Dave's Transformers Earthrise Rant: Battle Masters Wave 3 Decepticon Doublecrosser (Intersection/Shield) Permalink: http://www.eyrie.org/~dvandom/BW/Gen/BattleE3 So, I almost didn't get this one. None of the stores in my area carried Battle Masters at all by the time it shipped, online sources were all marking it up 100% or more (or selling out almost instantly to resellers who would do so), although the fact that some sellers listed it under its original name Crossguard didn't help in finding copies. Fortunately, one of my regular sighters found some extra in his area and scored me a pair (one for me, one for a local fellow fan). So after shipping, I only paid $8.25 for a $5 toy, and the upcharge went to the beleaguered USPS. This wave had no new repacks of Siege stuff, just a few Doublecrossers packed with reships. So, the grand total of new Battle Master molds for all of Earthrise is three...and the size class is now discontinued as of Kingdom. (Micromasters are being replaced by "Core Class" aka Legends, but at least Earthrise brought us a decent number of new molds there.) CAPSULE $5-6 price point, but good luck finding them if stores in your area already dumped the size class. Decepticon Doublecrosser: Barely more than a robot with a ramp on its back, although the two head thing does at a bit of character. If they were actually easily found in stores, it might be worth picking up, but definitely not worth paying reseller markup. Very mildly recommended. RANT Packaging: Same basic packaging as other Earthrise Battle Masters, the rhombus map shard just has a bit of path (specifically a Space Bridge path, according to the key on Scorponok's giant map chunk). Doublecrosser is a new character, and has no U.S. fiction at all, unless he shows up in the Earthrise episodes of the Netflix show. In the pack-in manga with the Japanese versions of the line, Doublecrossers were created by humans using Angolmois energy to serve as walls and ceilings and oh man that's soooo stupid. No wonder they rebelled. DECEPTICON: DECEPTICON DOUBLECROSSER Assortment: WFC-E39 Altmode: Intersection/Shield/Wall Transformation Difficulty: 7 steps Previous Name Use: None Previous Mold Use: None Function: Housing, apparently Division: Ground Command Unit: Engineer Rank: Raider (No stats for Battle Masters) Packaging: One plastic tie holds the robot into the blister, and one holds the Fire Blast. The instructions show the ramp mode connecting to the back of Fast Track...who is in vehicle mode. Getting dragged? The cardback also barely shows a bit of Fast Track connected to the shield/ramp. Heh, the instructions also show a two step "transform from shield to ramp" procedure. Fold up the chest peg and flop it on the ground. Robot Mode: A double-headed robot with a big red slab on their back and smaller red slabs on their forearms. And, unfortunately, the back is hollow because the way the ramp piece rotates leaves it uncovered and they didn't bother to give the torso its own proper back. The faces have visor optics but exposed faces, and helmets with what appear to be light sources on them, mirror swapped from each other. Unlike Rack'n'Ruin (Cyberverse version) there's no hint of dual torsos, just a wide single torso with two heads atop it. Parts of the ramp are molded onto the forearms. Of the three rampformers, he does the worst job of integrating the ramp into his non-ramp mode (Slitherfang does it the best). 2.25" (5.5cm) tall in gunmetal, clear red, and purple. Clear red plastic is used for the butt-shield, the entire torso piece, and the forearms; the legs and shoulders are slightly metallic gunmetal plastic. There's gunmetal paint on the fronts of the forearms, but not the backs. The torso piece is covered front and back with gunmetal paint except for on the ball parts of the ball and socket joints. The faces are painted red, and most of the torso front is painted gloss purple. No faction symbol. The shoulders and hips are ball joints, the hips tend to turn in a little and lead to a pigeon-toed look. There's swivels between the shoulders and biceps, but no waist or neck joints. A 5mm peg folds down on the center of the chest, and there's a 3mm stud on each arm shield (left arm up by the bicep, right arm down past the fist). And the AIRLock connectors are all accessible, I guess you could make a sort of Source Wall out of a string of robot mode Doublecrossers. I recall hearing a rumor that the Crossguard version would be released as a pure packaging variant. This is false as far as I know, there's no plans to release any other version of this toy and Crossguard was only a working name. That said, if you could find enough of these for it to be worth modding some, painting over the purple with a more Autobot-ish color like blue or gold would allow for easy repurposing as Autobot Crossguard. Transformation: Saying this is seven steps is kinda pushing it. Rotate the backpack 90 degrees either direction, snap the arm shields into the sides of it, peg the feet together and put the heel spurs into slots on the backpack. Fold out chest peg if desired. Shield/Ramp Mode: It's a pity they really failed to get traction with these, because as an intersection Doublecrosser is kinda important for anyone wanting to city-build. Guess that role will have to fall to third party products instead. It's basically a robot stuck to the underside of a clear red intersection, or a robot held by its chest and generating a shield out of its butt. Seriously, the center of the shield/ramp piece is connected to the robot's butt. At least Slitherfang kinda looked like a treaded vehicle in its shield mode. It's longer in one direction than the other...the way this is designed, having it be equal in both directions would have required really big arm shields. 2.5" (6.5cm) on the long direction, 2" (5cm) in the short direction. If you count just from center of AIRLock connector to center of the next connector, it's 6.2cm long and 4.7cm wide. The deck is entirely clear red plastic, all the gunmetal robot bits are on the underside. A sort of octagon with arms (or angular Magnemite icon) is painted in dully metallic very dark gray. The arm 3mm studs end up on the top, on the short-side bits. That's basically it. If the shelves were flooded with this toy, it might be worth grabbing a bunch just for road-building, but given the relative scarcity and $10+ aftermarket price, you're better off hitting Shapeways and looking for A.I.R. Lock as a keyword. (Or even commissioning a Shapeways artist to make one that looks more like Doublecrosser's back.) Fire Blast: Another surface burst, this one is very similar to Soundbarrier's but without the 5mm peg part, and slight tweaks to the shape of the burst. It just attaches via a 3mm socket, and at its widest is a little over an inch wide (about 28mm). Same orange-tinged yellow rubbery plastic as Soundbarrier's. Overall: Ultimately, the whole "turn into a ramp" idea had potential, but with none of the figures coming out in stores in large numbers, it was largely unfulfilled. They probably would have done better if sold in multipacks at a higher price point, neither of the two major toy sellers seemed interested in continuing to waste peg space on $5-6 toys. This toy in particular certainly ended the idea with a whimper, barely trying to do anything besides staple a ramp to the back of a robot. Dave Van Domelen, took a quick break from reviewing Scorponok to review this.