I’ll be filling in as many blanks as possible in my 2019 Marvel Legends reviews over the course of the next month and a half, and but today I paused that track to do an unboxing that will eventually lead to six reviews in one later this week! It was a spectacular surprise when Hasbro solicited the exclusive Marvel Legends Alpha Flight figures set in late summer, and they have now actually shipped and arrived on doorsteps a few weeks earlier than planned! How’d the set turn out? Here’s my impressions…

I don’t live and breathe Alpha Flight in the manner that I do the X-Men and more closely X-related teams, but I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t read a good 100+ comic books featuring the team over the years. So did Hasbro have my attention when they surprise-revealed this Amazon exclusive set…? Yes they did!

I actually wasn’t anticipating having to write a review of these figures anytime soon (what with their original ship date being in December 2019), but seeing as how they showed up at my door and then sat in my kitchen in the box for a week, I might as well at least unbox them and give some quick impressions, right…?

I genuinely thought Amazon was just going to slap a postage sticker on the product box for this team set and ship it straight out like that, but the set is actually packed inside a plain-ish white box by Hasbro and then Amazon stuck that box into a generic brown shipping box. The result is a box set that arrived in pristine condition!

The actual packaging for this Alpha Flight Marvel Legends team set is quite lovely. The illustration on the front of the box is terrific, and I dig how the portraits of each member are reused on the box side to summarize the package contents.

The Alpha Flight box back shows off the actual lineup of included six inch action figures, so there’s no confusion about who or what is included in this set and what each figure looks like. But if you’re still not convinced…

…the book-style cover un-velcros to show off the actual product on one side and give basic info of each team member on the other. Simple, yet classy and effective—although some explanation for each character’s powers would have been nice for casual fans who don’t know these characters well.

As soon as I pulled the plastic tray of figures out of the box, something that we knew since the day this set was solicited was really driven home: there are zippo accessories with this set. No medicine bag for Shaman, no little arctic animals for Snowbird… nada. The lack of any extras at all definitely make this set feel a mite barren.

And on the quality front, I’d have to give the Alpha Flight Legends set a ‘B-‘ after an initial once-over. I can feel that Aurora’s elbows joints are ready to rip in half if I don’t carefully heat them up, which isn’t a huge shocker given the propensity of this black plastic the factory uses—but it’s definitely something to watch out for nonetheless.

The paint applications on all of the figures look more or less solid, but there are some minor issues with the deco on Puck, Vindicator, Northstar and Aurora. Nothing major, although the point on Northstar’s star dropping off on the front of his uniform does bug me. Vindicator’s red paint also doesn’t match Guardian’s at all, which will totally cheese some people off, I’m sure.

On the positive side, Puck’s new head is a winner, I love the colors on Snowbird, getting a mass market Shaman figure at all is downright wild, and just being able to have a lineup of 6-8 members of Alpha Flight on the shelf (depending on if you bought Guardian and built the Sasquatch BAF) is going to be really surreal!

If you want your own ML Alpha Flight set, it’s available exclusively through Amazon now. I’m going to mess around with these figures a bit more, take some hi-res photos of them outdoors, and post my full final review of them in the next few days. Stay tuned!