LEGO Star Wars 2022 Set Discussion - READ FIRST POST!!!

[jdubbs]

1 hour ago, benderisgreat said:

They simply don’t make as many PT sets as a lot of fans including myself would want to see. That’s it, nothing more than that. While they make a ton of OT sets some even so obscure like new Hoth At-St, nobody would think that LEGO will ever make, we still lack a ton of iconic stuff from prequels.

LEGO makes sets to support whatever media is current. When the PT was new, they made loads of PT sets. When CW was airing, there were a ton of CW sets. For five years we got almost nothing but ST sets, for better or worse. When there's no new media to support (or no new media that LEGO believes in... see: Rebels, Resistance, early days of Mando) LEGO falls back on what they know sells. And consistently, reliably, that has been the OT.

That's not to say that the PT doesn't sell. But maybe, right or wrong, LEGO believes it doesn't sell as well... I think sets like the UCS Gunship will tell us (and LEGO) what the truth of the matter is. If we see it marked down by May the 4th or even next year's Black Friday, that's a sign there's not the 18+ market for PT sets that some people here would have us believe. (If it gets marked down for this week's Black Friday sale, well... that's game over.)

Re: the Hoth AT-ST, it's not really the norm. Most of the OT sets are rehashes of the same core vehicles... like most of the PT sets that come out. (I'm also not sure I would say "nobody would ever think they would make this"... it's a variation on an existing build, which they've demonstrated a fondness for doing on many other ships).

[PreVizsla]

I don't think LEGO hates prequels, but i think they are focusing too much on 1 certain type of costumers and on 1 trilogy which is making people irritated, angry and frustrated especially cause they can't logically explain to themselves why is LEGO doing that when prequel stuff is obviously selling well. This year alone we got 13 OT products, only 1 Sequel set which is 4+ garbage, 2 TCW life savers and only 1 Prequel set which is $350 that had to be voted in and then rumors start coming for the next year and again no Sequel or Prequel stuff till probably August. 

[SquirrelArmy]

Find any random person and ask them what is the first thing that comes to mind when it comes to Star Wars and there's an incredibly high chance that they'll either mention Luke Skywalker, Darth Vader or using the force. The OT has had a huge cultural impact on modern society. I don't think any other series of films has become so embedded in culture. The PT & ST haven't had the same impact.

Comparing it to another cultural icon which has been produced in Lego. Lord of the Rings also has it's iconic characters and stories. Everyone knows of Frodo, Gandalf and the other Fellowship members. Ask a random person if they know of some of the lesser characters especially those who appeared in The Hobbit Trilogy. Unless they are a hardcore fan they will struggle to tell you some. 

Jurassic Park is another example that follows the same pattern. It's hard to beat the magic of the original.

There aren't many film series that have their most iconic and memorable characters appearing in later films of the series.

[jdubbs]

38 minutes ago, PreVizsla said:

This year alone we got 13 OT products, only 1 Sequel set which is 4+ garbage, 2 TCW life savers and only 1 Prequel set which is $350 that had to be voted in and then rumors start coming for the next year and again no Sequel or Prequel stuff till probably August. 

Or, if you want to count accurately, 

6 OT sets 
6 Mando sets (including the Advent)
1 ST set 
1 PT set
2 CW sets
1 BB set
2 helmets that spanned the OT, PT, ST, CW, Rebels, Mando, and RO
1 statue that spanned the OT, CW, Rebels, RO
1 statue that spanned all media except Solo
3 GWPs which collectively spanned all three trilogies, CW, Rebels, etc.

You can choose to see the glass half-empty, or half-full. Maybe have a little faith that you'll see more of what you want in 2022.

Edited November 22, 2021 by jdubbs

[MKJoshA]

I'll lock this topic if I need to. Please keep things civil. Everyone is welcome to share their opinion. Everyone is welcome to share facts/data. But it is a rare time when it's okay to stomp on someone else's opinion. I'm not going to split hairs here, you know it when you see it.

Play nice in the sandbox!

[McMurder_them_softly]

Seems like Ahsoka brickheadz will be coming 1/1/2022 possibly? 

[Kdapt-Preacher]

I'm just going to post the same analysis that I did the last time we had this discussion (which was more than two months ago, which I think is actually a longer gap than usual).

