Chilling Out Over Lascaux

It figures that the one year I genuinely don’t have time to do any actual shopping at the Kentucky Horse Park - outside of my ticket times, and those might be a challenge to redeem too - Reeves decides to spring something on me that I’ve been begging for for years. Behold, the Caves of Lascaux, on the Zebra mold:

Between this, the Art Nouveau, and whatever the Stablemate is going to be, the Souvenir Tent is killing me! Someone on Blab recently nicknamed the Pop Up Store/Souvenir Tent the "Tent of Despair" - that sounds about right! Especially for me, this year.

I’m counting on some factors work in my favor this time, though.

First, this item is not a surprise, in any sense of the word. Surprises of any kind tend to create a feeding frenzy. The flea market mentality kicks in: Buy first, ask questions later.

Second, it’s not Silver Filigree. The mere existence of a Silver Filigree anything makes hobbyists crazy. The Zebra is just another Deco.

Third, it has decals/stenciling on it: while I don’t have an issue with them, many hobbyists would have preferred an unadorned Primitive Dun. (I tend to think that this is Reeves’s way of reserving that concept for a different Special Run or Series down the road.)

Fourth, it’s not someone or something like Misty. Aside from being the sentimental favorite of so many, last year’s Misty release also harkened back to the first Raffle Model, the Gold Florentine Misty. There’s not a lot of history or sentimentality attached to the Zebra mold.

Fifth, it’s the Zebra mold. While it has been out of circulation for ten years, and except maybe for me hobbyists haven’t been clamoring for its return. Honestly, there’s more of a desire among a certain class of hobbyists (the ones who like weird stuff) to revisit the Modernistic Buck and Doe, than the Zebra.

Sixth, the odds are that the piece count will be on the higher end, not the lower. Whenever a mold that’s been out of production for a while - like the Zebra - reappears, it means one of two things: either the piece run is going to be on the larger end, or there will be other new items on the same mold in the near future. It’s not cost-effective to drop and run a mold for just a few hundred pieces.

(Of course, that raises the possibility of a small run of Lascaux, with other small runs to follow. For the sake of my rationality, I am choosing to ignore it.)

Seventh, even though the Silver Filigree Misty "sold out" last year, the release reappeared on the web site sale of BreyerFest Leftovers a few weeks after the event, anyway.

So those are all the reasons I’m trying to convince myself to go about my BreyerFest business and chill out about the Caves of Lascaux release.