LEGO Pokémon 2026 - Rumours & Discussion

[MAB]

11 hours ago, Scarilian said:

The advert opens with demonstrating all the adult responsibilities and it ends with him actively choosing to ditch all of those responsibilities, including his work uniform, and instead meet up with his coworkers to get Lego Pokemon while someone expresses concern at his actions. 

Trying to insult people who acknowledge the adverts content doesn't change the adverts content.

Here is a popular fan commercial by John Wikstrom that encapsulates what they were going for better, the idea of revisiting your youth while also showing the passage of time such as reading a kindle as opposed to playing a gameboy.

The slogan was never intended to be a chore, it's a dream, an adventure and a journey. You can have the 'Gotta catch/build 'em all' as a slogan, but pairing it with how they handled the rest of the advert and the release it makes it feel extremely manipulative. No real time to view the sets prior, released during a working day, a GWP exclusive to the larger set and in a limited number, all of it's designed to create FOMO and rush people into spending without letting them think. Even the sets themselves which really should have been focused entirely on the Pokemon include unneccessary display areas and shove multiple Pokemon together to inflate the pricing.

If these consumers had no time to view the sets, and the pre-release was during the working day (it was at the same time worldwide so someone somewhere would be working) when they were at work, then how could they have seen the advert and been evilly manipulated to by it forcing them to buy the sets without thinking? The sets are not released yet. They will be on shelves in a month and will presumably be available for at least a year, along with other sets in future. These consumers have not missed anything except for the GWP and there is a possibility that will be back for the store release. 

 

The advert is a bit of fun. It is not evil manipulation. 

[danth]

On 1/13/2026 at 12:49 AM, squiz18 said:

Preorders for the big 3 set are exhausted on the US, UK and AUS lego sites. 

Jang did a whole video on how they sold out instantly, based on pre-order buttons being gone, and pulled numbers from some other website and did some math and concluded Lego made like $30 million in a day.

But now the preorder button is back.

So does that mean they never really sold out?

Edited January 14 by danth

[Black Falcon]

20 hours ago, Scarilian said:

The advert opens with demonstrating all the adult responsibilities and it ends with him actively choosing to ditch all of those responsibilities, including his work uniform, and instead meet up with his coworkers to get Lego Pokemon while someone expresses concern at his actions. 

Or it is simply showing some people breaking out from their boring every days life and fixed procedures, meeting up with some old friends and having some fun. That doesn´t mean that they have to ditch their jobs or anything.

On 1/12/2026 at 8:04 PM, danth said:

Eevee looks great.

Pikachu looks kinda bad. The others are just okay. 

Really sad to see Lego struggling to match Mega designs. 

I like some of their movable designs, Charizard, Magikarb and its Evolution look good, but most of the rest just doesn´t (to me), including the several Pikachus they made. That beeing said both Companies have several Designers, so the quality of the Design varies from Set to Set (and in the end of course also lies in the eye of the beholder).

8 hours ago, MAB said:

If these consumers had no time to view the sets, and the pre-release was during the working day (it was at the same time worldwide so someone somewhere would be working) when they were at work, then how could they have seen the advert and been evilly manipulated to by it forcing them to buy the sets without thinking? The sets are not released yet. They will be on shelves in a month and will presumably be available for at least a year, along with other sets in future. These consumers have not missed anything except for the GWP and there is a possibility that will be back for the store release. 

They were actually pretty honest about it, the Terms for the GWP clearly stated that it would be avaiable again for release.

[Mandalorianknight]

11 hours ago, MAB said:

The advert is a bit of fun. It is not evil manipulation. 

Exactly. And even then, regardless if you attribute any sort of sinister intentions to... the lego pokemon commercial... I would say that if somebody is so easily manipulated that a minute long commercial immediately convinces them to spend nearly a thousand dollars on lego they otherwise wouldn't purchase and "ditch all their adult responsibilities", there are clearly other concerns at play there that I wouldn't blame Lego for.

The ad isn't misleading about the product. It's not aimed at small children who don't know any better. As far as commercials go it really isn't anything sketchy or concerning.

58 minutes ago, danth said:

Jang did a whole video on how they sold out instantly, based on pre-order buttons being gone, and pulled numbers from some other website and did some math and concluded Lego made like $30 million in a day.

But now the preorder button is back.

So does that mean they never really sold out?

There are multiple possibilities I could see. One is that they underestimated demand, but either somebody in logistics was able to find some space/reassign some machines so that they could have more copies of the set produced by the release date, or they decided to dip into retail/release stock a bit. Another is that it was just some sort of glitch and they hadn't run out of pre-orders yet.