Looking just at regular system sets, BrickLink shows 181 OT, 121 Prequel, 49 Sequel, and 74 TCW. There's a little bit of fuzziness with those numbers, since they include some polybag figures and miscellaneous other stuff that probably shouldn't count for these purposes, but they're good enough to save the work of going through every set manually. LEGO has been releasing SW sets for 22 years, but only the OT and TPM have been out that long; the average Prequel movie has been getting sets for 19 years, the average ST movie for 4 years, and TCW for 13 years. That works out to 8.2 sets/year for the OT, 6.4 sets/year for the Prequels, 12.3 sets/year for the Sequels, and 5.7 sets/year for TCW.

So from the raw numbers, it looks like the OT gets more coverage than the PT but not by that much, while the ST is seriously overrepresented and TCW gets the shaft. But of course that's not the whole story, since set distributions don't remain even approximately stable over time. Movies are always (obviously) disproportionately covered when they come out and then get far fewer sets in later years--for example, more than half (25/49) of all TPM sets ever are from the first three years after the movie premiered. Furthermore, the total number of sets released has increased significantly over time, from a low of 12 sets in 2001 to a high of 67 in 2018, meaning that movies that got their premier bumps earlier got fewer total sets than newer ones. As a result, the better metric is the average fraction of total sets allocated to each era during the years that that era has been out. For that, we get: OT 44%, PT 30%, ST 35%, TCW 25%. (Those numbers don't sum to 100% because TCW and the ST aren't averaged over the whole time period--if we included the 0s for the years before those eras premiered, it would add up, but that wouldn't be very useful data).

That shows the OT consistently overrepresented, the ST doing a bit better than the PT, and TCW getting the shaft again. Now, the ST is still higher because it hasn't had the 'tail' yet; most of the years we're counting here are still the premier bump period, so we should expect that to even out over time as the rate of new ST sets in the next couple of years will be much lower than it was while the movies were coming out. To clarify that a bit, we should break the graph out into sections: the period from 1999-2007 when it was just OT and PT, the period from 2008-2014 when TCW was introduced, and the period from 2015-present when the ST was introduced. Conveniently, that separates the total period almost exactly into thirds.

1999-2007: OT 55%, PT 45%. More OT than PT sets, but pretty even split. Probably works out to even if you control for the fact that not all the PT movies were out the whole time, but I'm not going to try to.
2008-2014: OT 32%, PT 24%, TCW 43%. As remarked in this argument already, TCW dominated the era when there wasn't any other new content coming out. But the big news is:
2015-2021: OT 42%, PT 18%, ST 35%, TCW 6%. This is the major takeaway from this graph, in my opinion. The influx of ST sets almost entirely replaced PT and TCW sets, while the rate of OT sets remained roughly constant. That, in my opinion at least, definitely is grossly disproportionate enough to justify people getting up in arms about it. PT and TCW combined don't even make up 25% of sets for the last seven years. That may not hurt too much for people who've been collecting for decades, but for anybody who likes those eras who's just getting into LEGO or coming back after a long break, it's a pretty rough spread.

Of course, this doesn't take into account the fact that TCW and PT sets can often double for each other, or that there's a fair bit of overlap between OT and ST sets as well (yes, yes, they're different, but one X-wing or Falcon is much like another for many purposes). That's a matter of personal opinion for whether you'd want to count some sets as both PT and TCW or whatever, so you can shift these numbers around a bit if you like to compensate for that. But the point is that, even combined, the PT and TCW definitely are seriously underrepresented compared to other eras. And that's without even touching the PT UCS question, or any of the Rogue One, Rebels, or Solo sets that might as well be OT and aren't included in this data at all.

[PreVizsla]

54 minutes ago, jdubbs said:

Or, if you want to count accurately, 

6 OT sets 
6 Mando sets (including the Advent)
1 ST set 
1 PT set
2 CW sets
1 BB set
2 helmets that spanned the OT, PT, ST, CW, Rebels, Mando, and RO
1 statue that spanned the OT, CW, Rebels, RO
1 statue that spanned all media except Solo
3 GWPs which collectively spanned all three trilogies, CW, Rebels, etc.

You can choose to see the glass half-empty, or half-full. Maybe have a little faith that you'll see more of what you want in 2022.

