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LEGO Star Wars 2021 Set Discussion - READ FIRST POST!!!

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10 minutes ago, LDigital said:

Ok let’s look at it another way. Titanic 9000 pieces is £180 less

millenium falcon ucs is £100 less with 800 more pieces. 

so what is the extra £100 for?
 

This is The Lego group getting in on that scalping action as far as I can see.

I think some of you guys have become way too cynical when it comes to LEGO's motives. It's much more likely this is due to tariffs and licensing than to some kind of nefarious plot on LEGO's part to bilk UK buyers (and only UK buyers) out of £100. 

LEGO goes out of its way to avoid raising prices on already-shipping sets. They have done it a few times, but they're few and far between. So I would guess that the Falcon, were it released today, would likely see the same price inflation in the UK that you are seeing with the AT-AT, and LEGO has resisted raising its UK prices because that's their policy... or perhaps as a product that predates Brexit, it qualifies for lower import duties... or perhaps LEGO front-loaded a ton of stock in the UK before Brexit to avoid paying higher tariffs down the line.

As for the Titanic, it could be that it qualifies for more favorable tariffs and import duties because it's under a certain price threshold (e.g., the AT-AT is over £XX so it counts as a luxury item with higher tariffs, whereas the Titanic is under £XX so it doesn't), or even because it's based on a UK brand... or maybe the import rules are changing in two weeks and the Titanic just squeaked in before them.... or maybe it's being manufactured in a different factory in a different country, and thus is subject to different import taxes. 

Lots of plausible reasons why these two sets are cheaper for you, that don't presuppose LEGO being evil.

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I am wondering if it might be cheaper for the folks in the UK to simply have someone in the US pick one up for them and then mail it over to them and pay the 18%VAT on it.  Buy it in a state with no sales tax, say Oregon, for $800, say shipping costs of $50, and for a total of $850 which is 626.5 pounds and with VAT comes out to 739.72 pounds.

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Wow, that’s really a serious difference between UK and other markets. At first I thought it must have something to do with Brexit, but as has been pointed out it’s really not the first time. But then again, how can we compare purchasing power of an average Lsw afol from UK and from EU or US? I’m sure they take it into consideration as well

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The UCS AT-AT is a thing of beauty, but I'm actually really impressed by how well the playscale one holds up when directly compared to it. This doesn't feel like a Falcon situation to me where owning the gappy playscale version with funky proportions just left me yearning for the UCS version, this very much feels like you could get by with just 75288 without losing much. You still have the troop bay, the same speeder bike design and E-web, the winch mechanism for Luke, the head can fit Veers and the two pilots, and the only notable aesthetic compromises are the blue and brown technic pieces showing by the leg joints. The UCS version is still seriously impressive and I will spend a lot of time staring at it in the Lego Store, but I doubt I will ever buy it (especially not at £750). Besides, the UCS Falcon already dominates too much of my bedroom. :head_back:

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I still absolutely love the AT-AT, everything about it. The only issue i have is... it’s $800 (and $950 Canadian :sick:), and when compared to the Falcon, it’s noticeably smaller 

I think the size of it is perfect, I was worried we’d get an oversized one thats as long and tall as the UCS Falcon, but it really should’ve been $700 and I feel like it’s $800 because lego knew people would buy multiples

Still a day 1 for me, but that 950 hurts

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For those of you complaining about cost, I think as someone suggested, weight might be a better way to compare/contrast value. Also, any time a set requires brand new parts, it will drive up costs. The third thing is that this set likely involved a lot of R&D. It's not just that LEGO had to build a huge AT-AT. Many MOC builders have done that. But there are stability, durability, and warranty standards that the company must adhere to. That makes achieving a viable UCS AT-AT extremely difficult. This set is likely something LEGO has investigated for quite some time, and they have likely scrapped many ideas. When R&D goes up, the selling price of each unit will go up. You are not just paying for manufacturing, labor, marketing, and royalty costs. 

With all that said, this set would be much cheaper if LEGO didn't have to pay Disney for the Star Wars rights.

