Flak Maniak

I've long thought of Ninjago this way; it's a source of really cool-looking minifigures, and, well, who they are, their roles... That's for me to decide. Any Lego-original theme (and some licensed ones!) are just there to provide cool-looking figs that spark my imagination. "Could this be a space faction?" "What if this outfit were in the X-color fantasy faction?" "Should this torso/legs be used for some grunts, or is it too fancy? Which other minifigs does it go with?"

It's from the Imperial Probe Droid. I ordered some of that pack over the phone some days ago; even if the flat silver version is out of stock you can probably backorder it on the phone.

67638, centaur legs. So, the dark brown version is unlisted. Okay. But! The dark orange version from CMF21 IS listed, with a price... Says out of stock, but, maybe one can call in for them?

I wonder if there's a reasonable replacement. "One, stable part that covers 32x32 area" is a tall order. Yeah they can combine some 16x16 things, but that won't be as pick-up-able as a creation on a 32x32 baseplate. If it's feasible to make 32x32 plates then that'd be great.

I did always find it weird, looking at pictures of old sets, that Forestmen used black for their "tree" parts, and Dark Forest used brown. And, well, brown was already a color when the Forestmen debuted; you can see it in their sets! I do think that old brown is very charming, though I'm not sure if it goes well with dark brown and, well, that's the criterion for a lightish brown color.

Certainly this one is unpopular with me! When I saw the monkeys, my only thought was "I'm off to buy some of the old monkeys on BrickLink", and when I saw the elephant I thought it was frankly embarrassing to not have the body be brick-built, for it to have no articulation in the legs whatsoever.

Edit: Very interesting quote here, from the article: I don't actually know which parts historically haven't been in-house; heard people cite the Chima masks and such. But, I wonder if it will mean some significant changes in which styles of part are viable.

If the phasing out of baseplates does happen, and... It means better access to 16x16 plates (or even bigger!), in more colors... Then I'm fine with it. Plates are more versatile. Yeah, baseplates are nice; I don't mind them. But I'm not super-attached to them either. I'd probably be more attached to baseplates if raised ones were still being used. But, whatever; as long as we get good building substrates of some kind, it's alright.

Which parts are you thinking of? I noticed the dark bluish gray BB-8 head was new (and it is listed), but what else is new in DBG in that set? (And yeah the pearl dark gray accessory set, that one I ordered over the phone some days back.)

Hopefully the selection of Ninjago figure parts this summer will be less dismal than for the past couple waves. I definitely want a lot of the aquatic ninja; those figures are basically prompts for new Aquazone-style factions. And of course the underwater snakes look sick too. Was the canopy for 71736 Boulder Blaster listed at some point? I feel as though it was but it certainly isn't now. Lego is definitely inducing FOMO in me; so many parts that either got delisted or ran out, and I wish I'd bought some/more. Like the heads for the summer 2020 Hidden Side goons; should have gotten at least 20 more of those. Just so good for any fantasy setting; so versatile. (And I did get a bunch of them, just, not as many as I should have!)

Design ID 35635 (that one shoulder armor piece that was in various recent Ninjago and Monkie Kid sets) has been delisted from B&P; very strange. I bought some in various colors before.

I am about to talk about Vidiyo, but I promise this post makes sense in a castle thread. See... Whenever they show new Vidiyo figures... I understand how the no-fantasy-allowed castle fans feel, when they see fantasy-oriented castle-ish sets. Because here I am, looking for fantasy minifigures, and... Then I see all these Vidiyo ones that are kind of close, but so, so far. "Too outlandish!", I say to myself. The exact same thing a no-fantasy castle fan would say upon seeing fantasy-oriented castle sets. Just, I'm one step removed from them. And then the next person after me loves how wacky the Vidiyo figures are, but thinks that the hypothetical semi-abstract modern art minifigures go too far... It's all a matter of perspective. Though, I will justify myself, in that minifigures are irreducible, unlike sets-in-general. If they made some fantasy-ish castle line right now (no not Nexo Knights), that had fairly normal human knights, alongside orcs and elves and whatnot, I would feel fine telling the no-fantasy-allowed crowd that they should be satisfied, because they can just buy the non-fantasy figures (on B&P probably), and that should be good enough. Having "some reasonable new figures" is the important thing. Actual set designs don't matter; parts are what matter. You build your own castle! If we get cheap access to useful parts in high quantities, and the few unique things (minifigure prints, sometimes minifigure accessories) that can't be made from really common parts... Then that's fine, and Lego has done right by us. (Hmm, point of comparison, whenever Ninjago does some really fancy thing, like the movie Destiny's Bounty, remember all the people asking, well, how do we make it more boring/historical, remove the fantastical elements?) At any rate, it's great that they saw fit to have a dragon in the castle, but, as I said in the other post... It's very small! Again, not asking for some Castle of the Forsaken Emperor situation here, but... The dragon needs to be imposing! It needs to look like it should pose a threat to this castle! (And no I obviously won't ask for a molded dragon, let alone in a Creator set; I won't even ask for printed eyes like on a Ninjago dragon. Only for it to be larger. I don't even mind the green; I think it's a nice callback to the old green dragons. Dragons don't always have to be red-and-black.)

