Another cheap box of Wizkids miniatures I picked up from Thistle Tavern is the Pathfinder: Fists of the Ruby Phoenix - Martial Arts Masters" box. This is a box which is paired with a Pathfinder adventure path - the aforementioned "Fists of the Ruby Phoenix".
This isn't an adventure I own, but the concept is a martial arts tournament on an isolated island. The box looks to be significant or unusual characters from the adventure.
There's a "Kongamato", a primeval dragonkind which is basically a big dangerous predator type. The mini is one of the better ones in the set, and easily re-usable as some sort of draconic or primeval beast.
And then there's a yeti monk.
Another excellent figure, this one doesn't exactly have a common use in the average fantasy RPG. There's particular genres where it will be perfect, but for the majority, it simply won't fit or make any sense. So, a niche figure that's very marmite. I love him, but I have no idea when I'll run something that will need him.
A more usable figure is the onidoshi - an Oni miniature that is really high quality and looks excellent. Pathfinder uses these villains primarily in Tian Xia, but they are found elsewhere as well. They have a canon in D&D lore too, and are recognisable enough within D&D tropes that they end up not feeling out of place in "generic" D&D. Without knowledge of the existing milieu of D&D, they might feel out of place in a western fantasy.
Next up, we have a named witch whose hair is an animate weapon, and a Tengu in some kind of special combat form. The former's shtick has now been adopted into the standard player options for the witch, meaning that it's not super niche in Pathfinder. The model could also be a flying character with a lot of hair.
The Tengu is terrible. The model arrived bent, and while I used hot and cold water to bend it into position, over the course of about a day it slowly bent back into position. The weapons look bad, the teeth look bad. It's non-standard form means it ends up being incredibly, incredibly niche. A catastrophically awful miniature with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.
The lower of the two here is a named ghost character. It's a cool see through miniature with a bunch of detail and weird items. It's not going to suit every ghost you want to use, but a specific character ghost it will be excellent for.
Then we have I Don't Know What. It's . . . very 90s? It's a lady who seems to be wearing underwear, a half put on robe and a weird hat. There might be a reason for her looking like this, but I don't own the book to know the context. It's a mediocre humanoid figure before you take into account the dubious choice of clothing.
So, seven figures, of which I think two are actively bad, and five are good. I am very excited about the yeti monk but will probably never use him, while the Oni is the one most likely to see some play. The pricing on this box at recommended retail price is absolutely extortionate. I picked it up at "we need these out of our shop because they haven't sold" prices, and it seems likely they lost money on stocking them.
Pathfinder definitely has some good Wizkids products - their Goblins frameworks box* is stellar - but there's also some catastrophic misses. Some models I pre-ordered for "April 2024" still haven't delivered, so there's all sorts of different problems the range is having right now. Hugely discounted boxes are going to end up defaulting to be the massive misses. My overall opinion of the Wizkids range remains "do your research and be very picky".
* Don't go looking for the blog post where I "definitely assemble them in March". It was massively optimistic and I completely failed to achieve that.
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