My wait list converted too, like yours.
If it was me, unless you were planning to resell it, I'd go ahead and open it up. My view is this stuff exists to be enjoyed. Also even if you planned to resell it, most buyers are going to be in the US, and with the heavy cost of shipping to the US, your prices would generally be non competitive. Hot Toys made way way more of these than they want to admit.
What I suspect happened is they used the wait list as a simple preorder list and they completely boxed out smaller dealers. As the distributor, SST cost basis is 55 percent of MSRP. That means it cost SST 102 dollars to buy it from HT. Usually on a wide release, the distributor would buy it for 102 but sell it to dealers for 129.50. A small online dealer would go as low as 166.50 against a full MSRP of 184.99.
So instead of smaller dealers making a minimum profit of 37 dollars a set sold to consumers, along with the 5 dollar bump up for non attendee pricing, SST makes a whopping 88 dollars profit off of each sale.
Guardian would have sold out as a wide release. Lost 1 and Machiko did not sell out because they were simply poor product choices by the brand. As a wide release, I would have paid 52 dollars less for him than I did against non attendee MSRP. I suspect as a non US resident, considering the extra shipping cost, possible conversion fees, VAT and whatever else, your number will be far more painful unfortunately.
To be fair to SST, they could have just not converted the wait list at all and sold them on Ebay, netting 500 bucks a box and turning basically a 400 dollar profit per set.
Basically what I'm saying is MIMB only has value if you plan to resell him and the time to max value any resale was while the SDCC was still going on. Guardian prices have leveled off and will continue to for a while. The market will be flooded with people only buying to resell fast. This is the really sad part about this hobby, the way people can just be really ugly over scalping. Most people suck, not sure what else to say about that. The prices will spike again later, like all other Predator sets eventually, but not for a while.
I say just pop the guy open like a beer and enjoy him.
