CA Nexus Affiliate Needs SEO advice

I am one of the many California affiliates who is being dumped by some of my vendors. I've had four firm confirmations so far, fortunately only one of them was a major hit.

I have a large broad niche site, 5+ years old, and a fair number of page one rankings. My site is 2000+ pages.

One department on my site will be totally wiped out unless I can find a replacement. I have an application pending. If they pick me up, the products will be totally different, so I will be forced to change url's. What I mean is: In the past when I lost a vendor I could usually find another who supplied the exact same product so all I had to do was change the buy link and the url stayed the same. This is different.

I don't know if I should do 301 redirects, or simply delete the pages. This will involve around two hundred pages I will lose. If I use redirects, it will be very frustrating to my visitors. But I am wondering how the search engines will view the sudden loss of that many pages. I just don't know what to do.

Many of these pages are ranked well, and though this department isn't a major money maker, it brings a fair amount of traffic who then often wander to other parts of my site. Well, you know the drill... So what is my best options here?

I am fortunate so far that they haven't de-activated the links, so I am sending them money still, but of course will see nothing in return from the vendor, but at least they are not yet dead links. Help..........:confused: