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You know, I'd really love to see Pretenders brought back and reinterpreted like those Decepticon Hunters or Prime Armor figures, or even as far back as Prime Shockwave. It's always been one of my favorite gimmicks and I think it would be a lot better than the full shells since you could use them without having to make extremely small Transformers.
Make the characters a normal Transformer, with a robot mode that has their shell's elements. Then give them a big accessory or a drone that they can use, or that can break apart into armor they can equip. If you made a Monstructor you could even have their "shell" pieces turn into combiner kibble for Monstructor, or you could make retools of existing Jazz/Bumblebee/Grimlock/Starscream figures to use the Pretender gimmick.