Sorry, but that's not how it works. I am not going to army build stormtroopers cause it spans the thing that i actually love clone troopers. For example Scout trooper has only been in the OT and the Mandalorian and the pictures on the box are from which ever OT movie they were from. Might as well say it's a set from Sons of Anarchy show cause he is a guy with a helmet riding a vehicle. There are 13 sets marked as Original Trilogy on the brickset and scenes from those same movies are on the boxes like Tatooine Homestead that actually has builds and pictures from certain OT scenes on the box and in the build all the way to probe droid who had the entire advertisment based on locating the rebel base on Hoth. With your way of seeing things i can connect Star Wars sets with literally everything like connecting Sidious to a player 001 from Squid Games. 

[MKJoshA]

39 minutes ago, PreVizsla said:

Sorry, but that's not how it works. I am not going to army build stormtroopers cause it spans the thing that i actually love clone troopers. For example Scout trooper has only been in the OT and the Mandalorian and the pictures on the box are from which ever OT movie they were from. Might as well say it's a set from Sons of Anarchy show cause he is a guy with a helmet riding a vehicle. There are 13 sets marked as Original Trilogy on the brickset and scenes from those same movies are on the boxes like Tatooine Homestead that actually has builds and pictures from certain OT scenes on the box and in the build all the way to probe droid who had the entire advertisment based on locating the rebel base on Hoth. With your way of seeing things i can connect Star Wars sets with literally everything like connecting Sidious to a player 001 from Squid Games. 

I want to give you the benefit of the doubt, but this seems like exactly the kind of comment that is unwarranted. jdubbs is welcome to his opinion. Stomping on it like you did does not add to the discussion in a positive way.

[Pedilego]

2 hours ago, BrickBob Studpants said:

This is where the accessory packs could (or should?!) come in, but I’m not too optimistic about that  We should consider ourselves lucky if they’re not both based on the OT

*topic trigger warning* ; )
 

mandr released a review of the old speeder bike set w/ Phase 2 Captain Rex. Meaningless? Maybe. Given his pattern of reviews earlier this year, though, unless I missed it, I’m surprised that I haven’t seen it mentioned here. Based the options at this point, it does make me think we /could/ see him in one of those Packs…

[jdubbs]

25 minutes ago, PreVizsla said:

Sorry, but that's not how it works. I am not going to army build stormtroopers cause it spans the thing that i actually love clone troopers. For example Scout trooper has only been in the OT and the Mandalorian and the pictures on the box are from which ever OT movie they were from. Might as well say it's a set from Sons of Anarchy show cause he is a guy with a helmet riding a vehicle. There are 13 sets marked as Original Trilogy on the brickset and scenes from those same movies are on the boxes like Tatooine Homestead that actually has builds and pictures from certain OT scenes on the box and in the build all the way to probe droid who had the entire advertisment based on locating the rebel base on Hoth. With your way of seeing things i can connect Star Wars sets with literally everything like connecting Sidious to a player 001 from Squid Games. 

You see things the way you want, as is your right. But Brickset is not the be-all, end-all authority on LEGO Star Wars. What they tag as OT or PT or whatever is just bits of metadata in a third-party database, as flagged by the site's admins. And several of this year's sets tagged OT are tagged other eras as well.

I choose to see things a bit more holistically, and frankly, optimistically. Believe it or not, as a (primarily) OT fan, I've been just as dismayed by the selection of sets LEGO has put out over the last 3-4 years as you've probably have been... I don't particularly want another landspeeder, or X-Wing, or whatever. I'd much rather have new builds of new ships/scenes in any era, than rehashes of sets in the OT era.

But looking at the sets released in the last ~12 months, I choose to see reason for hope. Yes, there are a lot of OT sets, and several of them are indeed rehashes. But there is a healthy mix of new stuff in there as well... new stuff from the PT/CW (Mandalorian Throne and Fighter), new stuff from the OT (Vader's Chamber, Bespin Duel), new stuff from Mando (Forge, Marauder, Light Cruiser... which is PT adjacent). Maybe it's not the perfect mix of trilogies/eras, maybe there are still holes (RO, Solo getting zero love), but it's a bit better than last year, which to me at least felt like nothing but rehashes.

