The Stud

Here I am not even planning to display my City and Gardens on the same shelf, and I don’t own the Docks period. Also, there’s no credible indication that Ninjago is ending in 2022. The same doomsday “rumor” pops up every single year and hasn’t ever panned out.

If that Shang Chi list is anywhere close to being true, then I’m in Spider-Man 3. It seems like everyone else is in it, so why not? Seriously though, it’s bizarre that these Eternals sets and Ninjago City Gardens still haven’t been revealed by Lego and were leaked in their own catalogs. The even weirder part is that the former isn’t even coming out this month and the latter will only be available for VIPs. It’s just hilarious that Lego’s been putting the boot down on leaks of their products but they themselves have become the biggest leaker in the community.

Here’s one people won’t like to hear, but in my opinion, AFOLs are way too blinded by their nostalgia for classic Lego themes, like Classic Space, Castle, Pirates, etc. I can certainly understand wanting to have your favor if e Lego themes, but I’m so sick of hearing people complain all of the time that theme x, y, or z is still being made instead of more sets from those classic themes.

None of the other ideas that are being thrown around sound as plausible to me as a Marvel CMF. Of course that may just be my own bias, seeing as how I’m a Marvel fan, but the next few years are gonna be huge for the MCU. Lego is definitely going to want to cash in on that. Ideally, it’d have more than twelve figures and we could get some much needed variants of the marketable characters, some key characters that we’re missing, and a few based on the new Disney+ shows. Regardless of what the third series ends up being, it’s so nice that this year will be such a refreshing year for CMFs. I think Series 21 has been received well despite its small size and, in my opinion, is the first great original CMF series in about three years. The Looney Tunes series will be interneting and I think will sell well with the hype for Space Jam 2. Heck, I don’t even like Looney Tunes and I may still try to get some of the iconic characters. And then we have the third series of ‘21, which will be a fresh, new licensed series whether or not it’s Marvel. 2022 probably won’t have much for those who want new series ideas. I’m guessing Series 22 will be first, then Disney Series 3 second, and Harry Potter Series 3 last.

I don’t think I’ve ever had a missing piece from a new Lego set, or at least one that I couldn’t easily find a replacement for in my collection. I buy a lot of Lego sets too, so I’m always dismayed when people complain about getting multiple sets with missing pieces or even entire bags gone.

Wow, I don’t think I’ve ever actually been to this Lego Store before! I’ve been to Illinois many times and have visited the Discovery Center and Schaumberg Lego Store nearly each time, but somehow I’ve missed this one. I would’ve visited it back in April of 2019 during the weekend of Star Wars Celebration if it weren’t for a snow storm that cut my trip short. Seems like they had a pretty good selection. I personally noticed a few retired/soon-to-be-retired Star Wars and Ninjago sets, namely the Death Star Cannon, Samurai Mech, and Summer 2019 Ninjago Minifigure Pack.

I’m a little surprised to see Lego acknowledging the retired sets in one of the leaked images, saying “Expand Your Ninjago City Gardens!” A little hard since both of its flagship sister sets are long gone, but hey, this probably means we can expect more expansions someday. The Titanium Zane Statue was an awesome inclusion. I never would’ve thought that Lego would do that, but here we are. The Spa e Police poster on the side of the ninja tower thing is a nice touch as well. The build seems a bit more hollow than I would’ve liked though. Otherwise, I still really like the look of this thing and look forward to getting it in June most likely.

I’m not a fan of Castle by any means, but I do like this set and think that it’s getting way more flak than it deserves. The original build looked amazing and intricate, don’t get me wrong, but the colors made it look very drab and boring. And that’s probably accurate to how Medieval Blacksmith shops would look like, but for me personally, I want my Lego sets to have color. They are toys after all and I personally use them as an escape from the real world. Bright colors and outlandish creations further pushes that escapism for me. And let us not forget that Lego’s first medieval castle was a bright yellow. Overly colorful medieval sets are nothing new and neither are heavily redesigned Ideas sets. So like I said the build looks good to me. It could definitely use a few more figures and/or animals, but overall, I’m impressed by it. I look forward to putting that on one of my tables next to Barracuda Bay (which I’m working on currently), Benny’s Spaceship, and the Ideas Exo Suit. Essentially, it’ll be my shelf of modern tributes to Lego’s iconic, classic themes. I just need a new Western set to go with it!

