Kdapt-Preacher

They've been depicted differently in different media. My understanding is that in the recent Battlefront (which is presumably what LEGO's basing the figure on) the lenses are supposed to be black but highly reflective, causing them to often look silver. You can see that under neutral lighting conditions they're very dark. As a result, I think it looks good to have a mix of ones with black and silver printed eyes, since that's what you'd see if you had a group of them all reflecting the light from slightly different angles. The 501st's Costume Reference Library allows certification of mirrored, black, or silver lenses.

Well, Vader's and Lando's are covered by the capes. And I don't think any of the original figures had any printing on the back, so if you really want the originals you can pretty easily remove the printing from the backs of the new ones. Honestly, the only part of the Anniversary figures that matters is Lando's cape. You can get all the original figures for, like, $30 on Bricklink except for Lando with an original cape; that costs $120. Does anybody know whether the new cape is identical to the one from the 2003 Cloud City? You can tell from the pictures that it's the same unprinted pattern (unlike the one in Betrayal at Cloud City), but is it the new or old-style material?

And for anyone who hasn't seen the leaked pictures, the sets are up on shop.lego.com already if you filter by 'coming soon'; they officially release tomorrow. The five are all called '________ 20th Anniversary Edition'.

Each of the five 20th Anniversary sets comes with a yellow-flesh minifig made after one from before about 2003, but with the 20th Anniversary logo on the back. The figures are Luke, Han, Leia, Lando, and Vader. These figures are exclusive to the new sets, but since the new sets aren't replicas of old sets I'm not certain I'm interpreting your question correctly.

That makes it fit the anniversary theme, would be my guess. The weirder thing IMO is explicitly using the 2007 C-3PO again. Sure, those are crazy expensive for a minifig, but you can just buy some on Bricklink if you want; they aren’t a prize the way the metal figures are.

Nope. That lineup is from the Updating Your Minifigs thread on this forum. Not official.

Yes, the droideka is confirmed to be a MOC. Just because something is tagged 'legoleaks' doesn't mean it's actually news. Use some discretion. The 20th Anniversary polybag looks pretty good. I didn't know that was in the works; is there any info on whether more will follow? We don't seem to get rumors about polybags the way we do about larger sets.

Obviously stormtroopers would fit the set, but I honestly hope it doesn't have any. Is there anybody here who doesn't already have stormtroopers? There's a battle pack with three of them available right now if you need any. If the UCS sets have minifigures at all they should be new ones that aren't likely to show up in other sets. Bail and Captain Antilles are perfect examples. R2 and 3PO are probably a given, but I'd rather have somebody weird, like some of the other background droids and Rebel crew or Daine Jir. Also, to clarify, the conclusion was that there is not a new Vader figure as far as anyone knows, yes? Somebody on Instagram just posted a picture of the Rogue One version and somebody else didn't recognize it.

Yes. UCS ISD was never actually rumored; that was only speculation based on nothing but the part count. Nothing is ever quite confirmed until it's actually announced, but if it isn't the Tantive IV someone's gone to an awful lot of effort to make it look like it is.

Ah, that's nicer. That's the same setup as 2014--one normal figure with a Santa hat plus a specially-printed Christmas droid. Although 2014 also had Santa Vader...

You mean, in that the movie will probably contain both the Resistance and the First Order, so any set that has the words 'Resistance' or 'First Order' has a tiny bit of plausibility? Since absolutely nothing else is known about the movie...

There's no indication of any anniversary anything other than the five sets that have been explicitly announced as such. It isn't likely.

There isn't a thread for 2020 set discussion, and likely won't be until September or October. Does it really make sense to try to segregate rumors so harshly? There is absolutely no difference between our discussing rumors about December and rumors about January.

'Project Huckleberry' is the codename for The Mandalorian, so according to the list it's getting a battle pack at least.