I'm not telling you to love the OT, or pretend that OT sets are really PT. But there were four PT-era sets this year, including the first PT UCS set in over a decade... plus a large Mando set that can easily be adapted to fit the PT. That's not... nothing. And it's more than PT fans were getting throughout the run of the ST. 

If you are determined to see the world solely through a negative lens, you will see and feel nothing but negativity. I'm not going to get into what is coming next year. But I would again counsel, try to think optimistically.

[Brikkyy13]

3 hours ago, jdubbs said:

If we see it marked down by May the 4th or even next year's Black Friday, that's a sign there's not the 18+ market for PT sets that some people here would have us believe.

At that point the set will have been around for a year and it’s not unreasonable to find a set of that size marked down, no matter what it is. UCS A-Wing and the cantina from last year were seeing markdowns before the start of 2021, so by that logic the market for 18+ OT sets isn’t there?

[jdubbs]

47 minutes ago, Brikkyy13 said:

At that point the set will have been around for a year and it’s not unreasonable to find a set of that size marked down, no matter what it is. UCS A-Wing and the cantina from last year were seeing markdowns before the start of 2021, so by that logic the market for 18+ OT sets isn’t there?

I can only speak for the US, but here, LEGO only marks down UCS/D2C sets when they retire... with very rare exception. Which is typically 18-24 months. Slow sellers have been marked down (and usually retired) more quickly (Snowspeeder, Cloud City), and home runs (Death Star, Falcon) have lasted longer... 36+ months. LEGO has not put the Cantina on sale to date in the US. The A-Wing is retiring soon, 18 months after it debuted, and so it should go on sale this weekend for Black Friday if it's back in stock. I don't believe it went on sale before now... at least not by LEGO.

My point was this: if the Gunship gets marked down next May the 4th (9 months after its debut), or even next November, (15 months after its debut), that would not bode well for future PT UCS sets. Conversely, lasting a full 2 years would be a very good indicator that there is sustained AFOL interest in the PT... i.e., at the same level as other larger UCS sets (Falcon, ISD) and surpassing comparably-priced OT sets (Cloud City, which as a playset isn't a great comparison, other than price). 

Time will tell.

Edited November 22, 2021 by jdubbs

[Mandalorianknight]

3 hours ago, Pedilego said:

mandr released a review of the old speeder bike set w/ Phase 2 Captain Rex. Meaningless? Maybe. Given his pattern of reviews earlier this year, though, unless I missed it, I’m surprised that I haven’t seen it mentioned here. Based the options at this point, it does make me think we /could/ see him in one of those Packs…

If I remember correctly, he cycled back to standard reviews at some point after that rash of ones that were in the january wave.

 

All I'll say for the prequel set thing is that if a company believes they can make money off a certain aspect of a brand, they're not going to not do it just because they don't like the films, especially not a company as large as lego. There's certainly an argument to be made over whether or not lego's current proportion of prequel sets to other sets is the best, but I don't see any way to logically argue that lego has hatred for the prequels.

 

Edited November 23, 2021 by Mandalorianknight

[Paul11283652]

3 hours ago, jdubbs said:

I can only speak for the US, but here, LEGO only marks down UCS/D2C sets when they retire... with very rare exception. Which is typically 18-24 months. Slow sellers have been marked down (and usually retired) more quickly (Snowspeeder, Cloud City), and home runs (Death Star, Falcon) have lasted longer... 36+ months. LEGO has not put the Cantina on sale to date in the US. The A-Wing is retiring soon, 18 months after it debuted, and so it should go on sale this weekend for Black Friday if it's back in stock. I don't believe it went on sale before now... at least not by LEGO.

...

Interesting. That may be one advantage we have in Australia then where sets go on sale all the time here. I think I saw the A-wing on sale in September last year and I bought the last MF on the day of release(1/10/19) for 20% off.

[Agent Kallus]

10 hours ago, Mandalorianknight said:

All I'll say for the prequel set thing is that if a company believes they can make money off a certain aspect of a brand, they're not going to not do it just because they don't like the films, especially not a company as large as lego. There's certainly an argument to be made over whether or not lego's current proportion of prequel sets to other sets is the best, but I don't see any way to logically argue that lego has hatred for the prequels.