EDIT: I just realized that the issue with price had to do with regional differences. LEGO has a factory to manufacture sets in Mexico. This should 100% be the reason for the regional price differences.

Edited by Something_Awesome

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AT-AT looking solid in high res. Will have to build it first but definitely seems like a contender for best UCS set. Will try to get it day 1 for the GWP but not holding my breath, and not too fazed about it because I missed the yoda saber last year. 
 

Surely I’m not the only one annoyed by the figures though. The selection is perfect but the face prints on some of the troopers are horribly inaccurate. We desperately need more figure parts with darker skin tones and female prints, they should be in smaller sets for everyone to buy! Forced diversity in $1300 sets is not what anyone wants, collectors want accuracy to the source material and MOCers want cheap parts. However, with this and the figures in the marauder I’ve got a feeling the hoth battle pack next year will have a great variety of head prints :moar:

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14 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

Surely I’m not the only one annoyed by the figures though. The selection is perfect but the face prints on some of the troopers are horribly inaccurate. We desperately need more figure parts with darker skin tones and female prints, they should be in smaller sets for everyone to buy! Forced diversity in $1300 sets is not what anyone wants, collectors want accuracy to the source material and MOCers want cheap parts. However, with this and the figures in the marauder I’ve got a feeling the hoth battle pack next year will have a great variety of head prints :moar:

This may be a can of worms that I'm not sure should be opened in this thread, but why do you think that having diverse snowtroopers isn't accurate to the source material?

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28 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

but the face prints on some of the troopers are horribly inaccurate

 

28 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

Forced diversity in $1300 sets is not what anyone wants

Seriously though. What are you smoking?

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I might be visiting the US soon soooo if my wife somehow lets me...  I'll smuggle one in my luggage somehow and avoid that pesky VAT.

 

Where's pics of the faces of the Snowtroopers? I don't understand the "diversity" comment. Are they like not all white and/or male? 'Cause why does it matter? It's not like you could see behind the armour in the movies.

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4 minutes ago, BrickG said:

Where's pics of the faces of the Snowtroopers? I don't understand the "diversity" comment. Are they like not all white and/or male? 'Cause why does it matter? It's not like you could see behind the armour in the movies.

From the Brothers Brick review:

Spoiler

LEGO-Star-Wars-75313-UCS-AT-AT-TBB-Revie

 

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The diversity in snowtroopers is good in my opinion, as I hope it continues with smaller sets, I don't think there has every been a generic SW female figure in reddish-brown before and two of the other face prints I haven't seen in a generic figure before either.

While different face prints can increase the resale price of generic figures the snowtrooper is easily available in the cheaper playset AT AT, two previous sets and it will be in a battle pack, the same goes for the stormtrooper. The snowtrooper commander will be expensive anyway (unless it comes in a BP) so I see no issue there.

Is the Australian price revealed yet? I assume it will be the same as the MF as the US price is, but knowing TLG it will probably cost more.

Brickset normally include the Australian price but haven't this time and its not on our online store.

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The GBP price point for the AT-AT has left me severely miffed, though that’s all I have to say on the matter. Still a day one purchase for me.

I can’t help but gush over just how much this set gets right. The scale, minifigure compatibility, sleekness, and the sheer detail are riveting. This might be an adult-oriented display model, but I can’t imagine people won’t be playing with this thing every chance they get, I know I will! 

My opinion on Lego Star Wars as a theme is a complex one, but this model bursts with enthusiasm, creativity, and marvellous Lego engineering. It’ll be the first truly giant Lego set I buy, and whilst the £750(!) price tag isn’t easy to swallow, the set just seems worth every penny regardless, even moreso than the ISD and Falcon.

Also loving the diverse range of face prints for the Imperials, they’re a nice subtle part of the set and I’m looking forward to seeing more.

I have my fingers crossed for a truly revamped Snowspeeder next summer, Lego would be foolish not to offer one up now.

