Navy Trooper Fenson

Gold is one of the harder colors to mould, that´s why there are also always little spots of different shades on the parts and figures like to have some lines where I assume the two sides of the mould are meeting. The print is identical to the Sandcrawler, only the Jawas beacon and the dirt lines were removed and I think one of the cables is white instead of gold. Definitely just so people don´t get only a rather specialized version. I wonder why they didn´t just use the 3PO print from Droids Escape/Ewok Village. It´s still in production and doesn´t seem off. Did anybody analyze the color of 3POs wires throughout the movies once? Would be funny if he has different wires in each film for no reason and Lego is now releasing all versions of that.

The company is getting bigger appeal due to the movie and countless licenses. It is growing when you look strictly at the numbers but some aspects are falling. - More and more pieces are made in China with more details but at the cost of quality - Less effort is put into parts engineering, faults will be glossed over instead of improved (The Super Jumper, old Lego would have recalled the part by now but you bet they will just send out some more legs on request and call it a day) - The Lego resell market will collapse similar to the comic market, MISB Modular houses from 2009/10 should be double the price by now but still linger at just over 200€ even though they are out of production for over a year, Star Wars figures start to set in at prices below 10€ a piece due to the large influx of exclusive and extremely obscure figures Not everything of this is bad per se but this could start a downward spiral. What am I saying, the Super Jumper is clearly the beginning. With the reputation as the biggest brand on a whole and toy company they will be tempted to just rest at the top of the mountain, it´s the same that happened to Mattel and Hasbro who now produce stuff that is on the same quality/complexity level as stuff from the goddamn 45 years ago.

They made an extra wave just for TFA sets so most of the important new vehicles will definitely be covered by special launch date waves when those become a tradition which I would strongly expect with some exceptions for less child-themed movies like what happened to Captain America 2 and Thor 2 in the Marvel license in which case we won´t see any sets of those at all. Rebels is barely affecting the line as it is, at least far less than The Clone Wars did around the same point in time. And Rebels merch will just slow down more over time like with every other show and any new show starting would barely affect the line as well, supposing Disney even intends to air more than one show at the same time. If the newest waves are any indication I would expect more EU stuff. The Azure Angel and 3 of the 4 BPs this year are the most unexpected releases I have ever seen in any line but those might as well also be excused due to the transition period we are in now. A complete lack of PT sets is still very unlikely. According to Disney the PT is just as much Star Wars as the OT even when half the fanboys can´t get over it. I think the many TPM and ROTJ sets just came to be for the poetry of them being the last and first movie in the movie line that is finally getting a new installment after a decade.

All those things were known pretty much months or a year before through actual spoiler reports. Might as well say the Lego game had spoilers or the book adaptions. I don´t think the new movies can lock down the production of PT/OT/EU sets completely. After all, TFA got its own wave separately from the traditional summer/winter ones.

All D2C sets had a minimum shelf life of 3 years with extensions for special cases. That the Falcon was only available for a little under 3 years compared to 7 for the 2002 ISD, 4 for the Executor and 6 and counting for the 2008 Death Star should be an indication of something. The only D2Cs Lego give a shorter lifespan than 3 years are the true stinkers like UCS Obi-Wans JSF, UCS B-Wing and the Grievous statue. I was mainly motivated by how cheap it was. 30% off of MSRP at the store I found it at and selling all the fish guys meant the ship was basically free when I got it. Sold it again last year for 105€ (without all the figures) but in comparison the Imperial Flagship still would have been the better deal because of the tripled price. This kind of thing really is mainly about opinions, one mans treasure is anothers trash. I think it´s supposed to be similar or at least remind people of the image of a soldier who paints his face with the mud lying around the battlefield as camouflage. Why Stormtroopers would do something like that, especially Shadow Troopers that I think are trained to stay in the Shadow anyway with their normal suit would be interesting to know.

Really? I assumed it was a November wave. In that case it´s summer, three months prior something could pop up but I think it´s more likely later.

