Kdapt-Preacher

I agree with you, but I don't think it's on LEGO nearly as much as on the Sequel Trilogy being composed almost entirely of stuff taken from the OT. The handful of new vehicles that've appeared have been made--the quadjumper and various speeders, basically--and with everything else, what choice does LEGO have other than to release what's in the movie? The nice diversity this year has been in the locations sets. Death Star Escape, Duel on Starkiller Base, Death Star Cannon, and especially Vader's Castle are all totally new, with Obi-Wan's Hut coming up in January. The only duplicates that annoyed me this year are the AT-AP, Droid Gunship, and Tantive IV; the previous iterations of those sets were all still perfectly fine. The UCS ISD is also a repeat, of course, but the previous one is 17 years old and showing its age at this point--I'm not going to knock them for repeating something after more than fifteen years.

It is still the 20th anniversary of The Phantom Menace, and we just had a podracer. It isn't out of the question.

That First Order megablaster in the advent calendar is pretty slick...

I don't think the figures in the first TLJ wave were particularly bad. The only significant figures we didn't get in the first wave were Phasma and the Praetorian Guards, and of those the Praetorians were the only loss; Phasma was barely in the movie, and is essentially the same figure as the TFA version anyway. The only set the Praetorians would've been appropriate in is the First Order Star Destroyer. They could've replaced the medical droid and one of the stormtroopers with a pair of Praetorians, but even as it is five of the eight minifigs in that set were new, including Snoke, so I wouldn't say it needed it.

That doesn’t have a Bricklink entry, so I guess it’s new. Where did you find it? Is it available now, or something for an upcoming event?

There’s been an idea going around for ever that upcoming UCS sets are teased in some way on box art months or years before they come out, but if there’s any actual correlation there nobody’s ever presented any kind of evidence for it. My personal view is that if you want hints you’ll have better luck if you sacrifice a dove and examine its entrails, as the gods intended, than if you just look through officially released materials.

That’s a good thought, but I don’t think it is. Look at the tips of the ears—this one has a 1x8 brick at the top edge, while the Target one has a 1x4 and then drops down. The eyes here are more recessed as well. This one looks somewhat larger overall. This thing, for anyone else who’d never heard of such a set: https://www.bricklink.com/v2/catalog/catalogitem.page?G=yoda&name=Yoda (Glued)&category=[Glued Model][Star Wars]#T=S&O={"iconly":0}

The May the 4th set is the blockade runner. They aren't calling it a UCS, but there aren't going to be two >$200 Tantive IVs in one year.

It wouldn't make any sense as a 20th Anniversary figure, but it should've been a chrome Phasma...

I am certain that LEGO has done the surveys and crunched the numbers and determined that these brick-built things are more effective promotions than minifigs by some metric. I just have no idea what that metric is, or where all the people are who prefer a microbuild to an exclusive figure. There has to be some demographic that wants that and doesn't post online about it, or else LEGO wouldn't be marketing to them... printing a new figure is obviously expensive, but surely it isn't so many hundreds of times more so that these microbuild sets are cheaper for LEGO to manufacture.

We know it's big, but lots of things are big. The Death Star, SSD, Sandcrawler, etc are all about that size. An AT-AT could also easily be in that range, or they could be making something from the Sequel Trilogy. I'm not trying to criticize anybody; we just need to keep in mind that there isn't any information distinguishing between those or anything else before people get their hearts set on an ISD for Christmas.

All reasonable people understand that. But lots of people are total idiots incapable of understanding context, who take literally any mention of something that sounds like an upcoming set as God-given truth. See, for example, the rumored upcoming UCS Star Destroyer, which is based entirely on completely unfounded speculation from this very thread but has been repeated to such a degree that it’s treated as confirmed.

The main Christmas minifig is the GONK droid, which is wrapped as a present. The porg just comes with a Santa hat.

Wullffwarro and the other Wookiees in 75084 Wookiee Gunship each have a printed band on one arm, for some reason. Other isolated examples probably exist. But they're certainly not common.