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Absolutely stunning model. Minus what will likely be some repetitiveness in the build with the 4 legs, this might be the best Star Wars set of all time for me. It's close with the UCS Falcon, whose build may be more interesting when compared with this. There are so many factors that go into pricing, I honestly don't know what to think of $800. Perhaps the net weight is as much as the Falcon. Perhaps the new moulds upped the price a bit. Perhaps the licensing ups it more than we realize. I don't know. I'm fine expressing grief over such a high price, but until I know more about pricing methods I'm not going to be angry at LEGO. I really hope people will see this for what it is: perhaps one of the last great and enormous Star Wars OT models they may ever release (fingers crossed for a similarly monstrous Nebulon-B in the next 2-4 years). I'm going to soak it up.

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4 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

This may be a can of worms that I'm not sure should be opened in this thread, but why do you think that having diverse snowtroopers isn't accurate to the source material?

You hear the troopers talk, we know the casting, in the movie they’re all male. I’m all for diverse figures but in this case it’s sacrificing accuracy for the sake of diversity. It’s a $1300 set, ideally the troopers would have plain black heads or heads like the troopers had in 2012 so their skin isn’t showing underneath the helmet. Yeah I’m not buying it for figures but still, it’s the principle. FWIW I don’t think the Luke figure is particularly accurate either.

And furthermore we’ve been asking for diverse figure parts for how long? Those trooper heads in the AT-AT are exclusive prints, the prices of those pieces is going to be insane if they don’t turn up somewhere else. The marauder from earlier this year did it right: new, diverse prints in a massable set.

Edited by Brikkyy13

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50 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

You hear the troopers talk, we know the casting, in the movie they’re all male. I’m all for diverse figures but in this case it’s sacrificing accuracy for the sake of diversity. It’s a $1300 set, ideally the troopers would have plain black heads or heads like the troopers had in 2012 so their skin isn’t showing underneath the helmet. Yeah I’m not buying it for figures but still, it’s the principle. FWIW I don’t think the Luke figure is particularly accurate either.

Yeah, it's kind of dumb especially since, like you said, they're exclusive prints that could have been better used elsewhere. I wouldn't have an issue if they were just using, like, angry clones and the FO snow officer head or something, as that's accurate and not using new prints, but they went out of their way to make it inaccurate when the easier option was accuracy (which might be a first for lego?)

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1 hour ago, Brikkyy13 said:

You hear the troopers talk, we know the casting, in the movie they’re all male.

 

43 minutes ago, Mandalorianknight said:

Yeah, it's kind of dumb especially since, like you said, they're exclusive prints that could have been better used elsewhere. I wouldn't have an issue if they were just using, like, angry clones and the FO snow officer head or something, as that's accurate and not using new prints, but they went out of their way to make it inaccurate when the easier option was accuracy (which might be a first for lego?)

You don't actually hear any snowtroopers talk in the movie. It wouldn't surprise me if the extras were all male (I have no idea whether they were, or even if that information exists, but they may have been), but I don't see that that's terribly relevant given that you have absolutely no way to tell who's wearing the armor. I'm open to the argument that they would be better off having black heads for everyone (and particularly to that the AT-AT drivers should have grey heads, since their helmets are completely open in the back), but absolutely not that we would be better with Angry Clone or any other generic heads. We know from other media that the Stormtrooper Corps recruited women, and there's no evidence of their gender in the movie either way, so calling female snowtroopers 'inaccurate' strikes me as an excuse to object to them rather than an actual argument.

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29 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

You hear the troopers talk, we know the casting, in the movie they’re all male.

We hear maybe a half-dozen helmeted troopers speak in the whole of the original trilogy... none of them snow troopers... hardly a representative sample when you consider there are, what, fifty thousand of them on each Death Star? As we saw in the sequel trilogy, the female stormtroopers' costumes were nearly (if not completely) indistinguishable from the male stormtroopers. So, there's nothing to say that there aren't female stormtroopers in the OT. There's also nothing to say the stormtroopers don't have brown skin, or medium nougat skin, or whatever. 