Lego designed the set with no price point in mind and because of that the set ended up with a price tag far outside of what Lego thought would sell and indeed the Falcon didn´t seem to sell that well as he had a far shorter shelf live than any of the other giant UCS sets (Executor, 2002 ISD, 2008 Death Star). I would say everyone had his chance to get the set and the constant babbling in these threads of "rumors" of an UCS Falcon rerelease is obviously more motivated by children being impressed by a set that costs them their pocket money of four and a half years and wanting to seem like they could afford spending this much on a single set than serious collectors wanting to buy the set.* Are 3 years enough? I would say yes, at least back then in 2008-2011 where every 100+ set had the same lifespan and you could plan with it years in advance compared to now where they randomly pull sets from shelves and leave other stuff for nearly a decade. I am in a similar boat because I realized I would like to own the Imperial Flagship from the Pirates line as it is the only good looking ship Lego ever made but I know I made the wrong decision completely on my own because I could have ordered anytime in its three years but I chose to get the Black Pearl because it was cheaper and I didn´t really pay attention to the colors of the ship back then. But I take it and instead of paying the ludicrous price of 450€ on Ebay I am just going to wait for other ship sets and maybe build a nice one myself out of my own and bricklinked parts but no way I am going to pay more than 150€ for anything. I would say "collectors item" should just stand for a extraordinarily well designed item and not necessarily just something you have to pay a premium for because of crappy distribution. The Hasbro Black Series comes to mind where they made Carbonite Block Han Solo a Comic-Con exclusive bundled with a Boba Fett and never released him again even though it is literally a simple block of plastic and they even made a Jabba the Hutt Comic-Con exclusive where they could at least have reused him but chose to just put in a printed piece of cardboard. They really should rerelease the Cloud City Boba and when they are already at it another Cloud City outfit Lando so people don´t have to pay 50 and up for a damn main character. A Falcon rerelease should not be held back because of this kind of bullcrap, if anything it should be because of the true reasons: Because it didn´t sell well and nobody actually bought it and because Lego should get on with the prominent ships that still haven´t gotten UCS versions. *I don´t want to imply that everyone that still wants the UCS Falcon is a child but the vast majority talking about it and bringing up the discussion again and again, year after year are. September/October, probably the latter. As if.

I know what you mean, I always kinda sorted my parts by color but had older childhood sets in various boxes laying around cabinets and the basement because I never thought the contents would be good for building Star Wars stuff which I was mainly into but I was kinda inspired during summer to finally get on sorting out the mess and bigger my collection since bricks are still useful for a variety of things. I piled up all the childhood stuff, sorted through my cupboards that were still littered with childhood garbage and reviewed my collection of sets that were on display and decided to just scrap roughly half of it for the pieces because in the decade before I always thought to myself when buying sets from other themes that I would use them to MOC something better but never came around to do it because I just dumped all the colored parts into one box each and building anything in grey and black would mean pouring out two large boxes on the floor because no table is big enough for that and even then I couldn´t even really walk around. It took an entire month of sorting and finding all the boxes just to sort it all by color and meanwhile I realized it would be better to sort the four colors I have the most of into broad categories (like all special plates in one bag, all slopes in one bag, all curved slopes in one). So now it took another week to do that and I found yet another box of old random Lego AND I still have a box of newly gotten sets from between the last time I sorted and now. I liked to just power through the whole thing during summer vacation just to get it over with, I felt some dizziness from it as well but nothing really bad, I found it was worth it just for the sorted parts to finally be able to actually do something with all the stuff. I would recommend just doing it as fast as possible, when you stop it´s harder to get back into it again. For reference: Brickset says I currently have 102.031 pieces but I assume it´s a huge bit more since I didn´t include any of the old and incomplete childhood stuff in that list, only sets I was 100% certain of to have all of the pieces in my then sorted boxes.

I run into the same problem as you, many greys and blacks, much white and relatively good amount of tan and brown but only a small shoebox at most of everything else. Not really a problem because as you I mainly buy Star Wars so greys and blacks make sense for the bases and ships but it´s harder to do a Lego model of some other theme on the spot without having to check on Bricklink if I even have the specific pieces I have in mind in the necessary color. Classic and Basic brick boxes aren´t necessarily the best because they use mostly basic bricks which are more for bulking up, stability and simple walls and less for finer details, like say making a grey starship with red stripes. I would recommend normal Creator sets since they are good in having color variety and a large number of different moulds but they are only ever really worth it on clearance and still come with a number of the stuff one normally gets through Star Wars (technic axles/screws and black bit parts for stability). Another strategy could be looking for licensed sets on Ebay. At least in my country sellers love buying complete sets and then put up the figs and models in individual auctions or offers. Prices of the models are then comparable to the value of Classic/Basic boxes, far below 10 cents a piece. Mos Eisley Cantina for ≈20 Euro, AT-TE from 2008 going back when it was new for 36€ and the 2010 Clone Turbo Tank for 40-50€. And Star Wars stuff is mostly on the higher side of this, unlicensed themes like Ninjago go even lower. This strategy is basically the reverse of buying licensed sets and selling the figs. I don´t know which way around would be cheaper for you, I think it is really depending on the set and which arbitrary worth people give to the figures. I would recommend buying the model only from other people and only selling figures of new sets when it´s something where the figures go for 10-20 or more, Jurassic Park could be a good for this due to the dinosaurs.

Mine arrived last week. Already thought you forgot about me since I thought they would ship in January like the previous years and I didn´t think about checking this thread for some details. But no one was harmed, so who cares? Thanks for the figures, the Fire Lord Phoenix King was on my wanted list since day one and the others are pretty useful as well.

I thought the set would include Milhouse and Bart in reference to the episode where they drunkenly walk around town with a giant squishee, why is Marge in this? And can somebody tell me what Apus outfit is based on?

The biggest two problems are that Youtube allows to easily monetize your reviews so people are more concerned with becoming a youtube celebrity than giving people informations about Lego sets and that the Reviewers Academy makes it look like you are not allowed to post any reviews that are not up to its standard so the only pictorial stuff we have are: Many High quality reviews by academy members who are most of the time rather poor and only review smaller sets, often times making up to 10 reviews for the same set when it really isn´t necessary A few mid quality reviews by random sets from regular members. Quite a number of low quality reviews with tiny, blurry pictures made by people that most often don´t know what they are doing that are for many sets the only reviews they will ever get. All CMFs and D2C sets because Lego sends out a dozen of them to every halfway-notable site. The academy is still a good idea as it teaches people to correctly use things like photoshop that could come in handy in many aspects of life and it´s good to have a place with exceptional standards so the art of perfect reviews is not lost in time but some notes and tips for less complex/cheaper methods (like telling people large baseplates for backgrounds are perfectly fine if they don´t want to make a literal photostudio and less emphasis on written text as most of what the academy wants is mindless prose while the pictures tell you all you need to know) would definitely motivate more people to do at least something instead of giving up after the first paragraph. Well, obviously everyone wants to see the reviews for the upcoming sets because they most likely buy the sets near to their release so that goes hand in hand which I also find sad because reviews of older sets are basically non-existent. 90s and early 00s stuff was barely reviewed as it is and the few reviews that were made start to disappear because the members leave the community and delete everything from their flickr accounts or used crap sites like photobucket and imageshack. I was on a binge looking for decades old sets that I may wanted to buy and nearly every review I found was a picture-less ghost town of a thread littering the site with shallow text. It wasn´t really problematic for me as you can still get an idea of any given set through Bricklink inventories and downloadable instructions but those are easily beat by an okay review. P.S. Whitefang, please make your background less bloomy, anytime you photograph white parts they are practically invisible that you might as well could just write an additional paragraph of description and remove the picture for a better review, I already tried to tell you that in your CMF reviews, sorry. Why would we need reviews for those when Fbtb, Brickset, Brothers-Brick and countless others had their reviews of those sets up weeks before they went on sale? I wish Lego could put as much effort into promoting normal sets as they do on the quarter year long campaigns for every D2C. Instead they actively hold off the release of pictures for normal sets until a week to a month before release with the Toy Fair with summer sets being the only exception. I myself wanted to better the situation but I just came out of the habit of doing reviews after I realized how much money I could save by waiting for decent discounts instead of buying everything on full price like an idiot. So because of that and my generally lowered spending on Lego I don´t really have anything to review. Special stuff like CMFs and D2C sets get their reviews ages before I even see them in stores and with everything else it seems that the guy running Fbtb has the same taste as I do because he reviewed every single set I bought since January 2013 earlier than I could even get my hands on them. I doubt it will change any time soon but if I ever get my hands again on an unreviewed or bad reviewed set I will make one but otherwise it will just be redundant.

