CallumPears

It sort of did actually. At the end of 2016 they put a bunch of prices up due to the value of the £ plummeting, e.g. 75159 went from £399.99 to £409.99, a bunch of UCS sets went from £169.99 to £179.99, Battle on Takodana went from £49.99 to £54.99, etc. Yeah not to get too political but at least with Brexit people can claim they were manipulated by lies. These tariffs are exactly what people in America should've known they were voting for!

Apparently the tank is now the Falchion stun tank from a single episode of TCW??? That's even more obscure than the UT-AT. Honestly I'm just not gonna believe anything about this set or the RTG one (currently assumed to be a hotrod snowspeeder) until we get actual pictures.

Well I'm feeling a bit silly for buying 2 of the old K-2SO minifigures last year (plus the one I got back in 2016, for 3 in total), though at least I got them very cheap in bundles. Still, I'm not one to complain about figures being more widely available (would be pretty hypocritical as someone begging for them to make more Range Troopers) and the new one is different enough that I doubt the old one will lose too much value (different mould for the legs and a different print on the head/torso, without the battle damage present on the R1 figure). Buildable figure looks... yeah not great. I was never going to look at it twice anyway but at least with the recent C-3PO and R2 for example while they weren't sets I wanted they were at least done well (note that I didn't include Chewie). As others have said, this should've been the new TIE. One thing I'm trying to remember is when the Mando's N1 and the Spider Tank were revealed directly after their respective episodes did we have any rumour of them beforehand? Could there still be an Andor spoiler set kept under close enough guard to not leak at all? (Huffing the copium hard, I know.)

Yeah idk why but the UT-AT is legitimately one of my favourite vehicles. I started a moc of one last year but put it on hold when the rumours came out. Time to resume lol

So, where does the good-guy Cad Bane fit in? Was he fake, or is he in the snowspeeder? (I didn't watch RBTG so apologies if he is like the specific owner of that speeder or something lol)

Welp that sucks about the UT-AT. Time to dust off that MOC I put on pause when the rumour came about.

Watched M&R's review of the Slave 1 and oh man that loading ramp function is SMOOTH I will be injecting this set directly into my veins

Ok after letting it settle for a bit my overall thoughts on the GWP are the build could've been better (a few details on the Enforcer aren't quite right but easily moddable) but the figures are flawless. I've wanted clone cadets since 2013 (back then I was just sticking angry clone heads on some plain red bodies I got from Advent calendar Santas) so I'm gonna try to get at least 2 of the GWP. One with Slave 1, one probably on eBay or something. Hopefully it's not too hard to get (like last year's droid carrier- there was nothing I wanted to buy to meet the threshold back then so I got it on eBay and only cost me £25 which felt pretty fair).

GWP build is meh (not bad, just meh. Think the enforcer ship is a bit too skinny and ideally you'd be able to fit a Kaminoan in there but don't think there's enough headroom) but the cadet figures are spectacular Edit: actually now I'm looking at pictures of the ship side by side with the model... yeah it's not great. Has some parts, notably the 3x1 slopes, which seem to just be in the wrong place.

The seismic charge has FIVE stickers, 4 of which go around the flat-top astromech head piece. Has that part literally ever been stickered before?? For astromech figures it's always printed. And the circular midsection of the charge only has the pattern on one side. (Would be a total of 6 stickers if that pattern was on both sides, but would be worth it, though obviously better if they were prints)

Slave 1 might be my first day-one buy in years. I want the May 4th GWP anyway and Slave 1 is the only set I actually care about. I was originally just gonna eBay the GWP and wait for a discount on Slave 1 but after seeing these leaks... Hopefully someone will be printing custom tiles to replace the plaque with the proper name. Aside from that, and wishing the figures were a little better (Boba's hairpiece and the colour for his body and arms, and Jango's arms/legs needing more of a purple tint), the ship itself seems basically perfect. Just hope the UK price is a reasonable conversion since I don't think we know what that'll be yet, right?

