About two weeks ago, WizKids announced a 'bonus' program to address randomization issues with a small portion of the initial shipments of Mage Knight Sinister.  The program sends two bonus packs of Mage Knight Sinister, each with one unique and one rare figure, to distributors for each case ordered.  From there, according to WizKids Advertising and Public Relations Manager Jon Leitheusser, it depends on the pass-through at each level to be successful. 

Leitheusser expects broad cooperation from distributors because of the visibility of their allocations to retailers.  An example of that visibility:  Diamond recently sent a notice to its accounts telling them that retailers that ordered one case or more would get two bonus packs per case; accounts ordering less than one case would get none. 

At the store level, obviously, the allocation becomes more problematic.  If a retailer had any consumer buying in cases, they could just get the bonus figures.  Otherwise, retailers are just expected to use their own judgment in distributing the figures to generate good will, according to the original WizKids announcement.  Leitheusser told ICv2 that he'd been hearing from consumers wondering how individual stores would be handling this, but ultimately it's up to each retailer to handle as they think best. 

The bonus packs are expected to arrive on schedule in about four weeks.

The randomization problem affected about 10-15% of MK Sinister cases created at the start of the production run -- a relatively small number over-all, but enough to affect the perception of the product.  The problems were attributed to the rapid growth of the company, and the requirement to add new production capacity in China to keep up. 

Another randomization problem occurred with an apparently smaller number of cases at the beginning of the Marvel HeroClix run.  In that case, simply shuffling the packs in cases or between cases was done to correct the problems quickly (also not a bad idea at the store level as a general practice).