Christmas 2015 will be halftime for season 2 and the season is confirmed with 22 episodes as it is standard for cartoons and 13 episodes only happens when the channel wants to cancel the show or has other production problems like having to make a cartoon ready to air in only 1,5 years and normally shows don´t air episodes of three different seasons within a single year. I guess Rebels will take a backseat to the new trilogy depending on how well the show does or how much attention Disney wants to put from the show to the new movies. There aren´t really any things they could change about 2-1B so I wouldn´t put it past them to reuse it in the set and Han also has a tiny room for changes. I would say they either give him a different head or the coat reverts to dark blue with the same print/lines but I put my money on him just having a different head.

So you didn´t even have to put the parts out in sunshine and just leaving the parts long enough in the liquid works? I would like to order the same liquid you used for myself and I wonder if you have yet experienced any side-effects. What would be the worst case scenario? Did you also try cleaning yellowed pieces with printing or stickers on them? I would want to use the liquid to treat my 2008 Death Star model and some Stormtrooper minifigures. Not every part is yellowed but a number of them have some discoloration and I suspect the ones that aren´t yellowing now will start to yellow not shortly after so I would like to have a solution that doesn´t involve sunbathing the pieces as I don´t have enough room or time for that.

Completely indifferent actually but I share your opinion on the first X-Wing in particular as the 2004-2012 versions with their giant size and weird colorscheme are just too off from the movie likeness for me, I had a different opinion during my childhood though which meant I actually bought all 3 white X-Wings but never owned the original grey one. in the end though my personal perfect X-Wing would be a MOC made with many of the same parts as the original X-Wing but I would still like to have the original X-Wing just because it´s one of the few original SW sets that still work unlike pretty much everything else from the era like the Slave One, MTT, Sith Infiltrator and Pod Racers. The new one has a good technique put into it, especially how far they improved the wing function so they snap open in an instant instead of taking ages until you finally turned the gear 3 or 4 times. At first I was enthusiastic about the 2012 X-Wing but after some time I just got annoyed by the many differently colored bits like the tan cheese, the red/dark red used randomly throughout when it should be uniform and the occasional grey blobs in the design. It would still work well as a model of the Battlefront games but not the movies. I would say a true collector gets everything that has the brands name on the box but that inevitably means you have to buy a ton of stuff that you don´t actually like or is ridiculously priced like polybags in Germany so it was always a stupid practice that nobody should really care for unless they have too much money to burn. Yes, I myself am disappointed how pretty much everything from my original collection is so subpar and I never had enough of an emotional connection that I actually want to keep old Star Wars stuff unless it was accurate enough. I started in 99 (only with PT sets, started with OT two years later) and the only things that aren´t sold or parted out from my first few years is one Ben Kenobi, R2-D2, Naboo guard and Padmé, none of the models. But Legos constant updates suck out some of the fun after a while with only small actual changes between iterations, many models getting worse through Lego making the set smaller or bigger (Flash Speeder and AAT) and many figures just losing the touch. The new Tusken Raider and Vader are basically indistinguishable from minifigures that someone stuck action figure heads onto. More detail is good but Lego is starting to overdo it. There was also an UCS version of the X-Wing made only a year after the original grey minifig one. Did Lego really use so much touch in set design? Mostly because all the toy designers falsely make the X-Wings plain white instead of light grey and because those toys are more visible, around every corner, used in all the marketing etc. more than people watch the actual movies so this false image continues to get into the collective consciousness. If Lego made a model based on this picture it would have to be tan like the original AAT. Ugh, at this point Lego could just make an entirely new color with the X-Wing in mind and use it also for bits and pieces in other sets. In their current state it surely wouldn´t be possible for them to lose money because of that. Actual discussion I would call it. Yeah, that is also something I despise about the new sets. Everything needs a giant technic frame nowadays. I just wanted to mod my 2013 LAAT/I a little and there was a section around the wings that was so intricate and tightly constructed that I had to search for the instructions just to put the model apart. I It´s nice for collectors models that one wouldn´t want to damage or play with but not even being able to crash your Lego model? It´s not like rebuilding takes ages, it´s Lego not Hasbro or a glue and paint model kit, nobody expects it to be indestructible.

