With all this said, I thing CHUG line had produced most of the figures with the characteristics that I mentioned you could say this is my “favorite”. Still like Beast wars, A/E/C etc...


Early starts with not so common stuff 



Subtle differences stand out...


And some are not so sublte...






If you could pick one figure from your collection to keep, what would it be?




Honestly I would have to check my database, I like to keep my things organized, to see which one is the most expensive that I got. If I had to get rid of all except for one, later I would sell it and buy again most of the figures that I had before. So think of it as plastic savings account ha ha ha...




We sure know which one he is keeping






What’s most desirable figure to you ever?


 
Easy, G1 Overlord. First of all, it’s an exclusive figure. It was released in Japan and small part of Europe and I would like to have Japanese variant.  Anyhow, the figure is very impressive in my opinion, huge ,very detailed and versatile in design based on what I know from reviews and pictures I’ve seen. It has interesting transformation combinations, technically it is Powermaster, Duocon, base, can interact with different bases and figures, very high play value all in all. And at last, IDW made supercool character out of it, complete psycho very realistically presented, that makes you feel kinda creepy when you read the comic book.



 
What advice would you give to a collector starting today?


 
Don’t rush! If you want some figure that is crazy expensive today, in some time it can drastically decrease in value. With time the price will hardly go up. Simply, everyone who wanned to have that figure is either waiting to decrease in price or have already paid astronomical amount for it. This happened with CHUG line. With MP expansion , most of collectors stopped collecting CHUG and the prices went down. So now you can get them somewhere around retail price, couple of bucks up or down. Unfortunately during the hype, by missing couple of Henkeis in the right time I had to pay crazy price for them then. Now I would pay much much less.



 
How do you see Transformers scene changing in nest five years?


 
History showed, every time new movie hits the theaters those figures overflow the market. Given that they announced five new movies I expect that those figures/lines will be dominant in years to come.  I have some HFTD, DOTM, AOE toys and to be honest some of them are surprisingly good. Nice transformations, OK quality and so on. But since 30^th anniversary of Beast Wars is coming, Takara Tomy announced that will go along with that and honestly I expect that fans who grew up with that show to emerge and  popularize the line much more than it is today. On top of that there is MP as well, very popular now, couple of years ago we had 3 figures annually  released and now, with all the repaints and remolds, we have one almost every month. It is clearly a gold mine for Hasbro/ Takara and I just hope the quality will not drop down because of the frequent releases.

 
And for the end, Optimus or Megatron?


“Peace through tyranny!”



The image says it all






 
Many thanks to Nikola aka Sammael for giving us a chance to take a peek at his precious collection full of oddities and rare gems.
Further insight of this gold mine and it's development path you can get here Sammael collection

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