One thing I wonder is if it will be the new-style cloth. See, the new-style cloth is listed with the 1.82 price on the website. But... The old-style material ones seem mostly listed on the website at 2.1 or so. So... Maybe I will be sent old-style black capes? Or, wait, if these really are the ones that show up in those sets that have Palpatine + Vader (as the 6117766 element ID indicates)... Maybe it will be 60 capes? That would be a hilarious surprise, if it were twice as many as I thought! I forget if the two capes were packed together in my copy of 75183 Darth Vader Transformation.

Called in and successfully ordered odds and ends. Ordered too many spongy black capes (30) (6117766), the Ninjago sword-packs in white and bright green (6324267, 6299665), the weird minifigure accessory parts in pearl dark gray (6273229), power bursts in trans-bright green (6207149), and leaves in medium lavender (6210460). Which is to say, a bunch of parts that had prices on B&P, but were listed as out of stock. All backorders, except the capes are supposedly actually in-stock right now, contrary to what the website says. Also, the capes were 2.1something dollars, not the 1.82 dollars the website said. Right as I was getting off the phone I thought, hmm, I should have tacked on a longshot and asked about Ronin's minifigure parts. But I wasn't about to dig through the Ninjago City Gardens instructions for the element IDs while on the phone.

Yeah I'm not too worried about the kids; they're gonna take their sets apart and build other stuff no matter what you do. (Or, almost all of them, anyway.) But it's the folks on here who need to be prodded to do so! I was serious when I said that $300, D2C, 18+, black-box sets should have some funny-looking alt build inspiration pictures on the back! These are from the 2000 Millennium Falcon; imagine how great it would be to have this on the back of the 2017 UCS one!: What matters is not what's in the box, or what some far-away Lego designer decided; what matters is what YOU create! If you want X subject matter, you have the power! Lego might not think that brightly-colored box-fronts are easy to sell to grown-ups; they may be right about that. But, they should make sure to include things that remind the adult customers of that childlike wonder, things that remind them of being a kid, sitting there with a pile of parts... And just messing around, trying different things.

If the Black Falcon torsos are easier to get on B&P, it will probably just be because more time has passed and more demand has been sated by their current (slow!) extra-parts-for-B&P manufacture schedule. But, if they make a lot more of them, I'll be glad. Certainly, they're not making enough (or not charging enough per torso!) to meet demand. We're sure the castle is $100, right? Was that established a while back? Or is it $150? We did hear the price, right? I'd like to see more pictures that give a better idea of its full depth, of its total presence. One thing that's clear to me about these high-end (non-Expert) Creator sets is... I think the designers are very intentionally trying to include a LOT of colors. They could easily have used way fewer colors overall. And in some other lines, I'd have expected them to use fewer! At any rate, it looks neat; I think the yellow building bodies + reddish brown... Whatever you wanna call those cross bars, whatever they are, that looks good. And the dark blue roofs work fine with that. Honestly I'm kind of surprised there's that much dark bluish gray in there; I'd have expected more light bluish gray instead. But I'm not complaining; I love dark bluish gray and am meh on light bluish gray. One thing I'm not sure on is the dark green(?) bits on the center-left of the base. As I said, a lot of colors. Oh and it's great to see a proper brick-built dragon here; gotta have a dragon for your castle. I'd say something about "What if it were bigger?", but, how much can one really ask for? It's not like this was going to be some Castle of the Forsaken Emperor situation with a GIANT dragon relative to the castle. Yeah sure, it's smaller than some recentish $15 and $20 dragon sets. But as long as a minifigure can ride it no or minor modification, I'm sure the kids will love it. Again, I wanna see what it's like from a proper above-ish view, to get a sense of the area.

The couple times I called and asked for capes they told me they couldn't sell them, as they were licensed-or-too-close-to-it. That the very concept of capes was licensed!

Here's an exciting one: 6117766 (new-style fabric cape in black) has a price listed, 1.82 USD. How long has that been true? Has anyone seen it properly available, not just out of stock but with a listed price? It was in Death Star Final Duel in 2020; that set's nowhere near close to retirement, right? So surely it will be properly available on the website at some point soon. (Or, perhaps it will be possible to call in for, given it has a listed price?)