Can we make this a thread about general yellowed pieces? My 2008 Death Star has quite a number of yellowed pieces and some of my minifigures started yellowing as well. I heard of some ways to treat yellowed pieces but they all involve letting the pieces rest in sunlight for a few hours which is rather time consuming with 4000 pieces. Isn´t there something easier and faster like putting them in the washing machine? Of course I wouldn´t want to do that with the printed/stickered pieces or the figures but a rougher and fast way to de-yellow the bulk of my bricks would be appreciated.

Don´t be afraid, they still do it nowadays but less obvious like for example all the Star Wars advent calendars have minifigures that Lego obviously overproduced and had no idea what to do with like last years General Rieekan from the latest Hoth base set that apparently had its shelf-life cut short by around 6 months and the old Snowtrooper helmets appearing there when Lego released the updated design only a few months prior in the new AT-AT. They seem to have bettered themselves with the upcoming calendar though. No, that´s not hard at all, but I imagine it starts being problematic when you go into the 800+ pieces range which even then coloring specific parts is still not that helpful. I still had to search for multiple minutes after very common parts when building the 10188 Death Star. I think another factor in the rainbow colors of sets is that maybe common bricks like 1x2 plates and 2x4 blocks are cheaper for Lego to put in sets in red and blue than grey because they produce large amounts of them for sets across all themes or maybe that the basic colors like blue, red, yellow are just cheaper than everything else (though that conflicts with what I heard about Lego getting their plastic in a white/greyish color that they recolor themselves during production). With the Skyhopper I imagine the designer just wanted to give the buyer some more rare and useful pieces as white is more common and less useful in a Star Wars collection than grey and dark red so you are free to swap the good MOC parts for the more accurate and less useful parts. That kind of thing happens all the time in all themes, like the Detective Office Modular Building having 17 1x1 round plates with bar holes when only ≈5 of them actually need the holes for the sets design while all the others could easily have been substituted with normal round plates, which are apparently cheaper for Lego to produce, otherwise Lego would use them more often than in just three sets or so. In case of the AT-AT I think the designer thought that maybe it was an accurate way to represent the shading as the dark grey plates are all more "hidden" like on the sides of the main body where they are one plate deeper into the model than the rest or the entire backside and underside with the round engines. Natural shading doesn´t always work depending on the scale of the model. Also a reason as to why the Phase 1 clone trooper helmets have those grey lines printed on their cheeks, because without them the fallen in part of the helmet wouldn´t be as prominent as on the real life counterpart that is generally bigger and much deeper so the sunlight makes it appear differently.

