Funko Pops, to me.
I understand that some of them are fairly overpriced, but I also really like them as is. It doesn’t work on all characters, but it sometimes work on a lot and there’s so much representation and variety that it’s good to have a few.
If people want to talk about waste of plastic and vinyl, they should bark at the companies who make teeny tiny figurines that serve no purpose and have so little detail that spending any money on them is a waste.
On my own projects (some of which you can find in [email protected]) I end up having narrow off-cuts, often from ripping boards to width. I save these up and when I’m sick of having them around I glue them up into panels, cut them into squares and make coasters out of them. They don’t really match anything other than they’re made of the same species I tend to work with.