This shouldn't count as controversial enough for this thread, but: I think they should bring back the back-of-box pictures to inspire alternate builds. The point should be to reinforce, at every turn, the notion that what counts is what you create yourself. For the sake of the children? Sure. But also, for the sake of you lot, the online fans! Let's see them 18+ black-box sets with weird-looking alt builds on the back! You grown-ups need to be told too, to build from your imaginations! $300 D2C sets need the alt-build back-of-box pics as much as the $20 sets for children do!

Oh, did they become available last year? Right now I'm seeing a bunch of cape colors with prices as "out of stock"; I guess I didn't even see them listed before. So, progress!

Here's something strange: White capes are available (traditional fabric as far as I can tell), element ID 6208737. USD 2.12 each; not cheap at all. But the strange part... Nostalgic-Wilson's website claims they're newly available, but Brickset only lists that element ID appearing in sets in 2018 and 2019!

I always found the "instructions are oversimplified" complaint strange. (Side note on numbered bags, you can dump all the parts out together if you want, so that's not a very good complaint, but also, if you do try dumping all the parts out together, you will quickly find you prefer doing it by the numbered bags!) Back to the instructions, yes, steps have part callouts and will involve way fewer parts each. That's so. But official builds nowadays are genuinely much more complex than they were twenty years ago. Far more SNOT, more parts-density overall, just, a lot more going on. Even if you wanted to keep the difficulty of following instructions the same, you would still pace them slower in the modern era, because the builds are inherently more complex. But also, obviously, Lego does want them to be as easy to follow as possible; they want children to have an easy time of it. And that's a good thing. Also, you'll notice that instructions for older-targeted sets (for example Barracuda Bay) are a lot breezier, gloss over more things, than instructions for sets for the under-10 crowd. Lego clearly thinks very carefully about these things; if a set is for grown-ups, the instructions will add more parts per step, and will have fewer "caution of X" thingies, you know what I'm saying. They try to make instructions for sets for small children extra-clear. And that's a good thing.

Lots of good nominations in this thread. In response to the 2x4, I was going to nominate the 1x2 brick. The nomination of the masonry brick several posts down was very good, too. I'm going to nominate the Mixel-style ball joints as some of the best new parts of the past decade. Maybe not greatest of all time level, but, the 2010s had a lot of great parts!

Is it yet passe to say "I don't like classic space colors; later old-timey space subthemes had way nicer color schemes"? Does that still count as a hot take? I feel like it isn't a controversial enough opinion for this thread. And if I say "I don't like Star Wars", or "I don't really like licensed themes", I mean... Surely those are both far too standard, as opinions go. Yes, obviously minority opinions, but, not uncommon ones. I already said most of my actually controversial ones, like how online fans focus too much on the sets Lego produces and not enough on just buying parts cheaply in bulk and designing their own things. I think that bright green is just not a very nice color. It can be okay, sometimes, but most of the time I don't like it. And I really really dislike the recent trend of "bright green paired with lime". Almost every time there are bright green parts in a set, I wish they were regular green. I might like it more if it were more commonly an accent to regular green. I certainly don't like it for large plates/baseplates, and the recent-years thing of standalone baseplates being bright green is not something I like at all. If I had to be more specific, I think the color is too bluish, a little too bluish. Maybe slightly too... Saturated? It should be a little less blue and a little more yellow, I think. I think that sand green is overrated and sand blue underrated. Sand green is fine and good, but it can be difficult to find nice things to pair it with. Also I wish I'd bought fewer dark red parts over the years. It's just... I don't know. I don't really love it anymore. It's not a bad color; it doesn't have my enmity like bright green does. I just don't love it like I want to. Oh, and I think that dark bluish gray is sick, just amazing, one of the best colors, and... Light bluish gray is really meh. It does its job, but it doesn't excite me. The proportion of light bluish gray parts in my collection is probably lower than any of yours. Sure, I don't have a bunch of Star Wars sets lying around, but mostly the reason is, when I go shopping for parts, I'm not excited to buy LBG parts. It's not a color I seek out in large quantities, not a color I plan builds around, not a color I constantly reach for. It's fine. It has its place, and sometimes I do use it as a specific choice. But it's not a go-to like dark bluish gray is. (Also, LBG parts tend to be pretty expensive, all things considered. I guess people really like the color; there's clearly high demand!) Does it count as controversial to say that trans-medium blue was slain before its time, that I miss it, that it was underused? Is anyone going to say "No, brick you, I think that trans-medium blue was terrible and should have been removed long before it was"? I enjoy seeing dark turquoise come back but I don't have strong feelings on it as some essential color. It's nice, I guess. (Kind of weird for me to say that given how many dark turquoise parts I've just ordered.)

What's the ID for the Monkie Kid head with the golden eyes? And is that other Monkie Kid head also new in the past couple months?