I think Legos choice is quite obscure for an already obscure villain (at least for children). I have a feeling Lego chose this extremely classic costume because a modern tacticool Deathstroke is planned to be released in the future. Maybe for one of the movie universe sets, it´s the only thing he hasn´t been in that was made in the last 5 years. Or maybe an Arrow set. When Lego can pull through with TDK Joker there is no reason for them not to also do Arrow.

Literally no different from the one they use since January 2014. Do you even play with your Lego? I am delighted and pissed to see that the Advent Calendar includes a white Hoth Rebel like I always wanted. Shame that I now have to sell a number of my old tan/dark tan Rebels from the 2010 battlepacks and there still is the question when or if we are going to get a new battlepack. I hope the 2016 BPs are Snwotrooper/Hoth Rebels and the two factions from episode 7. Also nice to finally see a 100% useful advent calendar that isn´t made up of recycled garbage parts. 2014s with the old style Snowtrooper was a really obvious spit in the face with the new version exclusive to the AT-AT while everybody should by now already have 10 Snowtroopers from the felt 20 sets with them. Final duel looks very good, nice windows and general pieces but I still would like to know why the 1x2 cheese pieces are dark tan. Don´t really know what to do with it since I wanted to keep my display of the final duel to my 10188 Death Star but I guess you can´t have enough grey pieces, the windows can be used for a mod and I am not going to buy the set straight away anyway. Figure selection is a bit weird but inescapable. Palpatine is apparently identical to the book one. Shows at least that Lego isn´t that strict with exclusive figures when they can´t make another redesign/version. Luke is nice together with the one from Endor village but I don´t like how many white lines his torso has when in the movie it was pitch black. It´s this weird level of detail that Lego incorporates lately so their figures end up looking nothing like in the movie like all the Boba Fetts since 2010. Vader has a nice and new helmet but it looks like the new Tusken Raider more like somebody who stuck the head of an actionfigure onto a Lego fig. At least the pointy chin bit will be useful. Funnily enough my plan was buying the 2007 and 2012 Naboo Starfighters and using parts to make one who would be more screenaccurate but it seems like this new one has made exactly the same tweaks that I planned. Figure selection could have been better, it´s nice of Lego to stop doing a new Droideka every month but they should have come up with a good design first and not one that barely looks like the real thing. Oh well, I can still use the parts to make my 100% accurate and extremely fragile Droideka if I somehow find some additional dark grey battle droid torsos and dark grey minifig hands. Good pilot finally but Anakin could have used a dark tan version of the bob cut from the russian woman of the Indiana Jones line and I would like to know why they felt the need to include Obi-Wan on his own with no separate Qui-Gon Jinn. Should have been a Naboo soldier like from the Flash Speeder. The Flash Speeder is ugly as hell, I would like to know how they were able to mess up the shape so bad when it was essentially a square with slightly rounded sides all this time. It really didn´t need to be this big. They should have included more Naboo soldiers instead. I hope we will at some point get a good Naboo BP finally because I can´t seem myself getting one of this things. The Lambda Shuttle has a good design. Not quite as flashy, accurate and detailed as the UCS one but I prefer this one just for the smooth/Lego style of the wings which the UCS shuttle didn´t have because of the technic beams with their rounded edges giving the wings dents all over the place. Figures could have been more included for the price and size but I don´t feel the need to replace my sand green rebel soldiers with the new ones anyway. All in all a pretty great wave, far better than 2014 or 2012.

