Infinite Variations in Infinite Combinations

The Breyer Fairy is just flat-out messing with me now.

While I was out running a few errands yesterday, I decided to make a quick stop at the new farm store in town – yes our little town has not one, but two farm stores that carry Breyers, don’t hate me – and guess what they had?

The other variation of the Hwin I’ve been looking for: a pale and very lightly dappled one. Of course!

So I’m just not going to get out of this week without buying something, is that it? (I have not bought either/any. Yet.)

I was planning on stopping by a couple toy stores in the next week (Markus hunting!), but now I’m afraid I’ll find a Chalky Hwin in one, and a Hwin with no dapples at all in the other…

But here’s a tale of me resisting temptation and showing some restraint when it comes to variations and such: so far I’ve only bought one of the Man o’ War re-releases!

They had a big pile of them in the NPOD at BreyerFest for me to choose from. Qualitatively, they were pretty much the same – I saw no glaring factory flaws or overspray. Most were more on the Matte side, but some were Semi-Gloss, too.

Circumstances made it impossible to judge relative rarity: it was at BreyerFest, shortly after the release had been released, and late enough in the day on Saturday that the sample I was working with was undoubtedly skewed. What if a big chunk of the Semi-Gloss ones were already sorted out and sold?

The safest bet would have been to buy both. But after briefly consulting with a few of my compadres in the NPOD, I went with the Semi-Gloss. It didn’t matter if he was the scarcer variation or not, he was the one that caught my eye (like that extra dark and Chestnutty Bandera!) so in my buy pile he went.

The release has been popular enough that if time and space opens up, I can get a few more.

But right now I am afeard that the space I’m trying to make in the house will now be occupied by Hwin variations.