Alexandrina

Admittedly I don't really spend much time on the Ideas platform and I'm not 100% familiar with its intricacies, but is this right? The Ship in a Bottle set used 6002 in trans-clear (and I just checked, the same part was on the Ideas submission) - which had last been used in that colour outside of Dacta sets in 1992's Poolside Paradise and hadn't been used in any colour since 2010's Space Police Central (nor, indeed, had it been used in any regular sets at all between those two, according to Bricklink).

Well, I for one hope they're right and Mario enjoys a lengthy run. Even if that specific franchise isn't to my personal taste, its success or lack thereof is going to be a factor in future video game franchises being licensed

I know this is a thread for dream licenses rather than the actualities of current themes, but do we know for sure Mario is here to stay? It wouldn't be the first theme to seem very secure in its position after the first year but be gone from the market after five. I actually don't think video games will make for good long-term themes, so I'm hoping Lego puts out a few more good ones while they're riding the wave.

Ah, my mistake. I interpreted the number to be the total vote for Castle subthemes. What I get for not reading the article properly!

I'd rather get this as a set/CMF on its own. There's only so much you can do with the Eds on their own, and I can't imagine Lego would do a Cartoon Network series and devote half of it to supporting characters from a long-concluded cartoon. As a full run, however, it would be perfect: Ed with a Turkey Baster Gun Edd with a Book of some sort Eddy with a Jawbreaker Jonny/Plank Jimmy Sarah Kevin Nazz Rolf Lee Canker May Canker Marie Canker

It's a tough one to call, because without parsing through the full results (which to my knowledge haven't been published anywhere, at least not in summarised form) we don't know how many people voted for multiple Castle themes or put other themes first. If every Castle voter picked three subthemes, you'd only have 10,000 unique voters. Equally, you could have 33,489 voters who all put it second. When it comes to the final push, who knows where the vote will fall. But at the same time, there's no guarantee that every Bionicle voter put it first. Same for Space, same for Pirates. And there's sure to be some people who didn't get any of their three choices in the final. Their votes are an entirely unknown value.

I've recently been working on set designs for a foolishly large-scope brickfilm series - which essentially means designing about a hundred MOCs. I quickly came to notice certain parts that I was using a lot, in large quantities - things such as trans-light blue 1 x 2 tiles, and medium nougat 1 x 2 masonry bricks, which I need in great plenty (on the order of several hundred). I set up a wanted list on Bricklink just filled with parts like this, that would be expensive enough to make anybody blanch if ordered in one go - and every time I place an order, I'll buy that store out of the parts I need from my list. In the meantime, I've been scouring Facebook marketplace and gobbling up just about every big job lot in my local area, which has given me a considerable supply of bricks to be working off. I recommend doing that anyway, regardless of whether you need parts for your current MOC - lots of people listing big tubs of Lego on Facebook don't know that what they have is worth a ton, so they want it gone (last year I picked up a £50 job lot with about 5000 pieces in it, all vintage, including a few boxed sets from the 1970s, the entirety of the yellow castle and most of the Alpha-1 Rocket Base). You can accumulate plenty of Lego cheaply, and if there's stuff that you don't want/need that's worth a chunk, you can then sell it on for more than you paid to recoup your costs and have more cash for Bricklinking your MOC. At the same time, I've found it helps to split your MOC into chunks (not in terms of the design, but mentally) and buy the bits for a certain amount first. For example, if you were doing a street scene with a well, it might be good to order all the parts for the well (and anything else you need that the seller happens to have) and build that, taking the time to make sure your digital design looks the way you want it in person. By spreading out your Bricklinking, you're amortising the costs over a longer period. £400, for example, would be a lot for you to drop on individual Lego parts and shipping in a single go. If you buy it over ten months, you're spending £40 a month, which is a much more manageable chunk. Course, there's only so much you can do to save pennies - Lego is expensive, there's no way around that. But every little helps. You mention you're happy with the design and you can afford to place the order. In that case, I would say go for it. Perfection is the enemy of productivity - if you're like me, you'll constantly want to be tinkering and never be truly satisfied that it's as good as it can be. At some point you have to take the leap and say "right, this is finished now", so why not do it now? When you have the parts in front of you built into a physical model, you'll either still be happy about it (hooray! Job done!) or think up changes. And if the latter happens, you've ordered some pieces you maybe aren't using right now. Doesn't mean they won't get used later.

Echoing a lot of others here to say that I've cast my vote for Castle. I was all prepared to vote Pirates, but every new Castle set increases the chance of getting good medieval civilian figures and the parts that go with them (an updated hennin would be nice, or even the CMF one in different colours) so it'd be remiss of me to vote for anything else.

Of course! Apparently I had a brain fart and forgot the existence of hinges. That looks like it would do the trick - and also avoid the issue macaroni bricks have of making everything look smooth and not at all stone-like! Cheers!

