A veritable tsunami of new Halo Universe and Halo 4 toys have hit stores within the last week, and the first of the new McFarlane Toys items I found as part of the flood (no, not that Flood) are the Halo Avatars Series 1 figures. These figures are meant to be plastic versions of Halo fans’ XBox Live avatars.

The first series includes figures of Avatars wearing armor pieces from those of the Master Chief to Commander Carter to a gold Elite–there’s even a little scaled Warthog! The catch is that every one of these figures is contained in a plastic UNSC canister-shaped “blindbag”.

Halo collectors are no strangers to blind-bags–MEGA Brands has released 5.5 series of blind-bagged Halo Mega Bloks figures. But unlike the Halo Mega Bloks blind-bags, there are no identifying codes on these Halo Avatar figures’ canisters, so these are the first true blind-bagged Halo figures (no, I don’t count the Halo Heroclix).

At a price-point of nearly 3 bucks each, this is certainly among the cheapest possible Halo sets of figures to collect. But given the highly-niche nature of these figures that won’t appeal to everyone, this isn’t a line that every collector is going to feel the need to be a completist with.

I picked up one Halo Avatars Series 1 figure from Target myself today for $2.99, in hopes of snagging the flaming helmet Spartan figure. I’ll post a full review of the figure I pulled later tonight.