That’s always been part of it though. Other than when Nya fist became Samurai X, they’ve never tried to conceal their identities and they only actually wear their masks 1/4 of the time. Using mechs and vehicles have been a focal point since Season 1. I did like the movie’s stance on this, because Wu says at some point that their mechs don’t make them ninja or something along those lines. That’s one of the things the movie actually got right. Side note, but I hope we get a cool Ninjago promo this year to go with the 10 Year Anniversary. We haven’t gotten a single Ninjago promo since the when the Movie came out, unless there was some sort of Battle Pod that I’m forgetting about or something.

I don’t know, if Lego is seemingly getting rid of one of the mainstays of the Lego Star Wars brand (battle packs), then wouldn’t it stand to reason that they’re getting rid of the Duel sets as well? We only got two of those anyway and while the Starkiller one seemed to sell well, I’ve seen a bunch of last year’s Mustafar duel clogging up shelves at all of the stores near me. I’m not saying that it’s impossible that we don’t get anymore of this kind of set, and I’d certainly welcome more of them, but it’s too early to tell yet.

Here are my personal guesses and the minifigure selections that I both want to see and think are likely for the given set. 75308 - $199 - Could be anything. An X-Wing or Darth Vader’s TIE Advanced or maybe something unlike any other UCS set that’s come before. (Like not a starfighter or playset.) 75309 - $349 - UCS Republic Gunship [Comes with two clone pilots, three plain P1 clone troopers, and then either Cody or a modern Jedi Bob.] 75310 - $19 - A remake of Rey’s Speeder [Would come with ideally a new Rey, Finn, and BB-8.] 75312 - $49 - Imperial Troop Transport [Would come with a speeder bike as well. The figures would be Marshal Cara Dune, Greef Karga, two Stormtroopers, and a Scout Trooper.] 75313 - $799 - UCS Death Star [I’m not sure what minifigures this would come with, besides Tarkin maybe, or what the build would entail.] 75314 - $99 - The Bad Batch Shuttle [This would come with all five Bad Batch members and a Gonk Droid.] 75315 - $159 - Moff Gideon's Imperial Cruiser [This would have the same figure selection as my previous pitch: Moff Gideon with new Darksaber pieces, an Imperial Comms Officer, Grogu, two Dark Troopers, and maybe a plain stormtrooper.] 75316 - $59 - Another helmet; probably related to The Mandalorian. Could be Din’s helmet or maybe even a Dark Trooper. Hopefully, we get a few more sets thoughout the year, like maybe some surprise retail exclusives. I still want more Clone Wars sets but I fear the ship for that has sailed. Ideally we get more Mando sets, and with those, new Rosari-ahsoka Tano and Bo-Katan minifigures.

I’m pretty sure High Republic has been trademarked for all sorts of merchandise, including toys, so it’s possible we can see Lego stuff down the line. It really just depends how successful this campaign by Lucasfilm turns out to be. I know I’m personally not very interested in it, but there are a lot of really cool vehicle and character designs that could be translated to Lego form.

I could see 75308 being more of an unconventional UCS, something like the Art or sculpture sets rather than the typical ships and play sets than we’re used to. I think the $800 set will be something new; I just don’t see what adjustments to the build or minifigure selection that warrants a rerelease of the Falcon at this stage. I’m guessing the Gunship will be the $350 set. I really want to own a Gunship, but I’m not sure if I want a $350 UCS size version of it. I guess I was hoping it would be something like the Tantive from 2019 where it was essentially just a really large and detailed play set that was just released as a D2C. I don’t reallt have space or room in the budget for too many Star Wars D2Cs, with some exceptions like the UCS Slave 1, the aforementioned Tantive, and soon the Mos Eisley Cantina, so these three new sets don’t matter as much to me. It looks like there’s five to seven normal, wide-release sets for the rest of 2021 besides the Advent Calendar. Hopefully Lego doesn’t waste any of those spots, but I have a feeling that 75316 is going to be another helmet. (Not saying the helmets are bad, I just don’t want them in place of normal minifigure playsets.) Lego hasn’t released any other Star Wars sets at $60 for a couple years now. I just hope that most of these are related to the shows and some prequel stuff that hasn’t been done in a while (like Palpatine’s Arrest). I have pretty much everything I want from the Sequel era besides a few missing characters and the number of OT vehicles and locations I still need are very low at this point. My prequel/Clone Wars collection is far smaller in comparison because I only started collecting Lego Star Wars around the time of TFA, when prequel era stuff became more sparse. Hopefully 75315 will be Gideon’s Arquitens, but watch it just be another version of the Millennium Falcon. I have to imagine that we’ll get at least one set for the Bad Batch, because we’re getting them as playable characters in the new video game and we got sets for Resistance and TCW S7 after their respective releases.

