Artanis I

I used to size my armies according to how many foot soldiers I could fit in the castle. Mounted knights were extra. These days, castles are so rare and there are now many factions that don't even have a castle set, so army size is more up in the air.

25 death stars?

Castle minifigs were always more expensive than Space & Pirates, due to the additional accessories and desire to collect en-masse. I recall getting Space dudes for $1 or $2 on Bricklink back in the day, Castle was $5 for the desirable ones at the time. Now everyone is wanting to get in the army-build game. You can forget about vintage stuff, and even the semi-vintage (10-20 year old stuff) is priced at premium premium - if you can find it.

Gold was a terrible choice, voters. Never mind, they picked 2 options anyway. Thankfully the motorcycle helmet is now available in dark turquoise (it is however printed) so I can do a full custom Futuron with airtanks! The gold helmet is not cheap.

Glad to have 2 chosen, but I agree with the sentiments regarding difficulty in obtaining multiples to build a proper faction.

Wake me up when the Balrog & Gondor stuff leaks

I'll buy a full box, thanks (never done that before)

Pretty much.

The likelier deciding factor is that they need to keep their releases under wraps from their (bootleg/copycat) competitors for as long as possible.

I never found any dragon paladins at all

Nothing for me this time. I recall that there wasn't a great selection to vote for, but I quite liked a space submission or two that didn't get through.

Last week I found a new box in a supermarket, there was 1 packet gone from the top and everything looked nice and neat. I scanned the top packets and there were no wolf men there (I hadn't found any anywhere previously). I removed the 'shelf' to see that there were 2 packets gone from the bottom layer. No wolf men in the box, after I'd thought it was finally my lucky day. Then I checked Bricklink and saw that the minimum local mark-up on these is $10 per minifig... Today I found a not-so-new box in a different supermarket that had been picked over, and had several packets gone. It was next to an almost empty box that had been there for weeks. I scanned all of the packets and found 3 to my great surprise. I didn't want to hoard them all, but I did want to have at least 3, so I thought I'd leave one behind on top and grab it if it was still there when I came back later. I hope everyone else after them can find some.

That's what I thought. I don't know where this $270 came from

You can gladly want to pay $270 for eternity, because there is no way a Bag End with all those 13 dwarves is going to be less than $370.

Since I have the other one I will probably pass on this, but it's nice. A bunch of hobbits as expected, and some extra bits for the party too, as there should be. Reminiscent of the opening area in the game.

Come on, Patsy!

The heads all have a reverse face. Some of the minifigs have 2 heads: 1 with 2 female faces, the other with 2 male faces. I don't think any of them have 1 of each on the same head.

We aren't getting a joust set. We're getting a Creator 3-in-1 that has a joust build, which might not be the primary build. So the minifigs could be anything. After all, the last Creator castle had a pirate minifig as a blacksmith. And yes, BOO to brick built horses, thus with no helmets, saddles or barding parts. 3 things that aren't easy to pick up these days. At least the "new faction" is welcome news.

Scalpers only hoard things if stock is limited & it's likely that the price will go up afterwards (otherwise you just get speculators or resellers that run off small margins). This typically happens when demand is greater than supply. Clearly, there is more demand than there is supply. Some of that demand is 'artificial', ie buyers that are only buying because of the demand, expecting it to lead to quick or large profit (same reason house prices skyrocket). I don't know what a decent solution would be, but I never had this problem getting hold of multiples that I wanted in the past. (Besides series 1 where supply was extremely low due to humble sales expectations by TLG)

Are you saying that it's run out of steam?

Predictable post, but I finally found a box of these today, in a supermarket. Half the packets were gone already, and half a dozen of those left were ripped open. Guess which minifig I actually care about, and guess whether there were any in the box or not... No department or toy shops have these things these days (or they sell out immediately - which I doubt, because the ones in the supermarket sit for months with 4-5 packets left in them). So weird and annoying.

But let's be honest: Space was on a downward trend of quality from 1993. SW probably only replaced what would've sucked anyway (like the Castle stuff from the SW prequel release time period sucked)!

Hi, with the recent forum update, BBCode was disabled. So now to post photos you have to... um... Nobody seems to have informed the members what to do instead. So. I see that there is a button near "Submit Reply" that says "Other Media". You select that and "insert image from URL". So you may have to paste it in there and remove the BBCode if there is any when you copy+pasted from sites like imgur.

Space mocs are always so far removed from anything resembling Lego sets, they don't get a lot of support on Ideas or BDP. Even if they look any good, they're just way too big and over-detailed, and most parts are all the same colour. They're also not usually capable of carrying more than 1 or 2 minifigs, and the minifigs the designers can choose from are limited to what's currently available in sets. I've never seen one that I've wanted to vote for. Huge contrast from castle, sadly (from a space point-of-view).

I only learned about Renegade (and the other sets that never appeared outside North America) when I found the Bricklink, Peeron (maybe Brickset?) websites. Unitron (besides the expensive monorail) was almost entirely foreign to me, and I never knew about Dark Forest or Roboforce.