Ok so the Devastator chasing the Tantive is actually pathetic. I guess I shouldn't have expected much though. Did we know about a pilot Luke Brickhead? I don't remember it being talked about but maybe I just missed it since I don't tend to care about Brickheadz lol (Both of these are from Fateful btw)

Yeah the UT-AT is unironically one of my favourite vehicles so I'll be pretty sad if it does turn out to be something else.

Things like this could fill exactly the same purpose as the mechs while actually being something "real".

Yeah I wish they'd make Vader accurate to whatever movie the set is based on. The current version, similar to the Clones being an amalgamation of animated and realistic designs, is a mixture of his various costumes and is actually not accurate to a single one of them across all 4 of the movies he appears in (idk if there's a comic or whatever which coincidentally had the same inaccuracies).

Makes me glad we don't have an upvote system on here

Oh this would be amazing. Also, Mando S2 drivers would mean a torso perfectly suitable for standard Imperial Army Troopers (I have 32 of the ones from 75211 but a few more wouldn't hurt, and maybe they could reuse them in an Andor set if I keep all of my fingers and toes crossed). Of course it could also just be face-value (yeah I know it's Renown so maybe there is a super cool message in there after all lol) about how a bunch of people have been banned for sharing the Slave 1 (ahem, starship) leak and just happened to pick this quote since it means people might not be able to rely on Instagram and such now. LEGO seems to be a lot more on it with this set in particular so maybe they have a really cool reveal planned.

Whole thing is so stupid. They could've at least called it a Firespray Gunship if they really had to avoid the word slave (since we know from 2021 that it was indeed changed on Disney's instructions). "Starship" just sounds too dumbed down for a UCS set in my opinion.

Can't quite read the plaque, but it definitely doesn't say Slave 1 Looks like Jango Fett's™️ ____, possibly starship but I can't quite tell. The whole ""controversy"", which precisely zero people ever cared about until they changed the name on the 2021 set, is ridiculous. And if they really wanted to avoid the name (for who knows what reason) then using the proper classification would've been much better. On the box is one thing, but on the display plaque?

Welp...

Christmas TIE seems to actually be real

Facts. CWMMP >>> TCW Some of them. The TIE and X-wing were great (tbh the 2018 versions of both were too oversized for my liking), but the Slave 1 was terrible. I just want them to downsize the things which actually need downsizing. AT-RTs, BARC speeders, Naboo starfighters, AT-STs, and more have been consistently far too large for over a decade. Having them be far too big while sets like Slave 1 get far too small makes them look especially terrible side by side. Also I watched AshNFlash's review of the new character encyclopedia. As I kinda expected it's riddled with errors and is vastly incomplete, even going so far as to fully remove the EU section (when they could've just copied it from the previous edition). Probably just gonna Bricklink the Palpatine figure at some point, or maybe see if Amazon has a decent sale.

One thing to note is that it's the Temple of Doom which was cancelled back in 2023 and we got some blurry leaks of it but never had clear ones. I know there was some of drama in the LIJ Reddit community about it (something about Fateful not wanting to release the full pictures for security reasons but then someone he showed one to in private did, or something like that?) so this could be a revenge prank 2 years in the making, but we'll find out for sure tomorrow I guess.

Same, I was actually super excited for the escape pod but yeah cadets are useful to get too. Your version of the minifigure selection would also pair nicely with the new Plo Koon. Idk if they'll bother with new faces though. I guess technically they should look more like Bodie Taylor but they'll probably just stick with the default Clone head. Boba doesn't wear a cadet uniform in AotC so all 3 of the (now-hypothetical) figures would have a new shared torso piece. I think that hint was from when everyone - including the leakers - thought the GWP would be the escape pod. Isn't the smaller Slave I already guaranteed to not be TCW-based? We've already got details on the Jango figure being different from the UCS version, and we know the 3rd figure is a Kaminoan of some kind.

That would admittedly be quite cool (reminds me of that clip of the guy with the balloon, "oh that's class"). Still almost certainly would not buy the set unless it was at a good clearance price though lol