MIB vs Loose!

[xeevee]

I love MIB.  I honestly don't care about brushing their hair or anything like that.  I am more concerned about how well preserved they are, and how hard it will be for me to keep them that way.  So MIB all the way.  They are easier to dust MIB, you don't have to do anything special to display them, and they come with beautiful box art. 

There are down sides, the price of g1s MIB is very high.  They take up more room.  But it is worth it to me.

[InkyMilk]

I always open them up. Boxes and packaging looks ugly to me a majority of the time, and if they stick around in their box I usually wind up looking at it and wondering, 'Then why the heck did I even buy it?'. For me, ponies are first and foremost, a toy, and I like to play with my toys as I did when I was younger (brushing their hair, setting them up in groups and families, building little display homes for them), so to keep a pony in her box pretty much makes it impossible for me to play with her in the way I find the most fun.  So out of the box they go!

Plus, on a much more practical scale, boxes take up much more room than ponies do and I just don't have a lot of space to begin with.

[karrie91]

Loose! I don't have a single pony in the package and wouldn't want one! I open all my G4's as well. I just can't imagine not being able to introduce them to the shelf my heard currently sits on. Ponies are meant to be free! 

[Diamond]

I love MIB, for many reasons which I will not bore you with.  Thoth and I do have a ton of loose, we used to have opening parties for the G3's now though Thoth wishes she kept more MIB because they are easier to take care.  It is nice to have a mix but we are slowly when they pop up cheap enough replacing some G3's and selling the loose ones.  We will always have some loose, too much to replace or too hard to find (G1, G2 and G3 wise) cause a gal sometimes just needs some pony brushing time.

[Marigold]

On the otherhand almost all my dolls I collect are mib. Ponies and horses I prefer loose. 

[karrie91]

On the otherhand almost all my dolls I collect are mib. Ponies and horses I prefer loose.

How do you do it? I can't resist the urge to take my dolls out of the package!

[tulagirl]

Loose or I will be bored with my collection.

[Marigold]

Karrie,  I don't know!  Except maybe that I like the boxes as displays. I used to buy two of every (cheap) doll so I could debox one.  I've sold many of the boxed ones and kept the out of box. These are mostly small 6 inch ones. My barbies never came out.  I love dolls in boxes where you can lift them out for display and then return them.

[karrie91]

I thought about keeping my Monster High boxes because I like the look of the boxes but fighting and snipping all those little plastic things off made me destroy it lol. I HATE the process of deboxing. I have a ton of MIB/MOC action figures, mostly marvel stuff and a few Pokemon things but other than that I open! Oh I kept my Little Mermaid Ariel and two Sisters set in the box because it was gorgeous! It has bubbles! lol

[Lorelei Redfern]

i normally take everything out of hte box..  thats mp i  normally prefer to get them loloose.  yet i have a  few that are mib that i ouldnt take out.   but  i have  a bullseye  i never even consdered taking out. he s gonna stay mib even though he takes up a lot of room

[Nerdfins]

I normally unbox my items, and prefer loose ponies when I purchase.  However, Her-Royal-:muffin: Pony-ness and the Las Vegas Fair ponies are in their boxes.  I almost opened Pony but my Boyfriend protested.  My 2008 SDCC pony is out of its box and plastic, and my Pony Project pony most likely will come out too.

[ZeldaTheSwordsman]

This is one of those times where your BF is in the wrong, IMO.

Why buy a toy if you're not going to play with it, is what I say.  MISB collecting is utterly pretentious jerkhole-ery in my opinion. Especially for Japan-exclusive G1 Transformers, since the boxes for those have no windows. Yeah, people who collect those MISB are just being pretentious, price-inflating gits. They don't even have the "for display" excuse because you might as well display an empty box. And if the crime of hoarding is thrown in, well... ugh. Oh, and the AFA can go kiss Jabba the Hutt - they mostly just serve as an excuse for sellers to ridiculously jack up prices. </rant>

I haven't gotten any older ponies MISB or loose complete, but if the best deal available on one was MISB I'd buy it and I would indeed open it up. I wouldn't destroy the box, because that would be a waste (G1's boxes are pretty), but I would open it. I would return the pony to the box when not playing with her. Whether I buy something boxed or loose is dependent on price for me (this is a general thing, not just with ponies), but it's a toy - it's going to be played with and loved.

[Kiwi]

This is one of those times where your BF is in the wrong, IMO.

Why buy a toy if you're not going to play with it, is what I say.  MISB collecting is utterly pretentious jerkhole-ery in my opinion. Especially for Japan-exclusive G1 Transformers, since the boxes for those have no windows. Yeah, people who collect those MISB are just being pretentious, price-inflating gits. They don't even have the "for display" excuse because you might as well display an empty box. And if the crime of hoarding is thrown in, well... ugh. Oh, and the AFA can go kiss Jabba the Hutt - they mostly just serve as an excuse for sellers to ridiculously jack up prices. </rant>

Must everything be an argument? Can we not just accept that each person enjoys their collection in different ways? Agree to disagree, but do it respectfully - without name calling and negative judgement calls.

[Rosette]

Why buy a toy if you're not going to play with it, is what I say.  MISB collecting is utterly pretentious jerkhole-ery in my opinion.

I wholeheartedly disagree with your opinion.  I collect both MIB as well as loose/used ponies and love them both equally.  For me, having ponies in the packaging, especially when I have many on display, allows me to recreate the visual from my childhood of looking at all the My Little Pony toys at a toy store.  They are a visceral reminder of that awe I had, the one time a year I had money from good grades, to choose and buy something myself.  They are, like my entire My Little Pony collection, a frozen moment in time from my childhood and a collection of tremendous nostalgia.  I don't play with ponies, or any toys for that matter, but that doesn't lessen my emotional response to the items I own.  If I wanted to have some sort of status from my collection, something I could be pretentious and brag over, it certainly wouldn't be cheap plastic toys from the 80s.  I would think everyone who chooses to collect My Little Pony--regardless of whether it is in box or not, mint or rescued, does it for the love of the ponies.  There are a million better ways, as a collector, to get rich or turn a big profit.   

[Marigold]

Oh yes!  the nostalgia with packaging is overwhelmingly nice.  I had lady Lovely Locks dolls as a kid and I still to this day remember the first time I saw Curly Crown in her box at the store.  I remember the store, the aisles, and most of all holding her.  I loved her packaging and thought she looked breathtaking in it.  Her hair was never the same when I took her out.

I also took lots of time looking at the packaging before I opened my toys.  That was one of the biggest parts of enjoying a toy to me.  I read EVERYTHING on that box before opening it.  Then I read every single pamphlet inside before taking my toys off the box.  Then the boxes were tossed except in rare cases when I cut out a picture and kept that. 

As an adult, I sought out that original doll I had in box so I could love looking at her like the first time all over again.

Edited to add:  And with some dolls, I do not like them out of box.  For example Barbies.  I feel like once they are taken out of the box they lose some of the display magic they had.  The boxes they are put in are often made such that they are pinned and flared perfectly.  I don't want to destroy that perfect image.  However, this is why I do not collect them anymore.  They take up so much space no matter how lovely they are, and there are so very many I like, and most are now going for reasonable prices on ebay, that it is not hard to collect way too many.  So I stopped.  Except one day I will own the Green Tea and Orange Pekoe dolls.