I’m not a fan of the Amazing Spider-Man movies, but I am more excited for the potential of getting an Andrew Garfield minifigure. I somehow already have every Tom Holland Spidey minifigure Lego has made so far, and I’m about to order the Tobey Maguire Spider-Man 2 minifigure off of Bricklink soon, so I just need an attainable version of Andrew to complete the trio. I do hope we also get more of MCU Peter’s supporting cast this time around as well. (Characters like Aunt May, a proper Happy Hogan, new versions of Ned and MJ, and maybe characters like Flash, Betty, or even Peter’s teacher.) I’m keeping my expectations very low in that regard though, since none of them are superheroes or supervillains, meaning that kids aren’t really going to care for them as much. Also, I can’t help but wonder how Lego will differentiate the different versions of Spider-Man in the sets. Will they just call all of them Spider-Man? I think that would make it unlikely for more than one version to appear in the same set. I think it would be cool if they were all referred to by their universe designations. For example, the MCU takes place in Earth-199999 so the Lego sets could call Tom Holland’s version “1999999 Spider-Man”. I don’t think Lego would do that though, since that would be really confusing to most people. That’s good to hear! It’d be really cool if I somehow won since I just got the new Miles Morales game for Christmas and am about to start playing it soon.

It’s probably extremely unlikely, but six SM3 sets for each of the Sinister Six members would be stellar. (Assuming we’re getting versions of them in this new movie.) And if J. Jonah Jameson is truly playing a bigger role in this movie, it stands to reason that the Daily Bugle building will appear in it, which could make an exquisite $100 set like the IW Sanctum Sanctorum.

I just got most of the new Legacy wave at the Lego Store today. They didn’t have the Titan Mech available, but they had pretty much everything else from this new wave on the shelves. They didn’t have any older Ninjago sets though; they actually had to fill up the rest of the Ninjago section with their abundance of Monkie Kid products. All I still need to get from this wave are the aforementioned Zane Mech and the Overlord Dragon, which I passed on today. As for the presumed two Legacy sets coming in the summer, I’m going to keep my expectations low and assume we’re getting something like more Ninja vehicle remakes. A new NinjaCopter or Ronin’s REX would be nice but I don’t think they’re very likely this year.

I’m guessing the same name/much different price clue related to Legacy will be a vehicle as well. I’d like for it to be a scaled up Ronin’s REX (they could even use the same Ronin figure as the Gardens), but it could easily be another version of the Blaster Bike or the Jay Walker One. Both of which would be... disappointing.

If Lego wanted to, they could make a very scaled down Borg Tower similar to the Avengers one from this year. I don’t think it’s very likely either, but I do think a lot of fans would appreciate something like that. At one point an Overlord Dragon was seen as extremely unlikely as well, so who knows? A new classic Pixal minifigure would be amazing. She’s one of the more prominent secondary characters and I only have one figure of her. (The one from the $20 Throne Room Showdown set.)

I’ve actually been wondering this as well. I haven’t seen a single post, video, or picture of this thing in hand and it’s been a month since they were supposedly shipping them out. I don’t think I had much of a chance of winning or anything (heck, I don’t even think I received any emails saying that they even got my entry), but it’s weird that nothing’s come of it. Anyhow, here’s to a new year of discussing Lego Marvel! This is going to be the biggest year for the MCU yet, so I imagine non-comic readers like myself will be pleased with what comes out Lego-wise. Keeping my fingers crossed that we get something for at least one of the Disney+ shows, but I’m not expecting too much.

I’ve been binge watching the show recently and am already onto Rebooted. I’ve actually only seen the first two seasons (and the pilot episodes) once before, and that was over three years ago, so it was nice revisiting those episodes again. I definitely saw some sets that I think should be remade in future Legacy waves. (The Blacksmith Shop, Snake Train, Garmatron, Garmadon Mech, Borg Tower, Ninjacopter, etc.) It’s been a fun watch. My only qualm is that Season Two felt rushed and I hate the whole love triangle subplot in Season 3, and how it ended up splitting Jay and Nya apart for a couple of seasons. (They’re my favorite characters in the show.) Nonetheless, I’m having a blast going through the “classics” and I’m excited to get to Seasons 4 and 5 because those were airing when I first got into Ninjago.

