brickbride

Some more impressions (other than Mihawk's cowboy hat which I'm still not over, especially given that they paywalled him in a EUR 300 set): 75636 Partys Bar: There’s a rowboat which no-one needs and which sort of makes me wish that we’d got the Lord of the Coast fight instead. Makino's unprinted skirt looks really ugly though Shanks is very well done. 75637 Buggy’s Tent: I love the inclusion of part of the tent, the (plot-relevant) cases, the water tank, the spinning wheel, and the cage, as well as four important figs. Granted the top of the tent looks like crap on the inside but that’s LEGO for you, and the cage seems bigger than the spinning wheel which again, that’s LEGO for you. (Zoro has to fit on the spinning wheel spread-eagled while the smaller Nami has to fit into the cage only while crouching, but of course minifigs can’t exactly crouch or spread their arms and legs.) I still don't like Zoro's smirk and the inclusion of the entirely empty seating is kind of comical if you know the scene - you'd really need to fill it with villagers wearing terrified expressions. Still, I'd say it's the best set overall. 75638 Arlong Park: This set really, really needed both Zoro and Sanji. Their exclusion makes no sense plot-wise and five minifigs is just too little even though I think they're all exclusive. Plus the pagoda has a „smash“ feature but no upper floors and barely any interior at all. 75639 Going Merry: Again, this is the cheapest way to get all five of the East Blue Crew, and it's EUR 130. Not cool, LEGO. 75640 Baratie: First of all Nami has the wrong outfit, at least the top part of it – on the show she does wear the orange skirt again but with a different, pink top both in the restaurant and bar scenes and during the duel the next day. The same for Luffy and I think they could even have done his green dungarees and red shirt combo with existing parts. I really, really like the inclusion of Mihawk’s raft, though, and Mihawk – hawk eyes and all – apart from the hat. Speaking of, Zeff looks fine but I’d have preferred him either with his striped shirt or in his whites but with the oversized chef’s hat. Some of the lifestyle pics are spot-on (like Zoro sitting in the bar tipping a bottle to see if there's anything left in it) and others are completely nonsensical (like Garp playing lookout from the top deck and Helmeppo lounging on a lawn chair while supposedly on duty). The angle of both the box art and some of the lifestyle pics also does the set no favours because it makes it look almost as paper-thin as Malfoy Manor.

Since when does Mihawk wear a cowboy hat? The feather's missing!

Well it's just a normal blond in the LA version which this is supposedly based on. A lot of characters have unnatural hair colour there but he doesn't.

This. It's a nice little ship, the figurehead looks good, and I’m glad we get Zoro with a proper green hairpiece somewhere, but I could never justify buying it for that price. Also Sanji's hair looks awfully yellow, like Draco Malfoy's in the newer HP sets. I really preferred it back when they used to use tan hairpieces for blonds.

The Brickheadz for August are said to be Luffy and Buggy.

I love this fandom to pieces, and even have (non-LEGO) merch of it. Which is why it pains me to realize that I probably won't buy any of these sets. The Merry and Baratie are way out of my budget range. I was hoping that with Arlong Park I'd at least get the entire East Blue Crew, but now with both Zoro and Sanji missing it looks like the cheapest way to get them all is the EUR 130 Merry! Even for a set with just my favourite (Zoro) it's EUR 50! And if I cannot have all the East Blue Crew I'd at least like to have him battle Mihawk but of course he's locked behind the EUR 300 Baratie. As of now, I'm still looking forward to seeing the sets but I'll probably just end up bricklinking some figs or something.

Bricklink -> 75968 -> Dobby -> Inv There you go. 😉 If I pay modular prices (or well above really with all the add-ons) I expect modular standards, not a fixer-upper. I merely replied to @Virginia_Bricks that IMO it's not just the high prices, it's also the discrepancy between price and design that puts people off. Look at the picture above of how the big sets connect and tell me this looks well-designed.

There goes hope for Kuroobi.

Unlikely IMO. It's too dark and dreary for mass appeal, and its most noteworthy feature has already been done very well with the playset - what else is left?

On the other hand if they didn't waste a lot of parts with the slide-out drawers they could probably afford a less crappy-looking ceiling. To me the problem isn't just the high prices, it's the "bigger=better" mentality. I don't need a "beefier" model, I don't have unlimited space anyway. Sure, here you get a lot of empty space (which you then have to fill with additional sets) but I'd rather have something more intricate and detailed like, again, a modular building. Here you're paying modular prices for an unfinished-looking set full of deliberately inferior placeholders, but hey, it's big!

