Flawless Cowboy

Many called it correctly, the first $1000 LSW set would be a Death Star. I wonder if it’ll just be the outer shell or if it’ll have any interior. If it’s the former, it must be absolutely massive to warrant that kind of price. If it’s the latter, I hope it’s the perfect blend between the playset and UCS death stars of the past. As for the MTT, $150 is simply not enough to do it justice. Recent sets and prices for those sets have made that abundantly clear.

Chopper. A droid, but it fills the same niche of oversized character build.

We already have three different buildable characters releasing next year. Four would be insane.

One is designed for kids, the other for adults. The impressions of adults towards the 8+ set should have no bearing on a potential MBS set. I would too, and yet a UCS Boba’s Slave I would surely outsell Jango’s, but LSW has proven it’s not afraid to try new things (within reason).

The Yavin playset looks like a junior’s toy. An MBS rendition would look glorious by comparison. Lego also released a playset cantina in 2018 which retired the following year, and the MBS version came out in 2020.

Lego remakes UCS sets, there’s no reason for them to not remake MBS sets, especially when Hoth, Death Star, and Cloud City were designed as ugly but functional playsets, whereas the Cantina was designed to look good on a shelf, the first “adult” MBS. There’s many other locations for them to explore, Yavin temple, Jabba’s Palace, Petranaki Arena would top my list.

The problem is most times LSW implements them, they look hideous. Take the new arc-170. Not only does it clumsily stick out behind the wing, requiring manual activation, it also replaces the second gun that sits on top of the long cannon. The previous two renditions did not have this issue. It’s lazy in its implementation and it removes a key detail of the Star fighter. If they were implemented more like the spring shooters on the 2019 Slave I, I’d be all for it.

Absolutely anything that fits in one’s house is “displayable”, including the dookie in my toilet. Not every is “made for display”. To me, spring loaded shooters don’t beat anything. It’s the same mechanism every time, it’s boring, visually and functionally. The turning dials and bomb chutes seem revolutionary by today’s standards where slapping a stud shooter or spring shooter haphazardly onto a set counts as a play feature.

They’re kids’ playsets, they’re not meant to be display pieces. The most important considerations for a prospective buyer, usually the parents, are 1. is it a good toy? and 2. am I getting ripped off? The downscaled versions of many post-2020 vehicles has resulted in sets that are way less feature-packed than their predecessors while carrying a higher price tag. Is the 2013 gunship oversized? Potentially. Would a nine year old who just wants to stuff his ship with a ton of clones care? Absolutely not.

Shame the shooting mechanism from the past two versions was moved from the fuselage to the wings. A lot less fun.

It’s clear to me that LSW needs new blood, or to borrow designers from other themes that routinely put out better-looking and more fun models.

Not comparable. Speed champions are (almost) all 8-stud wide vehicles, there’s no other “niche” the speed champions market has to fill. In addition, each car is only $27, and F1 is only covering the first half of the year. If LSW only sold gunships, this comparison would make sense.

Two $140+ gunships on the market at the same time is a little to much for me to believe. They should’ve retired the hideous CGG by now anyways. Your proposal would make for an awesome set though.

So the ARC is smaller and less detailed than the last rendition. Sigh. Why are the Lego Star Wars playset designers so amateur compared to Friends and Speed Champions designers making sets for the same age range? Are they not allowed to make good-looking sets? It’s a night and day difference in the quality between these themes.

Very disappointed to hear Plo’s starfighter is a microfighter. Lego had JUST figured out how to make a great-looking Delta 7 with Jedi Bob’s Star fighter, I was very much looking forward to this. Yup. Could’ve easily been a standalone set. Lego rarely makes good-looking side builds in battle packs unless they’re tiny in-universe like STAP speeders

If it’s the TIE avenger I hope they stick with the bomber/fighter scale rather than the interceptor. Saves on money, pieces, and matches the rest of the recent collection better.

Adults really need to drill into their heads the fact that most kids who end up getting sets, including battle packs, usually get no more than two of them. A fraction of a single percent of the LSW community has the desire and the means to “army build” in excess, and Lego shouldn’t be catering to this group. Most kids are more than happy to receive six troops in a single $40 set and don’t need more. The reason why Lego doesn’t mind putting named characters in battle packs is because the overwhelming majority of the target audience get exactly one of them, and no more.

They’ve gotten worse in many respects too imo. No landing gear. Cockpit opens lifting the front windscreen, inaccurate. Accommodating spring loaded shooters muddles the design in the rear. Wings way too thick.

Not a formula 1 fan but the designs of speed champion sets are second to none at the minifig scale. There’s a reason Lego is confident enough to include adults in speed champions marketing while Lego Star Wars playsets are strictly directed at kids. They’re usually jank, visually speaking.

The new windscreen piece on the Ahsoka fighter is incorrectly/inaccurately attached to the front windshield piece, something every version since 2005 got right.

What I think most theories (and the sequels) miss is the crux of Star Wars, which is, first and foremost, a coming of age story. George’s vision had the prequels mirror the original trilogy as an example of what NOT to do, or how good men, or good people, are driven to do vile things. And most importantly, the theme that pervades at the end is love and redemption. All of these nuances on the larger universe, Cold War this, galactic stale mate that, trade negotiations, are merely a backdrop to the core of Star Wars. I think the first question a director would ask when charting a new Star Wars film or trilogy, is “what is the point of the story?” I think one of the reasons the sequels fell so flat for so many people is that it didn’t teach us anything new that George hadn’t already shown. There’s no new archetype to explore.

We need an ITT immediately. Major missed opportunity when they released the Marauder, a less exciting vehicle, that carries less troops, and is on screen for part of a single episode of the Mandalorian. We also need a GOOD AT-ST, at a proper scale like 2009, and with actual posable legs. Next year is a good opportunity to do an Endor variant. Maybe I’m arm-chairing too much here, but I think LSW has dropped the ball on releasing troop-carrying sets to coincide with battle packs. How many additional snowtrooper battle packs were sold to fill up UCS walkers? Certainly not a negligible amount. Why is there no way to fill up the current AT-TE beyond bricklink? Why, when attempting a gunship, a vehicle renowned for its troop-carrying ability, do you make it smaller and less able to carry troops?

Buildable Ewok to coincide with Ewok Village please!

Yeah I strongly agree with this, I don’t get why Lego butchers certain sets when they could be more accurate, more proportionate, and equally playable. The funny thing is, they’ve done a good job elsewhere, like the speeder in the snow trooper battle pack, but then they flub their BARCs and AT-RTs. Like, just shrink it, and if you haven’t hit your piece or MSRP quota, add side builds. Everyone’s happy. I Lego-fy mine. Lego sells battlepacks in groups of four figures, so that’s the squad size.

I respect your detail-oriented mindset when it comes to this, but I personally can’t help but feel that massing hundreds of minifigures and then attributing meticulous, real-world prescriptions on troop compositions and formations when the creator of Star Wars himself would likely shrug at such a notion, is fundamentally funny. It’s Lego. We forget that first and foremost these figures we’re massing are mainly enjoyed (in MUCH smaller quantities) for imaginative kids. If a kid wants to thoughtlessly stick twenty mismatched clones in a battle and call it a battalion, it’s a battalion. That’s the spirit of Lego.