34 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

I’m all for diverse figures but in this case it’s sacrificing accuracy for the sake of diversity.

Until Finn took his helmet off in The Force Awakens, we didn't know definitively that Stormtroopers were even living beings, let alone human. So I'm a bit unclear what you're defining as "accuracy". I'm sure if the added (sorry, "forced") diversity of minifig heads is such a sacrifice for you, there are plenty of Angry Clone heads other EBers will happily trade you, in exchange for the heads that come with your AT-AT...  

And, even if there were some definitive proof that no stormtrooper in the OT was canonically ever female — cue the obscure comic book/video game reference — the heads can easily be swapped to another minifig... this is LEGO after all. 

40 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

Yeah I’m not buying it for figures but still, it’s the principle.

Having a hard time seeing what the "principle" is here.

42 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

Those trooper heads in the AT-AT are exclusive prints, the prices of those pieces is going to be insane if they don’t turn up somewhere else.

UCS sets have, with rare exception over the last 10+ years, come with exclusive figs. It's a fact of life, one that isn't gonna change, and one that really shouldn't be surprising, unless you just emerged from a decades-long dark age, or started collecting these sets today. 

Even so, there's nothing that says these heads won't show up elsewhere.

43 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

The marauder from earlier this year did it right: new, diverse prints in a massable set.

So... why is it okay for Stormtroopers in the Marauder to have diverse prints but not the Stormtroopers in the AT-AT? Black heads are appropriate for one, but diverse heads are welcome in another? Huh? What happened to "accuracy"?

If LEGO is putting different heads in each of their sets, that just broadens the pool of unique heads we can get... which is something you already acknowledge most everyone has been asking for. Sure, if the AT-AT were the only set to include diverse heads, and every other set used Angry Clone heads, I could see an issue with that... but LEGO has been putting new/different stormtrooper heads in lots of sets over the last year or two... so, why does it matter if there are a few more added to the pot here? You don't have to collect them all... you can just pretend these heads don't exist, if they don't eventually show up elsewhere. 

I don't mean to be harsh, but it seems like you are talking out of both sides of your mouth here. And when you drop phrases like "forced diversity" and "diversity for diversity sake" in reference to minifig skin tones and genders — representing unseen, almost entirely unheard Star Wars characters — well, it just smacks of all the half-wits outraged when they saw a black stormtrooper in the first TFA teaser, or who couldn't accept a female protagonist in a Star Wars trilogy. Was really hoping we had moved past this.

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13 minutes ago, jdubbs said:

And, even if there were some definitive proof that no stormtrooper in the OT was canonically ever female — cue the obscure comic book/video game reference — the heads can easily be swapped to another minifig... this is LEGO after all.

Quite the opposite. It's been well-established for years now that female stormtroopers served throughout the GCW. Battlefront II established that they participated in every battle in the OT, and they also appeared several times in Rebels, plus books and other media. And the armor is identical for both; anybody who's hung out with the 501st can testify that there's absolutely no way to tell who's in the suit until they take their helmets off.

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I don’t see what difference a male or female figure makes, the majority are male figures anyway and as has long been established, figures are not the purpose of a UCS set, and from the other perspective for a US$800 set some exclusive prints are expected.

The only sort of defined character is the snow trooper commander, while he has a new face print, the new torso print was bound to see the value of the figure rise regardless.

With the other snow trooper figures, the only new print is one of the new female faces, but the snow trooper is easily accessible as are the other face prints, the same goes for the ATAT driver. Though I admit a plain black head would be best for those as the neck is visible.

For me the worse part about the figures is the inaccurate Luke figure, not faces that cannot be seen.

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46 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

 

You don't actually hear any snowtroopers talk in the movie. It wouldn't surprise me if the extras were all male (I have no idea whether they were, or even if that information exists, but they may have been), but I don't see that that's terribly relevant given that you have absolutely no way to tell who's wearing the armor. I'm open to the argument that they would be better off having black heads for everyone (and particularly to that the AT-AT drivers should have grey heads, since their helmets are completely open in the back), but absolutely not that we would be better with Angry Clone or any other generic heads. We know from other media that the Stormtrooper Corps recruited women, and there's no evidence of their gender in the movie either way, so calling female snowtroopers 'inaccurate' strikes me as an excuse to object to them rather than an actual argument.