Surely Castle and Trains have to be in there too? Not disputing your general point, but it's worth mentioning all the same

Hullo all. Despite having been first a KFOL then an AFOL for nearly a quarter of a century, I'm surprisingly terrible at actually building! Specifically, I'm not great at thinking up techniques and approaches to make a build stand out beyond just stacked bricks. I've recently been working on a MOC inspired by a local pre-Norman church (pictured below, spoiler-tagged to conserve page space) I'm not attempting a one-to-one recreation of the church, and I've already made certain adjustments - but while the two segments of the church furthest from the camera aren't posing too many problems, I'm stumped as to how to go about tackling the rounded section nearest to camera. My gut instinct was to use either large cylinders or the wider macaroni bricks, but in both cases the colour palette is limited (I ideally want to use medium nougat or dark tan for this section - though I'm starting to see a certain appeal in making my church all-white for a wider selection of pieces) and to my knowledge there's no way of combining either part with castle window parts. This issue is compounded by the fact that I'm currently in the middle of a large scale sort of my collection (~100k pieces that haven't been sorted properly in more than a decade) and thus most of my Lego is in different bags and boxes in the loft - making it impractical for me to keep digging out different bits from my collection to play around with different methods. A mock-up of my attempt in Stud.io is linked below: As you can see, it doesn't work right, so I stopped there. Does anybody have any suggestions? Or am I chasing a fool's errand trying to pull this one off?

Mid-February's not all that long away, and in any case there's no guarantee the estimated time on the website is actually when it's backordered to. Sometimes it's sooner. I ordered the Razor Crest back in November, and was told then it was on backorder until the beginning of February. Lo and behold, a few weeks later it turns up - more had obviously come into production sooner than expected, and they shipped it.

That's a tough one, and imo it depends on what you're planning to do with your pyramid when it's done. Super-detailed historically accurate display? Go for the white one, to be correct. Diorama inspired by popular culture assumptions of Ancient Egypt? Go for the tan - it feels like the accurate colour, even if that is just because the surface of the stones has worn away through time. If you're just making a pyramid as a standalone MOC, it's less important to be correct - in that case, I would personally go for the white one because there's a greater contrast between the white walls and the capstone, and also between the walls and the baseplate - the tan pyramid looks very monochromatic.

Are the glued parts particularly uncommon/expensive? If they're relatively cheap parts, you're probably better just writing them off for a bad job and Bricklinking replacements. To my knowledge, whether glue can be removed is entirely dependent on the sort of glue used - and if it's super glue, chances are those parts are never coming apart. I believe the solvents used to dissolve super glue also dissolve the ABS plastic, rendering the bricks useless.

This, I think, sums up perfectly why Castle really needs a full theme reboot - and why nice as the Blacksmith is, having a set like that every few years will not truly sate the appetite for Medieval. Some people want more everyday lives, and the Blacksmith goes some way to addressing that - but having a civilian structure doesn't please those who want more sets from the traditional Castle ilk. Equally, while Lego would get good mileage from a subset of the fanbase by releasing a big castle every few years as the extent of their medieval offering, that wouldn't be enough for people like you or I or anybody else who wants to see much more civilian life. A full theme avoids this issue - it doesn't have to be either or, there's room for traditional sets full of knights in their castles and smithies and stables and other medieval miscellany. People who want both can buy both, people who want one or the other can buy one or the other, and everyone is happy.

Of course? My understanding was that this was a message board where people were free to posit their opinions, and respond to other people's. I'm not trying to insist that 'my view is the right view' (quotations for emphasis, not trying to imply that anybody's said that) - I'm merely engaging in discourse regarding the topic, and offering my view on the matter.

I love her. So much so that I'm now going to be disappointed if she never ends up becoming a physical reality. Is the crown intended to be molded into the hair or a removable accessory?

That does look like a titan. I'm not sure if I'll wind up getting it myself, since it's not cheap and there are lots of sets to get, but it's on my list. Two quick questions: is it on baseplates? (Bricklink's inventory hasn't gone live yet) Would you recommend it to someone who has no familiarity at all with the lore/story of Ninjago?

There's a small part of me that hopes we get yellow-head figures with the current head prints (which I know intellectually will never happen). I never use fleshies for my films, but some of the modern prints would be so useful!

She

That is actually my point: Pirates is seen as a-ok despite being rooted in pretty violent history, because the stock tropes of the Pirate genre were spun off into books and film and are now seen as parallel but separate to the true history. The same thing is true of the Western: a century of films and books have built up their own mythos regarding the Old West and its stock characters. Are a lot of these early books problematic nowadays? Absolutely. But so were many early Pirate stories. That doesn't mean that the genre is irredeemable.

I've just ordered my copy of the Medieval Blacksmith, which gives it the status of being the first major set I've ordered on release (and second overall, after the Harry Potter Herbology book). Not sure my purse will thank me, but future me definitely will

It's obviously going to be an Emmeline Vance polybag.

In what way bs? If you mean in the sense that it's not an accurate portrayal of events then that's fair, but it also applies to the stock archetypes of the Middle Ages and the Age of Sail which are embodied by the various Castle and Pirates themes. The Western - at this point - is a genre with its own expectations and stock characters that often bare little resemblance to the reality of the Old West. That doesn't make it invalid as a potential source of sets. On the contrary, it's created a set of sanitised tropes which allow for a much more child-friendly experience. As long as the Native Americans and the various frontiersman factions never directly interact, and the setting borrows from the aesthetic of the Old West but the narrative of the Western movie, a potential theme is golden. Don't forget that it's not many years ago that Red Dead Redemption 2 was one of the most anticipated games on the market - and while Red Dead's market skews towards a higher age range than Lego are likely to ever be comfortable designing sets for, the appetite for sets in that time period is definitely there imo.

They usually are. I don't see why this time would be any different.