BrickJagger

New Jang video is out. He makes a lot of fair points, especially about the order in which the waves came out and the "internal competition" with TLBM and TLNM.

I couldn't stomach yet another licensed theme, medieval or not. What's the problem with a traditional Castle theme? I think we're due for a theme similar to Fantasy Era next year.

That too. I hope they had some sort of restriction of making new parts/prints for this wave, because if they could have made Monstrox and didn't, that's pretty lazy on their part. They could easily have put him into the Tech Wizard Showdown instead of the useless hologram.

Honestly, I can live with this. Sure, it's disappointing that we didn't get a proper fortress, large vehicle or anything of substance for the Vampires, but based on rumors last year, we were lucky to get this wave at all. I really wish that Lego had given us two or three more sets to give the theme a good send-off, but I assume the sales for the summer wave last year were atrocious, so they probably decided to pull the plug. I really do hope that they slide us a battlepack, or a polybag, or anything that will be an easy way to bulk up the Vampire army.

Report is in from the Toy Fair. This will make most of you happy: At the Toy Fair, we were told what has been speculated for weeks: there will not be a sixth wave of LEGO Nexo Knights in the summer. Say: The recently released five sets will be the last and the product cycle has been shortened by half a year. At the press conference, Frédéric Lehmann, Managing Director of LEGO GmbH, once again emphasized the importance of the digital component, mentioning the Nexo Knights app. Probably one last time. The knights of the future move on: A quiet farewell. What strikes me as interesting here is the fact that the production run is being halved. The newest wave will be off of the shelves by summer, which would give stores enough time to clear them out...before a new Castle theme shows up in 2019?

Translated: At the Toy Fair, we were told what has been speculated for weeks: there will not be a sixth wave of LEGO Nexo Knights in the summer. Say: The recently released five sets will be the last and the product cycle has been shortened by half a year. At the press conference, Frédéric Lehmann, Managing Director of LEGO GmbH, once again emphasized the importance of the digital component, mentioning the Nexo Knights app. Probably one last time. The knights of the future move on: A quiet farewell. Yeah, that'll do it.

Welcome! I'm not quite sure how to pronounce your username

Today is the moment of truth: will there be summer sets? Hold your breath

I'm a sucker for interesting play features but on this I have to agree. It would probably turn out something like the below image, which is far from ideal.

This turned out great! It always bothered me that this set didn't have an interior despite being the Forestmen's base of operations. Glad to see you've rectified that. I also like the individual details, such as the tree branch coming through the wall and the shaping at the front of the fortress. Excellent work

Hi there, Rémi!

Welcome, Jango!

The cotton is really clever, never seen a technique like that before. Bravo!

Not really. KK2, besides having a completely different story and characters, was largely story-driven. Nexo Knights has a simpler story and a heavy focus on vehicles, and the bad guys are all fantasy-based instead of fairly realistic.

You're right, the official explanation was that the elf was put in to fill out the upper-left hand corner of the map, because there was nothing there. There was another theory floating around that there were going to be elves until TLG heard about the incoming Hobbit movie, so they put out Kingdoms in the interim to transition from Fantasy Era to TH. Fantasy Era easily had the best shot of any post-2000 theme of making it past three years, and I think that's a pretty reasonable theory. Going back to Ninjago, Lego made the "evergreen" comment before the Ninjago Movie came out. I don't think they were expecting it to be a flop, rather they and Warner both seemed to expect it to do as well as the original Lego Movie. We don't know how badly that failure impacted Ninjago's "evergreen" status, but paired with diminishing returns the last three years, it's something to consider.

It's still doing well compared to other themes, but the decline in this graph is the most telling. The "most popular themes" chart you linked has some issues, as there's no way that Star Wars was barely getting more search interest than Ninjago in December, when a Star Wars film that is one of the highest grossing of all time came out. I can't pinpoint the problem but there's clearly a flaw in there somewhere. Regardless, what I said originally is still true. It's popular, but is declining at a steady rate. I don't know what the top five most popular themes were in 2004, and there doesn't seem to be too much reliable data for them, but here is Bionicle vs. Star Wars. As you can see, they were almost even for several years. Bionicle fell behind a bit and then just sorta...ended. IIRC the reason given was that Bionicle was getting old and too complex, but it just goes to show that no matter how strong a theme looks, it can end suddenly for a variety of reasons, especially if it is in-house. Another example, although on a smaller scale, is Fantasy Era. That theme seemed to be immensely popular and had a strong three-year run. There are dozens of speculation threads in Historic Themes from 2009 just over a single image of an elf in the Lego Magazine. Instead, we never got those elves, and the theme was suddenly replaced by Kingdoms, seemingly in its prime. Lego has reasons for why they do things, and it wouldn't surprise me if they decided to pull the plug on Ninjago while it was still on top instead of letting it peter out over the course of several years.