 

I think using the term hate is really just being emotive and it would be a more reasonable statement to say they ' underestimate their power' (don't try it)

[THELEGOBATMAN]

19 hours ago, benderisgreat said:

When I said ‘hate’ that was obviously an exaggeration. They simply don’t make as many PT sets as a lot of fans including myself would want to see. That’s it, nothing more than that. While they make a ton of OT sets some even so obscure like new Hoth At-St, nobody would think that LEGO will ever make, we still lack a ton of iconic stuff from prequels.

That's not an exaggeration, that's a completely different thing you're trying to say 

Saying LEGO hates Prequels is a conspiracy theory that doesn't make any kind of sense, because LEGO is a company, and thus it can't hate Prequels as a whole.

Now you're saying a simple fact that LEGO doesn't make many sets based on Prequels.

Edited November 23, 2021 by THELEGOBATMAN

[BrickBob Studpants]

And let’s not kid ourselves, if TLG stepped on the PT train again it’d mostly be remakes anyway, not sure why people are THIS keen on that (unless they missed all the previous sets of course)  I mean, when was the last time they released a PT set that wasn’t a remake of sorts, the duel with Maul on Naboo? As a long-term collector, remakes always annoy me a bit, no matter which trilogy they’re from.

And the gaps in the PT are not that significant to me, same with the OT and ST. The only thing I really want out of the prequels are remakes of the Coruscant chase scene, Jango’s Slave I, and the brown version of the droid starfighter. The old ones just don’t hold up that well. And of course, a Phase II Cody. Other than that though, I’m mostly satisfied. Or are people really clamouring for the likes of Sio Bibble? 

Besides, at lot of prequel characters would be better served in TCW sets. Wat Tambor for instance would work far better in a TCW set compared to an AOTC or ROTS one

[Agent Kallus]

31 minutes ago, BrickBob Studpants said:

And let’s not kid ourselves, if TLG stepped on the PT train again it’d mostly be remakes anyway, not sure why people are THIS keen on that (unless they missed all the previous sets of course) 

I'm in my twenties, I didn't have the disposable income in 2008 or 2013 to buy a republic gunship (for example) and I do now, but I 'd rather buy a modern one not one from over 5 years ago with a reseller's price bump from bricklink. (Especially as in my most recent bricklink order, they missed out grevious's head from a supposedly complete set of his 2010 star fighter) Though personally I like the OT as much as the PT and I was glad to see the recent Tie fighter and X-wing remakes. I can understand why remakes can be annoying but they are necessary in this business. I mean I own the CW turbo tank and I though it was a shame when they locked those new Luminara and Vos minifigures in a set that looked like a smaller yet more expensive version of something I already owned, but that's bound to happen. Lots of the sets they love to remake are ones that don't interest me, like the landspeeder or snowspeeder, and there are some they remake too often but when I say I want more PT sets, I do mean I want remakes.

[BrickBob Studpants]

1 minute ago, Agent Kallus said:

[…] but when I say I want more PT sets, I do mean I want remakes.

Fair enough. I know remakes are necessary and I’m usually fine with them, as long as they include something new, be it a side-build or new minifigs  Recent remakes have started to fail a bit in that regard. The 2016 CTT was great despite being its third version because it included ROTS versions of Luminara and Quinlan, while the 2019 AT-AP was a disappointment to me for its failure to deliver anything even remotely new.

I wish they still handled remakes like they did in 2014, where they sometimes threw in completely nonsensical characters just for heck of it (Palpatine in the Droid Tri-Fighter and the Neimoidian guard in the Vulture Droid set being the prime examples) 

[PreVizsla]

1 hour ago, BrickBob Studpants said:

And let’s not kid ourselves, if TLG stepped on the PT train again it’d mostly be remakes anyway, not sure why people are THIS keen on that (unless they missed all the previous sets of course)  I mean, when was the last time they released a PT set that wasn’t a remake of sorts, the duel with Maul on Naboo? 