That isn't clear (either of those specifics), as far as I can tell. The list was revealed on the 22nd, and this was reported on the same day; that piece isn't timestamped beyond the day, so I don't know which came first. But whoever typed up the LEGO list didn't know about the codenames leak, or else they wouldn't have guessed that 'Oslo Tram' meant a Conveyex set.

There's no real rumor of an ISD. That was suggested before the info about the Tantive IV figures came out and is still being repeated.

That isn't realistic, and it never has been. Brickset conveniently lists the PPC for all Star Wars sets. Average PPC has hardly increased from twenty years ago, and we've had 50% inflation since then. Occasionally individual sets fall below 10 cents/piece, like Han Solo's Landspeeder last year or the Droid Fighter in 1999, but that is not, has never been, and will never be the norm. Every now and then we get some set, like Snoke's Throne Room, that has a particularly bad ratio, and we briefly rail against LEGO's constantly inflating prices, but nobody ever points out that even in 1999 the original Millennium Falcon was higher than that, without even counting inflation. LEGOs are more expensive today because the average number of pieces in a set has skyrocketed. See the new Slave I--twice as many pieces as 2010 and only 50% more expensive gives it a much better PPC, but it's still a much larger set. Anyone is free to argue that LEGO's trend towards larger sets is bad and they should release more stuff at a lower price point, and I'd be inclined to agree with you, but pointing to the PPC like it's a problem is crazy (not aimed at you, w219, but everybody who talks about the PPC, which is most of us). That isn't the part that's changed.

That started with the Bounty Hunters Battle Pack in 2017, though, not just with Jedi and Clone Trooper. I think it's an oversimplification to say that any single set is responsible for long-term changes in the set lineup. But, keep in mind too that they've released two BPs per year for almost the entire run of them (2007-2014). It's only in the last couple of years that there have been so many, and they've drastically increased the number of very small sets overall with microfighters as well.

We have no reason to think that. There've never been more than 4 battle packs in a year, which isn't enough to have them in every wave. The last two will probably be in October.

As disappointing as that would be, I'd still prefer it to the brick-built droids we've had the last two years.... but it's senseless to speculate without any information on it, especially since we'll probably have something concrete within a couple of weeks at most.

No, that isn't correct. The Sandcrawler was UCS because MBS didn't exist then, but the official statement was: "The Master Builder Series models are large playsets and beside being complex builds they are characterized by having many play features and functions, interior details as well as a range of minifigures. Ultimate Collectors series will remain highly detailed display models providing complex builds with a focus on authenticity and both Ultimate Collectors Series and Master Builder Series will continue as a way to highlight the unique characteristic of each style of model." Nowhere is a distinction made between vehicles and locations, and such a distinction wouldn't make any sense. Something like the Sandcrawler in minifigure scale with play features would almost certainly be MBS, not UCS, and something like a display model of the Jedi Temple would be UCS, not MBS.

I don't think I'd say inspired by... there was talk earlier about how it's annoying that LEGO is calling the figures by the wrong name, and that while it's good to see more variation in the CIS ground forces they could've done a slightly better job, by, for example, putting the AAT driver droid in an AAT.

I actually like that they keep changing up the Rebel troopers. They ought to be ragtag, and this makes them better contrast with the Imperials (which still look quite good even with lots of both the old and new style snowtroopers). Some individual ones will look better than others, sure, but that's pretty accurately reflective of the variation in uniforms seen in the movies.

Yes, as well as the Jedi Defender-Class Cruiser, Republic Striker Starfighter, and Republic Troopers vs Sith Troopers battle pack as well. It was covered pretty well. And Vader's Castle is arguably from a video game, too (some VR thing). Obviously the games don't get covered in the same way the movies do, but things have really picked up in the last few years. There definitely aren't any grounds on which to say that Fallen Order won't get any sets.

Although it's historically been true that there haven't been many game-related sets, there've been sets from every game released since Disney took over the license (all two of them). We don't have enough information to meaningfully speculate about why the Resistance sets are so delayed, but so far that's the only media that's been treated so poorly; I would be hesitant to predict that that'll be the norm in the future on the basis of one data point.