Either way, it seems to be doing very well- it might not be $30 million exactly, but lego and nintendo are both walking away from this with wheelbarrows of cash.

 

I do think this is somewhat of a misstep on lego's part- they really should have put a $30-50 Pikachu out there as part of the release wave. The cheapest set being Eevee for $60 means a lot of kids and casual fans won't be getting any Pokemon sets, at least out of this batch. Pokemon is massive among millenials and older Gen Z, of course, but it's also pretty big with children, and they've essentially been cut out of the theme here.

[BrickBob Studpants]

11 minutes ago, Mandalorianknight said:

[…] but it's also pretty big with children, and they've essentially been cut out of the theme here.

That‘s whom the 16 sets in August are geared towards

[danth]

1 hour ago, Mandalorianknight said:

I do think this is somewhat of a misstep on lego's part- they really should have put a $30-50 Pikachu out there as part of the release wave. The cheapest set being Eevee for $60 means a lot of kids and casual fans won't be getting any Pokemon sets, at least out of this batch. Pokemon is massive among millenials and older Gen Z, of course, but it's also pretty big with children, and they've essentially been cut out of the theme here.

I think the strategy is to get all the money they can from big spenders, and from people who prefer cheaper sets but will absolutely cave and buy the big sets due to FOMO. 

Then they'll release cheaper sets later to get the more frugal people. 

 

[squiz18]

13 hours ago, danth said:

Jang did a whole video on how they sold out instantly, based on pre-order buttons being gone, and pulled numbers from some other website and did some math and concluded Lego made like $30 million in a day.

But now the preorder button is back.

So does that mean they never really sold out?

The difference is when the pre order came back for a second time, the GWP wasn't available. The numbers of available GWPs was in the T&Cs so I think it's likely they sold that many sets (over 32 million dollars in about 12 hours!). 

Then the second preorder round was presumably a bit of extra stock. I suppose it's the GWP that went out of stock, rather than the set itself. 

Preorder is unavailable again, at least in the UK

10 hours ago, danth said:

I think the strategy is to get all the money they can from big spenders, and from people who prefer cheaper sets but will absolutely cave and buy the big sets due to FOMO. 

Then they'll release cheaper sets later to get the more frugal people. 

 

Yeah, Jang discussed that in his video. This was the Brickset comment that he referenced which seemed pretty spot on: 

 

Quote

I think the business strategy here is pretty clear and it's not unique to Lego.

If you're a company with a line of products to sell that you know there's going to be strong demand for, you start by releasing the more expensive products first, with lower cost products being released a while later. This way the people who want the high priced items will buy them, along with some of a larger group of people would have bought lower cost items instead if they were available, but will stretch to buy these instead.

It's not hard to understand - you want as many people as possible to buy the most expensive sets they can afford/are willing to buy. Once you've sold enough of those sets, you discount prices on them or release lower cost sets as a way to get more money from the next tier of consumer in the market. You don't want to do that too soon because if you do, you cannibalise some of your higher value sales.

In this case Lego have done something even more crafty to increase their sales of higher value sets. The set with three Pokémon could easily have been sold as three separate sets, with bases that fit together into a bigger whole as a way to provide an incentive for some people to 'buy them all'. However, if Lego did that, some people might only buy the one or two that they wanted. By packaging them together Lego is ensuring (or at least trying to ensure) that people who want one or more of these Pokémon have to buy all three, and they get the increased revenue associated with that. You could of course argue that the high price for this set would put some people off buying but I'm guessing Lego have done some market research and determined that while people might grumble and complain about having to buy all of these together, they'll still do it. This is Pokémon after all.

It will be interesting to see what Lego comes out with at the next level down in terms of sets. I'm sure minature scale Pokémon would sell like hotcakes (especially if they put them in mystery boxes or I suppose that should be poke balls), but smaller sets would be popular irrespective of whether they come before or after the big sets, so if you're Lego, you release the big sets first.

 

[danth]

5 hours ago, squiz18 said:

The difference is when the pre order came back for a second time, the GWP wasn't available.

Ah okay, that makes sense. 👍🏼

[Meaf]

Do we have any solid information on when the next wave is coming out, or is it just "some time later this year (probably summer)"?

[BrickBob Studpants]

27 minutes ago, Meaf said:

Do we have any solid information on when the next wave is coming out, or is it just "some time later this year (probably summer)"?

August

[R0Sch]

Here's my reverse engineered GWP Kanto Region Badges display case, in case you want to rebrick it instead of spending 650€ on a set: 40892.io

[BrickWild]

Here's my 'Cosplay Pikachu' tail!

 

And here's the required pieces too.

Download: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1gxeXA0fLu_84G5VTwyRoPoLpgNB5W_BL/view?usp=sharing