I'm not objecting to them in the marauder, a cheaper set based off recent media, and I dislike your implication. In ESB, the snowtroopers were, in both cast and intention, men. And that's not even the main point I'm trying to make, my point is that they went out of the way to do this rather then to just do, say, some angry clones, the fo officer helmet, we'll even say like leia's head or something. That would have been fine with me, but they made new exclusive prints focused on stuff that you A: won't really see and B: is inaccurate, rather than new prints for the interior, or updated torso prints, or any other use of the budget. It's not even that big of a deal, but I maintain that I disagree with the decision.

19 minutes ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

Quite the opposite. It's been well-established for years now that female stormtroopers served throughout the GCW. Battlefront II established that they participated in every battle in the OT, and they also appeared several times in Rebels, plus books and other media. And the armor is identical for both; anybody who's hung out with the 501st can testify that there's absolutely no way to tell who's in the suit until they take their helmets off.

Not to get even further on a tangent but battlefront two's had canonicity issues for forever, ESPECIALLY regarding skins. (mustard 327th, the various jumptroopers, etc). Like, ewoks were not present at the battle of hoth, there wasn't a large battle on yavin, heck, vader doesn't fight bb-8, grievous never fights rey, etc.

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I couldn’t care any less about whether the heads of these characters that wear helmets covering their faces are accurate or not. I’d much rather get more diverse trooper heads than getting Angry Clone again for the next ten years. If it’s that big of a concern, then just swap them out. No offense but this is one of those things that only a Star Wars fan could find a way to nitpick about lmao.

As for the set itself, I’m absolutely blown away by the model. I was super apathetic hearing rumors about another $800 UCS set, seeing as how I haven’t gotten around to collecting many UCS sets and am a bit tired of all the big gray builds. That being said, this might be one of my favorite UCS, and Star Wars in general, sets to date. Not only does the exterior look amazing but the interior is so cool and also pretty accurate. I love the stickered(?) pieces used inside. I’m also really impressed that the legs can move and aren’t just static as I saw a lot of people worrying about.

The minifigure selection is pretty solid, even though it’s very reminiscent of the selection from last year’s play-scale AT-AT.  Speaking of which; this set makes the 2020 model I built back in December look puny by comparison. I’ll definitely have to get this new one at some point, but it won’t be for a couple years. I still need to get the UCS Falcon, Star Destroyer, MBS Cantina and R2-D2 sets before I can think about this one. I also have a Galaxy’s Edge trip next year…

Also, I’m curious to see if anyone will MOD this set to look like the AT-AT model used in Rebels and Jedi: Fallen Order.

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the diversity present with the stormies is fine but honestly, when did the space fascists get so inclusive? just because they don't let aliens in doesn't necessarily mean they've lightened up that much on other people too. not to mention all the unique entries on bricklink but i'm sure that's not a problem.

4 hours ago, Brikkyy13 said:

You hear the troopers talk, we know the casting, in the movie they’re all male. I’m all for diverse figures but in this case it’s sacrificing accuracy for the sake of diversity. It’s a $1300 set, ideally the troopers would have plain black heads or heads like the troopers had in 2012 so their skin isn’t showing underneath the helmet.

this is a bizarre complaint though. you're nagging the set for having... more printing? and accuracy? i think it's more dependent on them being unseen under the helmet, and as we've seen so far since the trexler marauder lego's trying at least to answer fans' bizarre complaints about angry clones. you can't please em all, i guess

the set itself looks marvellous; insane how well it's been pulled off. i think the last ucs i've been this blown away by is... the ucs falcon, and that one i sure haven't gotten either. either way they're marvels of engineering and with this one i really cannot get over how well pulled together those legs and torso are

Edited by Pirean_Grammaticul

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