Huh. Nami looks okay. Zoro - the printed haramaki is very nice; maybe it's the lighting but the colour of the sleeves vs. the colour of the shirt torso seems way off. Also I'd have liked it if we'd gotten a hint of his green hair despite the bandana. Their facial expressions both seem fairly generic, Zoro's smirk especially doesn't really suit Mackenyu's stoic portrayal IMO. And why is Arlong so purple? My first thought went "Did they reuse some Thanos parts?" 😀 Also this is Nami in her outfit from the barrel scene, presumably from the Merry set, and Zoro in his duel outfit presumably from the Baratie set. The leak says the Buggy set for both so I'd expect them to be reused in the other sets. (And Nami also wears the same skirt on the Baratie during the duel, just with a different top, so that might be another reuse.)

Well TUDUM's over. No LEGO sets as expected. In fact nothing much was revealed except for a look at Chopper and the fact that season 2 will air in 2026. I'm curious when exactly and also when we'll get a second wave of LEGO One Piece sets to correspond with it!

The CMF series looks just about as I expected: a ton of red and blues and not really anything of interest to anyone who's not crazily into these movies. Don't get me wrong, everything looks very well-done, and the baby, cat, horse, and werewolf mask are all very cute, but what would I need any of them for? It's not like, say, Marvel series 2 or the DND series where you could take Agatha or Tasha and stick them into your Harry Potter sets for additional variety. I'm wondering how these are going to sell given how niche they look, and given that even the fans here seem to be unhappy with the selection. (And now I'm leaving before I'm getting bludgeoned again for suggesting that those movies are 'niche' instead of the greatest movies of all time or something.)

The only surprise is that Arlong Park has neither Sanji nor Zoro, WTH? Though Sanji's probably more popular than Usopp so locking Sanji behind the more expensive sets makes financial sense. The cheapest set with Sanji is now officially the EUR130 Merry! But overall the Arlong Park set still seems to be poor value in terms of figs. Just five figs for EUR 80, they really could have thrown Zoro and Sanji in. Presumably the Luffy in 75636 is a kid with shorter legs and (hopefully) a different face if not hair. At TUDUM itself? I cannot imagine it. The entire OP community is chomping at the bit for either a season 2 release date, a season 2 trailer, a look at Chopper, a confirmation of season 3, or all of these. LEGO sets would be a distant fifth place on the list, if that.

Honestly I'm not a fan of either Great Hall but I will say that the 2018 one was much more affordable overall (cents per piece notwithstanding), has made for some awesome MOCs, AND included the Tower. So you'd really need to compare its then EUR 100 with the now EUR 200 for the new Great Hall, minus the underground section which the old one didn't have, plus part of the EUR 250 set price for the Tower set (we'll throw in the boat from the 2018 one for free). I'd say you'd land at roughly EUR 200-250 that way again and that still wouldn't give you the fireplace - here you have to buy the AC or the Duelling Club in order to get one. It seems a bit choosy to complain about its placement in the 2018 set when the new one doesn't have one at all. I think it's entirely fair to think that given the price increase they could and should have done better. The new ceiling with the negative studs looks really bad and the entire thing just looks bare (I've seen it displayed in a store). It's way too pricey for a playset but nowhere near nice enough for a display set, especially if you compare it to modular buildings.

And terribly unsafe as well. Now I'm just hoping none of those Duelling Club spectators will take even one tiny step backwards in surprise when Harry starts talking to the snake.

I could see people buying the less iconic locations in order to beef up their previous Diagon Alleys - if they would fit. And they don't. And they don't even look nice, they're very cheaply built for the most part with all the stickered panels, no comparison to the 2020 DA's intricate architecture.You'd have to do some massive MOCcing in order to turn, say, Madam Malkin's or the Owl Post Office from the playset line into something that fits with the 2020 Diagon Alley. (The 2011 one might be a closer fit size-wise but that's a long time ago and a set that's hard to get these days, not sure how many people will still want to add on to it. And again that set is much less cheaply built.) At best you'd get some additional figs and new moulds like the Pygmy Puffs - a lot of people initially said they'd buy WWW in order to beef up their existing WWWs - but that hardly justifies the high prices, and again I don't think the less iconic locations are much of a draw in that regard. And the people who don't care about collecting them and just want a display piece, again they'd probably want something halfway recognisable: "What's this on your shelf? Oh, that's the magic bank from HP with the goblins, see, and Harry and his friends in disguise, see!" vs. "What's this on your shelf? Oh, that's some random wizarding shop, I think it sells cauldrons or telescopes or something, and some random witches and minor Hogwarts students." I also don't really get the feeling that the playset line currently sells all that well, though that's just my personal observations.

