1987 was the last best time to search for a G1 Optimus Prime on ebay. You would have gotten only the original Optimus in your search results-no Michael Bay movie versions or Action Masters or Lego models, G2, BotCon, ReAction, reissues, third party versions, bootlegs, etc., etc., and even the Powermaster hadn't come out yet. So just for pure vintage original release Diaclone mold Optimus Prime, 1987 was the last good year of uncluttered auction searches. But of course eBay didn't exist back then. (1997 wasn't bad either, though.)

As the decades go by and other TF names beyond just Optimus get reused more and more, it gets tougher and tougher to search for G1 toy names and get pure G1 toy results. Tacking the word 'vintage' onto a search kind of helps, except that as time goes on 'vintage' covers more and more toys. Putting 'G1' in a search is pretty useless, too.

(I guess there are some G1 toy terms that have never been reattached to other toys in the last 40 years. You can still get pretty decent results if you do a search for 'Throttlebot', but forget about just using 'Goldbug' if you just want G1 Goldbug.)

What I do instead is try to use the minus '-' option to exclude all the descriptors that apply to everything non-G1. So if I am searching for Goldbug the original Throttlebot, my search looks something like

"transformers" "goldbug" -legacy -glass -creatures -minimates -suzuki -united -universe -reaction -magic -alternity -goldfire -thrilling -masterpiece -reveal -generations -buzzworthy -MTG -classic -MAAS -Netflix

All that to filter out extraneous, non-G1 stuff including official name reuses on later figures, third party and even Magic the Gathering cards.

Depending on the toy, my filters sometimes exceed the search field character limit. Menasor the original G1 giftset is one like that:

"menasor" -wars -warriors -fans -kukinski -montana -fansproject -classics -legends -force -titanium -unite -MHZ -tigerwing -KO -upgrade -attila -masterpiece -tcg -henry -gravestone -spoiler -capone -g2 -extransbots -perfect -kre-o -cybertron -magic -monolith -reissue -enhanced -overlord -legacy

That's like 4 or five characters under the limit I can cram into the search box. I do my Menasor search today and I'll find three examples of legitimate giftsets-one US, one Japanese, and one empty box. But those three are among over 400 other results I have to dig through even with my filters.

I'm just thinking about this because Rise of the Beasts is coming up and I'm still looking for opened G1 Terrorcons with their cardbacks and that search is gonna get exponentially more bogged down once the movie toys hit.

On Monday, December 26, 2022 at 1:29:05 PM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:

> (I guess there are some G1 toy terms that have never been reattached to other toys in the last 40 years. You can still get pretty decent results if you do a search for 'Throttlebot', but forget about just using 'Goldbug' if you just want G1 Goldbug.)

I tend to include G1 as a search term almost all the time. Here's my reasoning. People who have no idea what they're selling probably won't include the term "G1" in their auction description, but people who are knowledgeable enough to be able to identify a G1 toy as such will also be more likely to know if the toy is complete, whether something is broken, etc.

It's quite possible I'm missing out on lots of auctions by doing this, but sometimes I try other search terms just for fun and I haven't noticed a siginificant difference in the search results.

> "menasor" -wars -warriors -fans -kukinski -montana -fansproject -classics -legends -force -titanium -unite -MHZ -tigerwing -KO -upgrade -attila -masterpiece -tcg -henry -gravestone -spoiler -capone -g2 -extransbots -perfect -kre-o -cybertron -magic -monolith -reissue -enhanced -overlord -legacy

I've done the same sort of thing, especially when looking for toys to paint into Final Fantasy IV monsters. There was a specific Yu Gi Oh action figure called the Feral Imp I needed for a project, but I had to type this huge string of qualifiers so I wouldn't be inundated with trading card search results. Something like "feral imp" -card -cards -ccg -tcg -mint -common -unlimited -rare -mint -nm -played -unplayed etc.

But, at least you know how to manipulate the search engine to get the results you want.
> I'm just thinking about this because Rise of the Beasts is coming up and I'm still looking for opened G1 Terrorcons with their cardbacks and that search is gonna get exponentially more bogged down once the movie toys hit.

I feel the same way every time we get a neo-G1 version of a heritage character. Hunting for Bomb-Burst used to be so much more simple without all these Core-class toys and upgrades getting in the way!

Zob (has an absurdly long eBay watch list full of toys... did you know it's possible to hit a maximum limit?)

> On Monday, December 26, 2022 at 1:29:05 PM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:
> I tend to include G1 as a search term almost all the time. Here's my reasoning. People who have no idea what they're selling probably won't include the term "G1" in their auction description, but people who are knowledgeable enough to be able to identify a G1 toy as such will also be more likely to know if the toy is complete, whether something is broken, etc.

People with super accurate descriptions are also more likely to set a Buy it Now in line with current market prices because they know what they have. I'm after the sellers who don't know the lingo or even the character names and start auctions cheap. I'll let the pictures tell me what I'm bidding on.. But that bites me in the butt, too. It takes so much time to look through every picture and it's so tough when they don't even bother to use the names. Also I feel like 'G1' or 'vintage' have become such common terms that everyone uses them. They have become a shorthand for the lazy.

There was one recent auction that comes to mind where the seller used 'G1' AND 'vintage' but not much else. Just "Vintage Transformers G1 Original Action Figures Weapons Accessories LOT 1980s". That could be anything! But get this-they had a near complete Scorponok, a complete Divebomb and three others that went for $200:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/234818536605

Not a single name in that one. It would have been impossible to find with just a Scorponok search. That stuff makes me crazy.

But even people with good descriptions still screw up. Like there was this guy that sold a loose Darkwing accurately described for $92 BUT with a Thunderwing gun that isn't mentioned at all:

https://www.ebay.com/itm/314287762973

Just that Thunderwing gun alone is demanding $95 from the only other seller who has one. Someone looking for that gun would never have found it in a Darkwing auction.. So even when someone is describing things accurately, they're describing things inaccurately. It's a total crap shoot. My method of excluding terms I don't want instead of including the ones I do ends up being as precise as possible to get very general results within my parameters. If that makes sense. Just to catch these kinds of things. But people are so unpredictable it's still a crapshoot.

> It's quite possible I'm missing out on lots of auctions by doing this, but sometimes I try other search terms just for fun and I haven't noticed a significant difference in the search results.

Yeah, you never know what you never know. You will never know.

> But, at least you know how to manipulate the search engine to get the results you want.

In the end I still don't catch everything. I will never know about the super deals that got away despite my best filters.

On Sunday, January 1, 2023 at 1:08:54 PM UTC-7, evil.king.m...@gmail.com wrote:

> There was one recent auction that comes to mind where the seller used 'G1' AND 'vintage' but not much else. Just "Vintage Transformers G1 Original Action Figures Weapons Accessories LOT 1980s". That could be anything!

There are a lot of people who legitimately have no idea what they're selling, and they'll rely entirely on the toy's copyright stamp to tell them what it is. So you can find a lot of "Hasbro Takara 1986 robot" and "Bandai Popy robot" and such.

Back in the early days of eBay, before the computer-assisted search listings, I would deliberately search for "Trnasformers" or "Strascream" or some other such misspelling just to see what turned up. (Another good one was "TNMT"—you know, those good ol' Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles.) Now, of course, they have artificial intelligence governing the search listings—"We couldn't find any search results for Strascream. Did you mean Starscream?" and they've ruined all my fun.

Zob (2023 is shaping up to be suspiciously similar to 2022 thus far)