Collectibility Spotlight: Rare Stablemates

Despite having just over 500 Stablemates in my collection at present, I don’t really consider myself a mini collector. I did, once, but then I started to disband a lot of my mini congas in 2022. I’ve sold a couple hundred since then, and I would have parted with more if it weren’t for my strict rule about not breaking up sets. To prevent them from getting out of control again, I don’t buy whole sets when there are only one or two models I want. There are plenty of people out there who don’t flinch at breaking up sets, and I just wait for them to sell the pieces I want individually.

 

I also don’t consider myself a mini collector because I don’t have many mini rarities in my collection, nor am I actively pursuing any. When I considered Stablemates for my Collectibility Spotlight, I wondered if I’d even have enough to talk about, especially since my event Stablemates were just featured earlier this month. I managed to rustle up six others.

 

 

My first “rare” Stablemate was this G1 Draft from the #701705 Stablemates Mini Fanfare set, released through the Just About Horses (JAH) magazine in 2004. There were 1500 total sets made, with four colors of the G1 Draft split evenly into 375 pieces each. The silver was by far my favorite of the four colors, and happily, that’s the one I got. I show him regularly under the name Winter Solstice. My region has several *serious* mini collectors with models far more rare than he is, so he’s not as competitive as he used to be, but he did get two NAN cards last year.

 

 

My next rare Stablemate acquisition (and the rarest one in my collection to date) was Hermes, a run of just 75 pieces made as a fundraiser for the ASPCA in late October 2011. Donors who gave $100 or more received one of these guys. 

 

That’s the easiest $100 I ever spent.

He unfortunately took a nosedive off the shelf last year and broke one of his ears. I sent him to Jennifer Danza for repair and (as with all her repairs) I can’t tell anything ever happened to him. He just got back to me a few days before Christmas.

His show name is The Messenger.

 

 

This set, #720599 Thoroughbred Horse & Foal, had two different releases through Target. The vast majority of models were a solid bay adult and a solid red dun foal, but some of the early sets in 2006 were these pintos. I found my set for an absolutely insane price on MH$P in January 2012. I show the Thoroughbred Mare as a Paint x TB. Her show name is Loudmouth. I haven't shown the foal.

 

 

This little dude is #711502 Porcelain Stablemates Warmblood, produced in 2002 as a 300-piece special run for BreyerFest. I bought him in April 2013 from my friend Kelly K and kept the show name she gave him, RickyTick. Like the American Saddlebred also produced in porcelain that year, there’s a good chance there are fewer than the original 300 out there, as many arrived to BreyerFest broken from shipping and were returned.

I actually found another one of these guys at BreyerFest 2014 in the Swap Meet. He was jumbled in a box full of other loose Stablemates, all of which were advertised as bodies and priced at $3 apiece. I couldn’t believe he wasn’t smashed to smithereens, but there was nary a mark on him. He came home with me, and I eventually sold him to my friend Lori in 2018.

 

 

A few posts ago, I mentioned that the only G1 mold of which I want a complete conga is the Quarter Horse Stallion. I still have a few regular runs to pick up and thought sure I’d get those long before this guy, Pancho, a run of unknown quantity for the Chincoteague Pony Farm in the the late 1970s/early 1980s. Pancho is notoriously difficult to find. It’s widely accepted that there were fewer than 1,000 made, and many of those probably ended up in non-collectors’ hands.

In May 2021, I got a message from a friend that she’d lucked into multiple Panchos from a seller who had been friends with the woman who'd originally sold them from the store at the Chincoteague Pony Farm. My friend made an offer, got the lot, and then sold one to both me and our mutual friend Heather B, who had been looking for a Pancho even longer than I had. Mine has all the usual flaws for this run - bad seams, flash everywhere, and both of his right-side legs were severely bowlegged. I started to fix them with a heat gun, but then I got too close and caused a small blister on his front coronet, so I panicked and stopped. His show name is Arambula and he's already got a nice stack of NAN cards.

 

I will always be thankful to Marci for helping me obtain this huge Stablemate grail!

 

As far as rare Stablemates I'd like to add someday, there really aren't many. I'd like an unpainted black plastic G2 Warmblood and the American Saddlebred porcelain I mentioned above. That's really it as far as reasonably obtainable things. Unobtainiums include any of the German Show Special models (of which there are only 15 of each) and the solid-colored new bucking dude from the 2026 Stablemates Club.