Quote Originally Posted by Dan View Post
Oh, well in that case, I do that with Scramble City toys too, since I have less than five of any set.

I guess it's only a mis-transformation if you strictly conform to the recommended combos rather than embrace the 'free combination' inherent in their design. Besides, I find that the leader-torso portions (and associated accessories) contribute most of the identity to any gestalt.
Yeah, I guess it can't be helped if you're unable to secure every member of a combiner team, because some members might be more elusive than others - Heck, it still happens to this very day (looking at you Snarl, Sludge and Rippersnapper)

In the case I described earlier, the rabbit hole gets a bit deeper. The Stunticons I had were the gold-boxed/carded G1 reissues that my father bought for me during a trip to Australia. I lived in South-East Asia at the time, so getting a replacement Wildrider would have been out of the question. Those G1 reissues were Australia/Europe exclusives. The Swindle I used to substitute Wildrider was the G2 version; so you could probably imagine how weird it looked . It's fairly normal nowadays to mix and match teams, and even Wildrider got replaced by Offroad in the official canon. But back when I was a child, having a gestalt character who was 80% G1 Stunticon and 20% G2 Combaticon was kinda weird (til I got used to it).