Thanks for the input! I’m someone who likes to complete games to the highest level possible, so it’s good to hear that there’s a lot of content on top of the main 9 hour-ish story. I like a good amount of the franchises within the game and for the ones that I’m not particularly fond of, I’m sure the Lego aspect will keep me invested. As for getting the packs themselves, I’m definitely not averse to buying used Lego. I tend to prefer it sealed, but so long as it’s in good condition, I’ll be happy. And in this case where building’s less of the objective as playing the game and getting the figures, I’m okay with doing it that way. I’ve mentioned my previous interest in Disney Infinity in some of my earlier posts, and I have to say that I would not have been able to get a near-complete collection of characters for that game if it weren’t for me buying a lot of the figures used. (GameStop had this fantastic deal at the time where you could buy two used figures and get three free, or vice versa. They probably had a similar promotion for Dimensions come to think of it...) I suppose that I’ll just have to keep checking eBay for any used lots to really boost my collection, and fill the rest via Bricklink and anything I can find at secondhand shops near me. I actually found two of the Level Packs at a Ross recently, so I might try checking some of the stores near me as well. Glad to hear your endorsement of the game! New gameplay features are certainly welcome as a lot of Lego’s recent game ventures have seemed rather similar to me. Part of the reason I didn’t get back into the game back when it came out is because I didn’t care as much for the properties within it. I liked the in-house Lego stuff, along with some random things here and there, but I just didn’t have that connection to any of the franchises in the game. And part of the reason I’m interested in it now is that I have grown fond for a lot of the game’s properties in recent years. I’ll certainly try the game out at some point; I’m just not sure when. I’ve been extremely busy the last few months and I’m not sure when I’ll have the time to invest in this game. I also have a long list of Lego related purchases I want to make that supersede Dimensions that will make me have to hold off on getting it anytime soon. I have to say though, I’m looking forward to trying it out whenever I get the chance. In the meantime, I’ll try checking out some gameplay on Youtube and start looking for whatever deals I can find. Thanks for all the advice!

Ah, heck yes! Sound like 71756 is like the Destiny’s Bounty but as a Submarine? That should be interesting. Thanks for the scoops btw! I really like hearing about all of these one at a time as opposed to just getting everything at once and being done with it.

Weird that those Jan. 2021 instruction manuals had such an inaccurate Luke render from this set, but I’m glad that he has the correct color lightsaber. (I honestly forgot about that error and this set’s existence until I looked at the back of the instructions from my Trouble on Tatooine set. ) The Imperial Shuttle build looks pretty solid and I’m going to sound like a broken record here, but a larger and more interesting minfigure selection could have turned this set from good to great. Still, I look forward to getting this, the Tauntaun/AT-AT microfighters, and the Cantina sets on May the 4th next year!

In my opinion, the original Ninjago City is the greatest Lego set of all time. The build is so intricate and full of interesting techniques that you can see for yourself how much love and attention was put into it. It’s filled with so many easter eggs and references that will please Lego and Ninjago fans alike. It’s a great value for all the pieces and minifigures that it comes with. I have never taken it off of display since I got it two and a half years ago, because it’s the crown jewel of my Lego collection. Maybe I’m being a bit hyperbolic about my love for the original set, but needless to say, I had high expectations for the Gardens when rumors for it started to circulate. I thought the leaked pictures looked good already, but I couldn’t make out too many details at that given time. Now that we have these quality pictures of the build and minifigure selection, I’m pleased to say that this a worthy follow-up to what I consider to be the greatest Lego set of all time! I’m also glad to see people being less disappointed with this model than they were with the blurry preliminaries. While this set doesn’t blow me away like the 2017 model did, I’m still impressed with how vibrant and detailed this one looks. The colors just pop so well and all of the trees look great. It certainly beats the singular tree on the original model. It looks like there’s some pretty cool locations on this model: the Ice Planet Ice Cream shop, Master Chen’s Noodle Shop, the museum, the “ninja zone”, and the Ninjago Fan’s Apartment. This set just packs so much into it that it brings me back to taking in the original set for the first time. Unpopular opinion here, but I think the minifigure selection here is better than the City or Docks. Here you get the full cast of major characters (the ninja and Wu), some key supporting characters (Misako, Ronin, Clutch Powers, The Mechanic), and plenty of generic civilians. While the lack of certain named characters, like Skylor, Pixal, Cyrus Borg or Dr. Julien, is disappointing, and there are some other puzzling figure decisions, I still really like what we got and prefer the amount of named characters we’re getting here to its sister sets. In those we got two or three characters and maybe one or two other show/movie characters, whereas here we’re getting a majority of recognizable characters. All in all, I really like this set and am anticipating it more than any other set coming out next year. (So far! )

I don’t know anything about the Eternals either, but these sets look pretty neat! I’ll probably wait to decide if I’m getting any of these but the quality here is much better than the typical Marvel sets. Tons of nice figures with good looking builds for reasonable prices? Count me in! It’s also interesting to note thar the smallest set is $12.99. We don’t get too many sets at that price point anymore, certainly not any licensed ones. I’m excited to see what other MCU sets we’ll be getting next year!