I think Filoni and whoever else did TCW and does Rebels are just bad at pacing and introducing their characters and when the season has ended or maybe during the next season the show becomes a bit more in line with our taste. TCW didn´t exactly have the best start either, first season was pretty much without any real happenings and the first four or five episodes produced (the movie and R2 lost in battle arc) are downright the worst things I have ever seen. I doubt children are getting into Star Wars easier or better through Rebels or TCW, the qualities children care about are pretty much served regardless of what Star Wars media they watch except the Ewok movies, Ewok show and Droids cartoon. If anything Rebels is worse for children as it has less of a budget which leads to less flashy action sequences and in all a more boring show than TCW. If anything I am frightened about the effect the entire new movie line would have on Legos line up. I still want some OT, PT and actually also some TCW sets. With yearly movies and a show at any given time there has to be a decline in past movies sets. Especially when Disney will release more and more stuff every year like how Marvel is planning on releasing three movies and now has 4 shows on tv. I wonder how Lego will cope with that. Right now it looks like the shows will just take some slots of the old merch and the new movies get a special third wave separate from the regular January/August stuff with maybe some sets extra like battlepacks in the traditional January/August waves. That seems like a good deal to me. And I don´t know if it´s just because 2014/15 are still some kind of a transition time between the old Lucasfilm plan of the ROTS/AOTC 3D rerelease and the new movie release but TCW related Senate Commando BPs, EU related Shadow Trooper BPs and even a 2003 Clone Wars microseries Azure Angel set all look like a sign that Disney is less strict than the old Lucasfilm with having Lego produce more current merch so maybe this change actually gave us a better chance on getting more interesting and varied sets based on all aspects of the EU and movies while the olds Lucasfilm in these situations liked to completely disregard old stuff with for example 2005, the year of ROTS with only three OT releases and the summer of 2008 that would have been without any OT sets had there not been the Death Star playset. I suppose that had more to do with these movies being far less popular and having nearly no merchandise to begin with.

Which ones? Wow, the worst sets since the 2004 era. Something to be really proud of. Yeah, I occasionally see some of the bad City polybags in supermarkets and there was a single orange Galaxy Squad polybag in the berlin Lego Discovery center but except for those none are available here, even the dutch get more polybags in their ToysXXL store or whatever it´s called. Not that polybags are that great with all the crappy mini models but something like the Uruk-Hai, elf warrior and other army builders would be nice to have here, too. I get that feeling all the time. Normally you are better off with niche sites and their coupons a couple months after release than Lego itself. Only reason I see why one would buy from Lego are the polybags (which are most of the time not even that great) or because the set is exclusive to Lego Stores/S@H. Well, I also got some cramps from the US and UK getting the Star Wars ARC Trooper in September 2013 and Germany not at all but then it turned out they just moved that promo from September to December. Same with the Shredder Polybag and Retro Space Minifig box that appeared earlier in Europe and later in the US. I guess we will get the Friends/Star Wars promo at some other point in time. Ands sorry for off-topic but there is a way to finally get the Lego Store employee? Can somebody point me to all the details? I was in cologne just two weeks ago and didn´t see anything on the store calendar about the employee polybag.

Did nobody read the link? The article is just clickbait by some shady idiot who wants some attention for his site by making up stuff. The key sentence is pretty messed up. They look like the LEGO® Star Wars™ General Grievious (10186) figure from 2008. Same size, same laser sword, but no LEGO® Technic parts and similar to the LEGO® Marvel Super Heroes figures from 2012. He says the new products look like UCS Grievous but are at the same time similar to the DC/Marvel CCB figures from 2012 which are as far away on opposite ends as you could get design-wise. He says there are no technic parts in the new figures but also that the lightsabers of them are the same as the ones from UCS Grievous who had them made out of technic 2L axles and 2L axle connectors. This is just going to be identical to the 2012 Marvel/DC figures and the Ben 10 stuff and will do just as great. Lego employees on this low level don´t actually care about their products. Most likely the whole Star Wars brand is embargoed because the people at the fair are too lazy to call up company or check Wookiepedia to find out which sets are episode 7 related.

All prizes look very good except G and D. Looking at the odds I hope everybody gets their favorite prize. Looking at the odds there won´t be many people left out.

Rather self-explanatory. In my photostream

The torso of Ghost Rider is Mutt Williams with slightly different colors. The head is the standard evil skeleton head. The fire is photoshop. Seeing how the boxes of their Mario carts all picture two figures while only including one misleading advertising is inevitable so the Ghost Rider is guaranteed to just be Mutt Williams with a different head.