Quickly: So, like, in the Nineties there was almost a Generation 2 Menasor, but he was canceled and BotCon got to have one-fifth of him as an exclusive, the rest being limited to a small handful of samples, causing him to be amazingly valuable.  

But now there's a Combiner Wars giftset that does Menasor in his G2 colors (sort of), so everyone can have one now!  Hooray!  And mine was an early birthday gift!  Yay, thanks, Scott!  

Combiner Wars G2 Menasor is one slick package.  I mean, obviously, you get all these guys at once, rather than having to get them piecemeal in stores or online, and so that's good.  You open up the box and you see everything all arranged there in a plastic tray, and life is good.  Also inside the box is a large paper envelope, which contains your instructions, a collectors card, and a cardstock-quality poster of Menasor.  ....well, G1 Menasor, not G2 Menasor.  But it's still friggin' cardstock paper inside an envelope, so.  None of that floppy thin paper nonsense, this is the fancy stuff.

I have some quibbles though.  From all appearances, the deco on this toy was taken from some guy's DeviantArt digital mockup.  (to the point that the official Transformers Facebook account used his mock-ups exactly in a promotional image, including the yellow Offroad you don't get in the set)  That's kinda shady.  And it also means we get a Breakdown with purple and silver instead of pink and gold, since I guess the DeviantArt mockup guy was working off this fan-painted version of the canceled G2 Stunticons and not the BotCon version people actually know.  

Also, if you're expecting Blackjack to be at all snug when connected to Menasor's chest, don't.

That said, this set is a pretty good deal, especially if you don't have any of these guys yet.  You get six brightly-colored toys for $100 (or less, as Amazon inevitably drops it a few bucks like they did Superion) that combine into a robot and visually emulate a toy 99.999999999999999% of Transformers collectors can't ever own.  Plus, y'know, the poster.  I have no idea why I love that poster so much, but I do.   You may love the poster less.

If you're dead inside.

I've had enough of these Combiner Wars guys to make a full combiner since Christmas, but I didn't have the right components to make an official team until Thursday.  And so I figured I'd wait to talk about the combined forms until then, when I could show off a completed group.  The first two waves of Combiner Wars staggered the teams, with one or two missing members of the two completable teams held off until the second wave.  (Optimus Prime being a third wheel.)  

Here are the Stunticons!  There are four of the original members here, with two new members of the team.  Wildrider has been replaced by Offroad, partially for "we lost the trademark" reasons and partially for "wouldn't it be nice if one of these guys weren't a sports car" reasons.  You gotta vary up your allotted retail space.  Offroad himself is sculpted to be a new Ruckus, a Triggercon from the late Eighties, but it was determined for one reason or another that his toy would instead become a new guy in colors that would look like Wildrider when in combined mode.  (I think "Ruckus" itself is another lost trademark, but I'm not sure.)  

The other new member of the team is Blackjack, who was originally a Micromaster from the Sports Car Patrol, but is now the guy who forms Menasor's chest.  The original Menasor had a little black car-like drone on his chest that came with Motormaster, the semi truck torso guy, and Blackjack is the new approximation of that.  The new Blackjack toy itself, like Offroad, was sculpted to be a different guy, Runabout, the Battlecharger.  But they didn't have the trademark to that guy the last time a Runabout toy was made (he was a Transformers Collectors' Club exclusive renamed Over-Run), so that toy became another small black car, Blackjack.  S'just as well, since I'm not ready to replace my Over-Run yet, and am happy to have a new Blackjack.  

(Blackjack doesn't fit super securely on many people's Menasors, but mine is snug enough.)

Wildrider won't be completely forgotten, as he's getting a limited release through online retailers(?) as a Dead End head-retool named Brake-Neck. 

Like the Aerialbot limbs, the Stunticons share some engineering ideas.  Offroad transforms the way most Combiner Wars limbs do so far, with the head placed at the far end of the combiner connector piece, the front of the vehicle folding over onto the back of the robot, the arms splitting off from the sides of the vehicle, and the legs pulling out from the rear.  Dead End and Breakdown differ similarly from this formula in that their heads are not attached to the connector piece at all, but are hidden under the hood of the car during vehicle mode, attached to the front of the torso which wraps over the tops of the shoulders and over the connector piece in robot mode.  Drag Strip's head is done similarly, but without the chest wrapping part.  

Breakdown is super obviously going to be Sunstreaker eventually.  He looks like Breakdown, sure enough, and there aren't really any compromises on Sunstreaker's behalf, but Breakdown's foot/hand/gun is Sunstreaker's car engine thruster dealio, and it can peg onto Breakdown's back appropriately, as well as slot into Breakdown's car mode in a way that better approximates Sunstreaker's vehicle mode than the usual orientation.  Breakdown will likely get some new parts, like a head and chest, and some new colors and be a pretty good Sunstreaker.  

The highlight of these guys, however, is the combination engineering,  The connection points are a dream.  There's no shoving or excessive force, and yet it's incredibly sturdy and poseable.  I'm in awe of its simplicity.  You really can play with the larger combined robot as if it were a single entity, without fear of anything falling off.  (With the exception of Blackjack for some people, as mentioned above.)  

This is probably pretty good, since this is a line titled Combiner Wars, so the combining should probably work.