I meant that it's short for sets belonging to a bigger subtheme (i.e. the new modular Hogwarts), and prevents people from getting the whole picture before investing. For example, you might want the Duelling Club in order to beef up your new (and pretty empty) Great Hall, but you have to buy it within six months and can't know whether next year will give us a different scene set in the Great Hall which you'd like better. Similarly, you might want to wait a bit with investing in the new modular Hogwarts, period, and see what next year brings in order to get a better idea of the entire silhouette, but by then the Owlery, Boathouse, and Potions Class all won't be available any more.

StoneWars did a current EOL list for 2025, subject to change of course. Apart from more obvious sets like the D2C Diagon Alley, this also includes: - the last remaining Hogsmeade set (train and station) - no big surprise here, though it makes me think that we'll be due another Hogwarts Express soon. They have to have one on the shelves and the booknook is a poor substitute for an actual train; - Ollivanders and Madam Malkin's, which means they're fully committing to their super short cycle for the playset Diagon Alley (WWW went out before the third set was even available, and now the second set goes out before there can be a fourth); - Boathouse, Owlery, Hagrid's Hut, Potions Class for the new modular Hogwarts all from 2024 and Duelling Club for the new modular Hogwarts from 2025 (!), so apparently here, too, they're going with "super short cycle in order to induce FOMO and prevent people from thinking too hard about how overpriced these things are"; - Aragog, which means we're probably due another Forbidden Forest set soon; - a bunch of other sets like Dobby, Buckbeak, the Mandrake, and apparently the Durmstrang Ship which aren't connected to anything else. Of course these are all still subject to change. I do wonder how long they will be able to continue with the playset DA at this pace, as the shops will get less and less iconic (barring Gringotts which I'm sure we'll be getting sometime). Anyone starting to collect after this year will already miss both WWW and Ollivanders. That's not really an incentive for new buyers, especially kids!

Sure, but the Guardians are very popular while the F4 are as of yet untested. And the Galactus set is way overpriced with none-too-great figs, for a lot of people the main draw is that they see it as their only chance to get the whole team.

Meh, I can't see it. Why would they waste one out of four slots on the F4 when I assume the Galactus set will still be on the shelves? Those sets would just cannibalize each other. And where are returning fan favourite characters like the X-Men? Or characters the fans have been clamoring for like God of Timelines Loki and Doctor Doom?

Just read that despite good reviews, Thunderbolts isn't doing so well at the Box Office - not horribly either, more like "with luck it'll break even". How do you think this will reflect on both LEGO and the MCU going forward? Will we get even fewer current (that is, non-legacy) sets since the MCU's clearly past its heyday? Or will Disney/Marvel insist on even more marketing (including merch) in the hopes that this will push the MCU back to its former heights? Personally I think a lot will depend on Doomsday. With all the returning characters and bringing back RDJ, they're throwing everything they have into this film. If Doomsday doesn't make a significant profit I don't know what else they could realistically try given the MCU's current status. And I don't see how a MCU where the better-performing movies just about break even while the rest incur losses would be sustainable in the long run.

You misunderstand me. To me it's not a playset if it’s primarily geared at AFOLs. For example I'd argue that the Flying Lesson is a playset (if a massively overpriced one) because it depicts a scene children would like and has the characters to act it out. But it's plainly unrealistic to expect a EUR 250 set to be predominantly geared at kids, and the Main Tower is heavily optimized towards displayability over playability: way too many stairs, no Quirrel, Mirror of Erised in a location that renders all the challenges moot (but looks pretty), inclusion of Kettleburn over actual plot-relevant characters, and so on.

Most UCS sets have minifigs and (a very limited amount of) play functions. That doesn't make them playsets. For example, the 2020 Diagon Alley has the WWW mascot with the hat that can be raised. But it's still clearly a display set geared at adult buyers. The same goes for the UCS Burrow with the Floo function. The Main Tower is in the same price range as the latter and, for me, fulfills the same role between its displayability and the inclusion of rare characters like Kettleburn (why would a child want this particular fig? What play scene would he lend himself to?). Malfoy Manor is a set AFOLs - not children and certainly not their parents - have been clamoring for for years, the same goes for updated figs of Narcissa and Bellatrix. The sets is way out of a child's price range, is a facade maent for display that would probably fall down if you tried to play with it, and what child wants to play "Death Eater meeting" anyway?

Hogsmeade? Why would I count a display set with a list price of several hundred EUR as a playset? Of those you listed, several are pretty clearly meant as display sets like Malfoy Manor, the Main Tower, and both DA sets. And only two (!) playsets are below EUR 50 (Dueling Club and Charms Class). Now compare this to other childrens themes like Friends, City, Ninjago ...