I fortunately got in on the ground floor with the whole amiibo craze. I preordered the all of the first two waves from Gamestop back in November without any problem back before anyone realized how crazy the market would get. For wave 3, I preordered all of the non-exclusives and Shulk from the local GS and was lucky enough to get a Meta Knight preorder online from Best Buy before they closed those in early December. Tried to reserve Lucario and Rosalina from Toys R Us and Target in-store, but they had no idea what I was talking about (the concept of reserving/pre-ordering, not amiibo in general). Come January 30 (thank you NintendoLife commenters), stood in line at Toys R Us only to find out that employees got first crack at the couple that weren't already reserved (turns out they did do preorders, just didn't tell anyone), so ended up having to get that one on eBay for a ridiculously high markup (like 1000% above MSRP). For Rosalina, got to Target ~1.5 hours before they opened and the GF and I were able to both get one of the 8 they had in stock. Finally got Meta Knight in the mail on Friday, and now just waiting for Ike, King DeDeDe, Sonic, and Mega Man to get in stock from GS so I can go pick them up. Have all of the Super Mario line on reserve now, at least the ones that can be, and just waiting for Wave 4 to become available now. tl;dr, have been fairly lucky so far, but amiibo collecting isn't cheap, even if you can get most at MSRP.
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Re: Feature: Tales From the Front Line of amiibo Collecting
I fortunately got in on the ground floor with the whole amiibo craze. I preordered the all of the first two waves from Gamestop back in November without any problem back before anyone realized how crazy the market would get. For wave 3, I preordered all of the non-exclusives and Shulk from the local GS and was lucky enough to get a Meta Knight preorder online from Best Buy before they closed those in early December. Tried to reserve Lucario and Rosalina from Toys R Us and Target in-store, but they had no idea what I was talking about (the concept of reserving/pre-ordering, not amiibo in general). Come January 30 (thank you NintendoLife commenters), stood in line at Toys R Us only to find out that employees got first crack at the couple that weren't already reserved (turns out they did do preorders, just didn't tell anyone), so ended up having to get that one on eBay for a ridiculously high markup (like 1000% above MSRP). For Rosalina, got to Target ~1.5 hours before they opened and the GF and I were able to both get one of the 8 they had in stock. Finally got Meta Knight in the mail on Friday, and now just waiting for Ike, King DeDeDe, Sonic, and Mega Man to get in stock from GS so I can go pick them up. Have all of the Super Mario line on reserve now, at least the ones that can be, and just waiting for Wave 4 to become available now.
tl;dr, have been fairly lucky so far, but amiibo collecting isn't cheap, even if you can get most at MSRP.