Marvel Legends BAF Guide: What the Build-A-Figures Actually Sell For
Same wave structure, same one-part-per-box mechanic. The sold data says the payoff is nowhere close to equal.
Every BAF wave asks the same thing: buy the wave, pull one part per box, assemble the giant at the end. Hasbro hasn't changed the mechanic in years. What changes, wave to wave, is how much that giant is worth once it's built, and our sold-comp data says the gap is not small.
What Marvel Legends BAFs actually sell for
- Thanos, Avengers: Infinity War wave: median $27.99 across 50 sold. The most common BAF in this set — the movie hit theaters right as the wave shipped, Hasbro printed to match, and the market has never treated it as scarce.
- Thanos, the earlier "Infinite Series" Avengers wave: median $29.99 across 46 sold. Different release, same character, almost the same number.
- Armored Thanos, Avengers: Endgame wave: median $40 across 34 sold, a real step up for the variant — though the sealed figure here has sold exactly once, so treat that $42.99 as a data point, not a price.
- Sentinel: median $174.99 across 26 sold. Split it by condition and sealed alone runs $200 (13 sold) against $44.50 loose (13 sold) — better than a 4x sealed premium on the same figure.
- Galactus: median $585 across 38 sold. Sealed sits at $600 (19 sold), loose at $55 (11 sold) — the widest sealed/loose spread of anything on this list, and the only BAF here that clears five hundred dollars.
What actually moves the number isn't fame. Thanos headlined two Avengers movies and still sells for under $30. What moves it is how expensive and how hard the build was to finish.
Why the same gimmick prints a $28 figure and a $585 one
The Thanos waves shipped at peak MCU hype in a standard six-figure spread, priced low enough that Hasbro could print without restraint. Demand was real, but supply kept pace with it — two separate Thanos releases landing within two dollars of each other is the market telling you both settled at "common" and stayed there.
Galactus is a different build. He stands well over a foot, splits across a wave that costs real money to complete, and asks a casual buyer to commit shelf space and cash to a background piece most people will never open. Fewer collectors finished the build, which means fewer complete loose Galactuses exist, and a sealed one — never opened, parts unverified but guaranteed present — commands better than ten times a common Thanos.
Sealed vs. loose is where the real money sits
Every BAF here carries a sealed premium, but it scales with difficulty, not flat percentage. Sentinel sealed runs about 4.5x its loose price. Galactus sealed runs closer to 11x. The bigger and harder the build, the more a buyer will pay for a sealed, guaranteed-complete figure over a loose one somebody assembled from a bargain bin of stray parts, because with something the size of Galactus, "loose" too often means missing a piece, and paying for sealed is paying to not find that out the hard way.
The buying rule this data supports
Building for the shelf, not resale? Buy loose. Thanos at $28-30 loose and Sentinel at $44.50 loose are both honest prices for a finished giant, and neither has moved much in a while. Buying Galactus is a different decision: buy sealed, or buy from someone who can show you every part is actually in the box, because the loose market for that one figure (11 sold) is thin enough that a single bad-parts sale can skew what "normal" even looks like.