My point seems to have gone over your head (pretty evident when two of the most costly features are disregarded as “not what’s being critiqued here”): I’m not saying that the sculpt is well done, I’m saying that if you’re evaluating the sculpts against their peers, you should have an idea what their peers are.

DUST sculpts are actually another great example of something with considerably less value added to it at a higher price point (It looks like a box of 5 DUST infantry runs about $15, or $3 a figure). An individual DUST mini, therefore, costs almost 1/3rd more, and yet has less going into it.

I don’t think you quite seem to appreciate the other costs here: the “fancy base” you mention contains a printed insert. A printed insert means that laminated paper dials have to be produced and cut to size at an entirely different factory, along with the individual stat card (conceivably at a 3rd factory).

The most expensive part of any product is the labor involved, and clix figures have substantially more labor input per unit then any of the commonly used TTG figures. Think about it,

-A DUST figure must be produced (my impression is they are injection molded plastic), then assembled, then primed, then matched with the box, which can be collated with the stat card and then finally shipped.

-A HeroClix mini, by contrast, requires all of the above steps, and then, after being primed, each one will be hand painted, then matched to the correct base (the top of the bases contain individual model stats, and are not interchangeable), then matched with the correct paper insert, then matched with the correct card, then collated into a blind booster.

Because boosters do not contain set figures the cards must be individually matched to each figure rather then associated with the box, which means more QC, more labor and, above all, more cost to produce.

On top of all that additional labor cost, WizKids must also pay a licensing fee to the IP owner (none of the properties used by WizKids at this point are their own IP), which adds even more costs per unit. Yet they are still cheaper then DUST minis.

When you ask, “are these sculpts good for this type of mini?”, you shouldn’t be comparing them to TTG minis, you should be comparing them to… the green army men that come in a bag, really. That the overall figures are as good as they are is almost amazing. That WK is able to produce figures of the quality of the SF minis (here’s hoping LotRs is of similar quality), the GSX colossals or marquee figures such as Magneto or Weapon X is nothing short of astonishing.

What’s rather funny about all this is that no one here has commented on the most important part of this model for players of the Heroclix game; the dial (the series of circular numbers to the right of the black disk). Which is… kinda crazy good, actually.

Again, bare in mind I’m not saying these are good sculpts (even for clix sculpts the chicken is rather nasty), I’m saying you should be realistic about what you compare them to. Clix sculpts are noticeably less crisp then the Star Wars Minis sculpts (formerly produced by WotC); at the same time, each individual figure had at least one added layer of mechanical complexity (and thus assembly cost) over and above SWM pieces.