And the ship in Revenge of the Sith isn't even the Tantive IV. These things happen...

It takes a while, but it definitely happens. The stickers on my 2002 Republic Gunship are disintegrating, and they've been stored in pretty ideal conditions in a dark closet for that whole time. The dark red stickers seem to be particularly prone to damage, for some reason; they aren't cracking yet on my 2011 Republic Frigate, but they're all peeling off, and several other sets are the same. I'm less worried about the big stickers on the Tantive's cockpit than the smaller ones running down the sides in that regard. The transparent stickers hold up very well in my experience, even after decades. They're just going to be really annoying to apply well in this instance. This is discussion directly relevant to a 2019 set, in the 2019 set discussion thread.

There's never been any kind of definite rumor about that. Sets from Episode IX are confirmed (I think? Is that last list of sets final?) and there are a couple of sets that aren't definitely known yet, which might be more E9, The Mando, Jedi: Fallen Order, or something else.

2009 and 1999 are the only two years without one. Which I guess means this is the time, but I don’t think it’s likely that there won’t be one this whole year.

The Death Stars, Ewok Village, Assault on Hoth, and Cloud City had 24, 27, 17, 15, and 21 minifigs, respectively, which is what people wanted here. The market for a good-looking $400 set is better than that for a crappy-looking $200 set given that you've already lost most of the kids either way. I don't have either of the older Tantive IVs, so I'll definitely be getting this, and I'll forgive them a lot for having included Bail, but this definitely isn't the level of quality that, for better or for worse, we've come to expect. It can certainly be argued that this isn't substantially worse than the 2009 Tantive IV, and it's not; it's very close to being the same set. But that was ten years ago. It shouldn't be the same set; it isn't at all unreasonable to expect a second generation, special anniversary edition of a large expensive set to show marked improvement rather than only being arguably not worse.

MTTs and battle droid carriers certainly do. The Republic Dropship and AT-OT and 6210 Jabba’s Sail Barge have 8, and 6211 Imperial Star Destroyer has 9. I’m sure there are more examples.

Yes, the old one had that. The escape pod is a pretty crucial part of the Tantive IV's role in ANH... this one doesn't look any more like the actual pod than the previous one did, though. Droid Escape (any of the versions) is still the place to go for that.

Looks like he's picked up a cape since that figure leaked, but you can't see any details from the box pics.

The neck definitely is too skinny. It should be about 1/3 the width of the front end, so six studs rather than four. Not terrible as it is, but there's no good reason for it not to be correct.

Well, yeah. The 2015 one is retired, so the ones available right now are the Kessel Run version and the UCS. The two ships that I won't ever complain about them repeating are the standard Falcon and OT X-Wing; I tend to think that there should always be a version of each available since those are the two basic ships pretty much any Star Wars collection should have (and that kids should want). It seems like there are a lot of Falcons recently because of the Kessel Run version, but for all intents and purposes that's a completely different ship. Assuming the Falcon features reasonably heavily in Episode IX (as it did in VII but not in VIII), it would be weird for them not to include it.

The ones from 2015 are based on the shadow troopers from The Force Unleashed, which are a different trooper entirely and not just a different depiction. Before the canon reset in 2014, shadow troopers, shadowtroopers, and shadow stormtroopers were all different things (I hate that they wiped the Expanded Universe, but I don't miss crap like this). The all-black LEGO depictions were shadow stormtroopers and the grey ones were shadow troopers (the names of the figures given on Bricklink are switched, naturally, but ignore those). In the current canon the all-black guys are called shadow troopers, and the grey ones that used to be called shadow troopers aren't canon and don't have a name. The LEGO figures in 2007-8 were based on either Crimson Empire or Star Wars Galaxies; 2015 was based on TFU; and 2019 are based on the recent Battlefront games. Long story short, black and silver eyes are both OK and it's a matter of personal preference.