A ton of people missed everything. From my huge experience most of the PT fans are in their 20ies and some are 14-18. Some of the sets and figures haven't been remade for 10 years, Jango Fett's Slave 1 for almost 20. Most of the prequel fans grew up with the movies and tcw and they were children with no buying power when all this stuff came out. Even if you were 16 when TCW started in the end of 2008 you just won't be able to buy $120 Venator and $250 AT-OT as a high school student in most cases.
Last time we got some of the sets and figures:
2002- Jango Fett's Slave 1, Bounty Hunter pursuit
2009- Separatist Shuttle, AT-OT, Count Dooku's Sailor, Republic Attack Shuttle, Venator
2011- Tactical Droid, Commander Cody
2012- Queen Amidala
2013- AT-TE, Gunship, phase 2 Rex, Count Dooku
2014- 212th phase 2, MTT, wolfpack phase 2
2015- Naboo Starfighter, Maul's infiltrator, Flash Speeder, super battle droid
2016- Clone turbo tank
Funny you mention Duel on Naboo, i heard lot of people get back in LEGO with that set.

[Prometheus87]

15 minutes ago, PreVizsla said:

A ton of people missed everything. From my huge experience most of the PT fans are in their 20ies and some are 14-18. Some of the sets and figures haven't been remade for 10 years, Jango Fett's Slave 1 for almost 20. Most of the prequel fans grew up with the movies and tcw and they were children with no buying power when all this stuff came out. Even if you were 16 when TCW started in the end of 2008 you just won't be able to buy $120 Venator and $250 AT-OT as a high school student in most cases.
Last time we got some of the sets and figures:
2002- Jango Fett's Slave 1, Bounty Hunter pursuit
2009- Separatist Shuttle, AT-OT, Count Dooku's Sailor, Republic Attack Shuttle, Venator
2011- Tactical Droid, Commander Cody
2012- Queen Amidala
2013- AT-TE, Gunship, phase 2 Rex, Count Dooku
2014- 212th phase 2, MTT, wolfpack phase 2
2015- Naboo Starfighter, Maul's infiltrator, Flash Speeder, super battle droid
2016- Clone turbo tank
Funny you mention Duel on Naboo, i heard lot of people get back in LEGO with that set.

Ugh, I really want to buy a LOT of those - Jango Fett's Slave 1, Queen Amidala in regalia anything, naboo starfighter, Maul's Infiltrator....ugh!

[PreVizsla]

58 minutes ago, Prometheus87 said:

Ugh, I really want to buy a LOT of those - Jango Fett's Slave 1, Queen Amidala in regalia anything, naboo starfighter, Maul's Infiltrator....ugh!

Same. Price on some of those are insane though from $1000 for a used AT-OT to $90 for Amidala.

[Archer]

4 hours ago, BrickBob Studpants said:

And let’s not kid ourselves, if TLG stepped on the PT train again it’d mostly be remakes anyway, not sure why people are THIS keen on that (unless they missed all the previous sets of course)  I mean, when was the last time they released a PT set that wasn’t a remake of sorts, the duel with Maul on Naboo? As a long-term collector, remakes always annoy me a bit, no matter which trilogy they’re from.

And the gaps in the PT are not that significant to me, same with the OT and ST. The only thing I really want out of the prequels are remakes of the Coruscant chase scene, Jango’s Slave I, and the brown version of the droid starfighter. The old ones just don’t hold up that well. And of course, a Phase II Cody. Other than that though, I’m mostly satisfied. Or are people really clamouring for the likes of Sio Bibble? 

Besides, at lot of prequel characters would be better served in TCW sets. Wat Tambor for instance would work far better in a TCW set compared to an AOTC or ROTS one

I think Agent Kallus said everything I would have said about remakes. But also, I wouldn't underestimate the desire for a more fleshed out roster of prequel characters. I collect all SW minifigs and I think that the level of coverage my OT fig collection has makes the lacking tertiary characters from the PT all the more noticeable. I was happy to get a Neimoidian Warrior for example, I'd love Sio Biddle, Mas Ammeda, Typho and the Seperatist Council in its entirety.

[lego the hutt]

22 hours ago, Kdapt-Preacher said:

I'm just going to post the same analysis that I did the last time we had this discussion (which was more than two months ago, which I think is actually a longer gap than usual).

 

Great post.  A couple questions. 
Where do Rogue One, Solo and Mandalorian sets factor into this?
Also, TCW takes place during the Prequel Trilogy.  As far as content it expands on those films (Clonetroopers, similar vehicles etc).   As a fan, I'm happy to get sets from either of them.   What would the chart look like with TCW and PT combined?

Edited November 23, 2021 by lego the hutt