Just to preface, I think this chart is dead-on. Ninjago started out reasonably popular, exploded in popularity in 2012 and probably peaked just before 2013 with the "Save Ninjago" fiasco. It went down for a bit because there were so few 2014 sets, but hit its stride again in 2015. However, there's a significant decline starting in early 2016 that isn't stopped until Lego pushed all of their chips in with TLNM. While the decline in 2014 had an explanation- there were only eight or nine total sets released that year - the 2016-17 decline should be a concern. That time period encompassed three separate themes: Sky Pirates, Day of the Departed, and the Vermillion. During that time, search traffic seems to have steadily dropped from 85 to 44. The release of TLNM and the massive marketing campaign from both TLG and Warner took it back up to 87, but in the months following the film's release it has tanked back down to 52 and will most likely continue to drop. I didn't think of using Google Trends before I made my last post, but I feel that this reinforces what I said. Don't get me wrong, Ninjago is still plenty popular, but it appears to be running out of gas. That's a good thing or a bad thing, depending on who you are.

Liking the updates to the mine and the new drones! Glad to see the town is taking an eco-friendly turn.

Very cool! Lots of NPU all around.

Hello and welcome!

The Dragon Suit Guy is great! Easily my favorite figure in this series. While there's not a lot going on in terms of Fantasy/Historical stuff in this series, at least it's not licensed.

I, for one, think that Ninjago is starting to wind down. The movie, regardless of what people say to defend it, was both a critical and commercial disappointment, and while it does have a large core of fans who have been with it since the start, those kids are somewhere between 16-19 and will most likely be moving away from Lego soon. Ninjago seems to be having a harder time attracting new, younger fans, because those kids are being lured away by the resurgence of Star Wars and the never-ending MCU. Another issue with Ninjago would be the complex storyline, which is not quite nearing Bionicle levels but is confusing enough to make it hard for a new fan to get a full grasp of the storyline. I don't remember exactly who Bionicle ended, but Ninjago is starting to follow the same parallels. Finally, the theme has been running for eight years straight, and it would make sense to end it after ten years. If this were to happen, it could open up some room for Castle (which I think is coming next year no matter what) and maybe a couple of smaller themes. This makes a lot of sense. I wouldn't be surprised it that's how Lego sees things. Furthermore, they also might be trying to draw in kids with wacky themes full of multi-colored knights, and then slowly move them towards more realistic sets as they get older. KKII --> Fantasy Era --> Kingdoms/Castle 2013 --> Fantasy Era II?

This series turned out better than I expected! I'm glad that most of the figures don't rely on their "costume" to look good. My personal favorite is the Dragon Suit guy, as he strongly resembles the ones from Fantasy Era. The Policeman is another standout, I love the homage and I didn't expect Lego to do that.

The argument presented in the OP defines "original themes" as themes containing unique builds, as well as a "classic" lego feel. Examples of this would be Atlantis, Power Miners, Monster Fighters, Dino, Pharoah's Quest, etc. If you look at it that way, the only themes that fit such criteria released in the past five years are Ultra Agents, Elves, and Pirates. For the past three years, we have had no new themes introduced that resemble these. "Boost" does not count. Further, CMFs, which used to be a great source of figures to pacify those of us who wanted these types of themes, has gone licensed and produced such enthralling products as TLBM Series 2. I think one of the main issues here is how the licensed themes are seemingly inescapable. Lego has gone wild with Star Wars products, and have somehow managed to put out over fifty Batman figures in a single year. It wasn't like that until recently. Now it's at the point where the licensed themes are churning out hundreds of sets a year, while...you know what... 2017 Advanced Models (5) + City (54) + Creator (21) + Elves (10) + Friends (46) + Ideas (1) + Nexo Knights (45) + Ninjago (25) + CMF (1) = 209 total sets Brickheadz (22) + DC (10) + DC Girls (11) + Dimensions (11) + Disney (9) + Marvel (16) + Minecraft (9) + POTC (1) + Ideas (3) + Speed Champions (8) + Star Wars (68) + TLBM (35) + TLNM (32) + CMF (2) + Cars 3 (8) + Frozen (2) = 248 total sets Here's this year: Advanced Models (2) + City (35) + CMF (1) + Creator (15) + Elves (7) + Friends (18) + Ideas (1) + Nexo Knights (6) + Ninjago (31) = 116 total sets Brickheadz (25) + CMF (2) + DC (10) + Disney (10) + Fantastic Beasts (2) + Harry Potter (4) + Jurassic World (8) + Marvel (14) + Minecraft (10) + Speed Champions (6) + Star Wars (38) + TLBM (7) + TLNM (1) + The Powerpuff Girls (2) + Unikitty (6) + Incredibles (3) = 148 total sets Yes, I took the time to do that. As you can see, the Licensed Themes already have a pretty sizable advantage in terms of sets. However, the gap between the two grows significantly if you factor in total price. Practically every set over $250 last year was licensed, which heavily tilts the scale. Also, the fact that almost every new Lego theme released in the last five years has been licensed only indicates that that gap will continue to grow. TL;DR: Licensed themes are coming to kill us all. Take shelter!

I sympathize with all of this. Starting in 2011 or 2012, Lego begin sliding down the slippery slope that is licensed themes, and it's gotten so bad that nearly everything is licensed. Outside of City, everything is meant to be flashy and in-your-face. I miss the old "adventure" type themes. I miss classic Castle, Space, and Pirates, even if I didn't own too many of the latter two. I would rather Lego to be about actual creativity and imagination than a giant influx of people who care more about the "Star Wars" aspect of Lego than the "Lego" aspect" (that's an example). Unfortunately, it's highly unlikely, in fact almost impossible, for Lego to revert to how it used to be for at least the next decade. It's sad, really.