RichardGoring

There's a discussion on Reddit about the Temple of Doom set. One person says that a trailer has said they have it. Another works for a retailer and was told that there was an element causing a problem which is why it was pulled.

Awesome!

That's fabulous! I love so much about it. Great work.

My Bestseller PAB order arrived on Saturday, but only just had time to sort through it. I got a 4x8 black plate instead of the 2x6 reddish brown plate that I ordered. And I ordered the 2x6 plate to replace a broken piece from my Hogwarts castle set, and I've started to hear too many people being banned from missing pieces for seemingly very few requests, so figured I'd just order one. And now I'm in a quandary over what to do...

If you search for Jay's Brick Blog, you'll see them in a post from March 21.

Scorching burn there! I've not been following this much, but when I first hear about it, I had Brett Waller's batcave in mind, but this clearly won't be anything like that. I'd love to say confidently that they will do something awesome with a $450 budget, but then we got the Black Panther bust and Hulkbuster, so... It will be interesting to see how they approach it. I love the Keaton batcave as a dark and brooding backdrop for a movie. I don't think I could love it as a LEGO set.

It might be worth remembering that from LEGO's perspective LOTR has four sets currently available, three of which are low priced. The Brick Headz will retire soon and could easily be replaced by other, slightly shorter lived small sets, while the large Rivendell sticks on shelves for a couple of years. Stepping back from it, I also think that Minas Tirith is unlikely, as it's such a vast location with an iconic layouts, that you'd be hard pressed to show it off in a LEGO set, compared to many other places that are of similar iconic status and would fit into LEGO sets much more elegantly.

The tracking that I've had for this, shows that DHL hand it over to USPS in their Westborough, MA facility, to delivery to be in Boston (30 miles away). So it would appear to be either regional or local handover and not centrally in NJ. It may just be me, but sometimes I enjoy this kind of reverse tracking to see how things are done.

Lovely work!

Very nicely put! Having said that, three other things to consider: 1. Before they replace all stickers will prints, they need to get much better at printing. Opacity on some of the colours is terrible, leaving things washed out. Yes, they should be doing this as part of your points above and the billions of dollars profit they make. 2. Sometimes it's nice to have a piece without a print so you can reuse it for something else. But this would affect a pretty small number of parts in a collection, and a small number of people who repurpose pieces, and a small fraction of the pieces they repurpose that would have prints on. So it probably only saves you $30 over a lifetime of MOCs. Maybe. 3. My children like the stickers. So maybe keep them for Friends and City sets? Or, give extra stickers to personalize things further. Little ones that can 'float' anywhere on a piece, providing cool decoration without having to be lined up properly. I suspect they'd love that even more.

I'm with you. Not terribly enthusiastic about this release compared to some of the others recently. The pirate is nice though. Might have been more excited by the knight, but I don't army build much (usually no more than 8-10 of anything). And I just placed a PAB order for the torsos and shields last night. D'Oh!

I think it may be the handling fee, and it's just labelled as shipping on the order. My spreadsheet shows that I may have only ordered $8 of bestseller parts. Should never do these things in a rush. Oh well. Worth it to get things complete!

I placed my first order since December last night. Got some baby animals, and a load of the castle and Viking torsos and legs (some were out of stock sadly). And, most importantly of all, bits for a few MOCs, by which I mean things from Rebrickable that others have made. Although having said that, I was pleased to try Studio for the first time to modify a Cadillac I found on Rebrickable, to go with the Palace Cinema. It's a really cool tool (obvious to probably everyone here). I was charged shipping on a $100 order though, which feels like an error. Annoyingly, I forgot to check how much was attributed towards standard vs bestseller, but I didn't think it would make a difference now that it's merged. Certainly doesn't appear to get called out on the T&Cs. Might have to do an online chat later to see if it's wrong.

It made me smile, and then cry. So you can stay.

I don't know whether they would go for a hospital though. All the modulars so far have been set in the 30s, 40s, and 50s (in my mind it's the 40s and the Downtown Diner is the new breakout architectural style that will sweep the nation over the next decade). Hospitals then we're always great, and perhaps not the kind of thing that LEGO would focus on much. You can't have the nice slick stuff available to hospitals in modern times (which you can do with City and Friends sets). But a doctor's office might be more likely, as that would be far simpler to achieve, able to go into a mixed-use building, and probably fit more in the idea of a bustling city street. I'd really like a post office or library though. Or a train station!

So that made it 67c per piece (still high, but I'm keen on doing that bonsai). Wouldn't have considered it for the PAB price.

But so expensive at $1.66 each. If you're near a LEGO store, they have/had them in the BAM station as an accessory. I left it a bit, in case they were really popular, but was able to get 70 of them (nearly five BAM packs worth), as I want to build a Christmas bonsai tree with them. The staff at the store were very good letting me do it, but because it wasn't when they were freshly released, they said it was fine do to.

True. I was thinking that the Witch King would be the 'hero' figure to entice people to the set, but it would have to be vast to capture them all. That's generally the problem with Minas Tirith as a model. But given how good a job they've done with Rivendell in minifigure scale, I hope they can achieve the same thing with Minas Tirith, should they do it.

Agreed. It would either be minifigure scale and be the hall, courtyard and seat, with a small amount of height to give a sense of the projection up and out, or they'd do more of it at microscale. In one of the videos, the designers did say that their first attempt at Rivendell was microscale, but they switched to minifigure scale so that they could include all the figures more easily. I suspect they'd need to do the same thing for Minas Tirith, as the figures available would be a decent draw. Especially if they set it during the siege.

It's going to depend a lot on the size of them. The previous BDP sets were about 10c per piece on average, so typical of many LEGO sets. But the piece counts were far higher than they would be for a standard LEGO set of the same size, due to the extra details and fiddly bits that the MOC creators add. Given that we have no idea which five sets will be chosen, we have no idea on pricing, but quite a lot were touching the 4000 piece limit, so expect at least one or two to be $400 each. Hopefully they will pick a few smaller sets too, but I'd be amazed if the average across all five finalists wasn't over $250.

I used it to replace pieces that broke with normal use (brittle brown and dark red primarily), or cracked with age (despite not being terribly old). I checked with them first, and they said it was absolutely OK.

Not that much cheaper though. Interesting if they have made a new mould for it though, and an encouraging sign.

I got my observatory delivered yesterday. The others are still in the warehouse.