Just bumping up this thread and saying I've been playing the MK Dungeons quite a bit. The figures are relatively cheap to get used and the necessity to get one of the blessed "unique limited edition" figures is not very high because of the way the game is played. (I can tell they "adjusted" this for hero clix to make the 'rares' more important.)
It seems to be a good social game as well. Not a good tournanment game though. The rules are a little 'loose' and ambiguous in places, but everyone seems to be able to quickly agree on a resolution. You were iright about the speed of the game, it goes quite fast.
Hero Clix doesn't seem to do it for me. If you look beyond the most expensive figures, many figures are fairly worthless and similar to each other.
The MK Rebellion stuff is intriguing from a grand-scale battle sense, but I am sure that gets expensive real quick....I saw there was a LOTR minitures set out, are you familiar with those? They are much cheaper.
Thanks for the update. I'm in a bit of a money crunch here, so I can't get into MK Dungeons like I wanted to (have to save up for the D&D 3.5 Players Handbook).
Hero Clix, while kinda fun, is seriously broken in that a few figs can dominate the game (Hulk is utterly unkillable, he gets stronger all the way until his very last click). I didn't know there were LOTR plastic minis. Also coming soon are the D&D minis, will be interesting to see how much they cost as well.