Was initially pissed off because I booked flights and hotel to cover the night before the first day up till the evening of the second day, planning to queue overnight for first day drop. Then they announced much later that the exclusives were only sold on the second day on. With the 1 person 1 item/day restriction, that meant I only had one chance to queue!!
Didn't want to extend my stay initially because of the extra costs incurred, but after realising how limited the items were when I was in BKK, I relented and stayed till the end. Day 1 - Waza, Day 2 - Irimi. Case closed.
I must say the 3A Thai Legion did an excellent job there though - super gracious and friendly. I can't comment about the expo organisers since I had less contact with them and wasn't too happy about their late announcement of the details, but the Thai Legion helped to coordinate the 3A side of things and were fantastic gentlemen.
Props goes to Witoon and his team for filtering out most of the non-3A collectors attempting to queue, asking them questions to screen their 3A knowledge. Impressively, all the Thai guys did not bring girlfriends/wives as far as I could tell to help queue for a second piece. In fact, they put that rule into force from the second day onwards, so that everyone would get a fair chance.
When the HK guys made noise about the queue being unfair because they came late and missed out, Witoon and another Thai guy graciously gave up their spots to two of them - an unnecessary gesture of goodwill! Too bad the HK guys couldn't appreciate it and continued whining to others that the queue was unfair and Witoon only gave them 2 spots when there were 4 of them. They were a bundle of trouble for the organisers even for the next few days, but I shall not dwell on them.
Overall, the queue experience wasn't as bad as I thought. Being my first time, I was all ready to bunker down for long, dreary hours and sleeping in the cold, dark night. Fortunately, the bunch of SG collectors I met there helped to kill time with chatter, and the queue number system the Thai guys came up with allowed us to return to our hotels for the night and resume the queue the next morning.
Some close ups of the carded set. It's super huge and had problems figuring out how to bring back. In the end throw away the shipper box. If you have AP carded figures, you can try to imagine the shipper of that upsized to 1/6 size.Super bulky.
Oh, and first day first 30 people got some leftovers from RVHK. I was queue number 2! Some guy got Blanco mask while another got Negro mask.
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