brickbride

Called it. The high US price might be due to tariffs but they sure didn't waste a chance to jack up the EUR price while they were at it.

That would be a lot, I can't see that. The LotR book nook had one minifig and the HP one had two. The Sherlock Holmes one had five but no licence, and Marvel seems to be on the higher-priced end of licenced themes. I'd therefore expect one or two figs maximum.

Has anyone seen the video of Inaki at One Piece Day in Japan? Check out the giant brick-built Den Den Mushi (with the LEGO logo and everything, so it looks to be actually from LEGO) at 1:13. (Though I do wonder where Zoro/Mackenyu was.)

Let's hope that alleyway has actual walls for him to swing from/to. As the LEGO LotR book nook shows, even that much is not a given.

I like Endgame Thor. I hated the quippy, short-haired Ragnarok version but I could get behind Bro Thor as a plausible bit of character development. Of course then they ruined it all with the utterly unwatchable Taiki movie. To be fair that's quite literally what Wanda tried in MoM and apparently we're still to think well of her. That was my point, though. I don't expect any of the old guard to have a large role but I do expect Marvel to play up their appearances in the marketing and mech. It's not just that characters like Loki and Strange (and their actors) are charismatic enough to make Falconcap look even more worden, it's also that they're massively overpowered compared to him. Strange can do magic spells that affect the entire world; all Falconcap can do is flap his horrendously fake-looking CGI wings and get beaten up by both Ant-Man and an elderly Hulk. If he's supposed to be the main hero everyone else needs to be written out for most of the movie.

The Owlery had five owls, though, which must be pricey given how stingy LEGO is with them (the Owl Post Office with WWW had only two, one of which was the shop sign, and the Owl Post Office with UCS Hogsmeade had none at all unless you count Hedwig). And larger sets having better PPP ratios than smaller ones should be the norm, not a laudable exception. Anyway I just tried to find a comparable set from the new modular system for the Hospital Wing, and like I've said the Flying Lesson seems to fit the bill.

While I would personally find that hilarious (LEGO outright making you pay for empty rooms which you then have to fill with additional sets), I don't think they’ll go this far. I'm expecting another crappy filler module or two, though. As for a comparison, the Flying Lesson was EUR 80. With LEGOflation it would probably be EUR 90 if released in 2026. And it’s partially exclusive and thus probably somewhat more reasonably priced, as LEGO seem to already factor in market discounts. I'd therefore expect the Hospital Wing to be around the same size.

But shouldn't we compare HP to HP feom a few years ago instead? If prices keep skyrocketing and the quality keeps going down that's a legitimate complaint. That the decline may be even worse in other themes is hardly cause to celebrate.

Can I ask why you bought all the sets so early? From what I've heard they"re only exclusive to LEGO in August but will go to retailers in September which should mean some discounts at least.

Stick with Falconcap (who they inexplicably like no matter how little he manages to engage the audience) and in the marketing and merch play up all the appearances from actually well-liked characters (Spidey, Star-Lord, Thor, Loki, Strange?) no matter how small those might be.

Hogsmeade which was initially rumoured to be USD 380 ended up being EUR 380 but USD 400. Given that I doubt we'll see the Pearl having as large a price difference across markets as USD 380/EUR 330. Maybe something like USD 380/EUR 360?

I think it's less the comparison with DA that's bothering people and more the comparison with the playset (Hogsmeade Village Visit). McGonagall had skirt printing then but doesn't now, and the playset included both Mr and Mrs Flume whereas we now only get the latter. That's an obvious decline in quality unworthy of a so-called collectors' edition. The figs in Malfoy Manor also weren't good, especially Narcissa compared to her previous version.

What do we think are the sets for the Summer 2026 wave? Some slots seem to already be taken: - a large (think EUR 200+) expansion for the Hogwarts system (I'd guess Chamber of Secrets) - at least one or two mid-size expansions for the Hogwarts system, possibly one inside and one outside the castle proper - at least one interior-only expansion for the Hogwarts system - another playset Diagon Alley entry (I'm expecting Flourish and Blotts and a price of at least EUR 100) Anything else?

You beat me to it but for anyone else interested it should be 973pb5433c01, last seen in the Tudor Corner modular. @BacktoBricksYou'd still need the exclusive sticker sheet in order to recreate the GWP, though.

I'm not buying it either but I actually thought the Dursley House was the most reasonably priced HP set we've had lately, given how much the previous version was and the fact that this one closes up. :-) But stuff like the Malfoy Manor facade with crappy figs for EUR 150 is a big no-no for me.

Huh. That must be a regional thing within the US, then, given how many people boast on reddit that they buy their LEGO from Walmart for 50-70% off. In any case the assigned value of GWPs is usually overstated (such as here - that's the price of the Charms Class, which has three figs not one). Personally I never buy directly from LEGO if I can help it; there are a couple smaller exclusive sets I might even have wanted, but the nearest store is several hours away and they charge quite a bit for shipping, too, which adds to their already overstated list prices. 10% (at maximum) off that isn't much of a draw. The GWP thresholds are usually way above what I'd spend and I'm sure I'm not alone in that given how many blogs give recommendations for "filler" items to reach the tresholds. I'm at a point where I've made peace with the fact that I'll never own the majority of those sets that interest me because they're all a) too expensive or b) not readily available (i.e. GWPs). But you WILL have a Hogwarts without them because even if you buy all the sets there's no way for you to cram them into the Most Complete Hogwarts Ever. First of all I don't think the show has much if anything to do with it; I very much doubt they'd reboot their Hogwarts Castle based on that since the layout will probably be identical or close to it. Second - we already have the list for the first of two 2026 waves. The only Hogwarts Castle modules on that are the Sorting Hat (another wasted slot IMO - of course you can call it something else but the fact remains that it doesn't give us a new location) and the Hospital Wing. Which at a reported EUR 100 will probably include one or two other small rooms at the most, comparably to the Flying Lesson at EUR 80 (which is partly exclusive and was thus probably more reasonably priced, since LEGO does seem to factor in market discounts already). From your list that still leaves two large (we're probably talking EUR 200+) sets - Viaduct Entrance with Chamber of Secrets etc and Astronomy Tower), one mid-size set (Viaduct), and two small sets (RoR again, and Lupin's Class). No way can or will all of these get done within the second wave of 2026, if only because most parents wouldn't shell out for two large sets in one wave or even one year. Those have to be spread out for sure. And then we're still missing a bunch of other plot-relevant stuff (such as Moody's Class, Lockhart's Class, Prefects' Bathroom, Sirius Black's Cell) inside the castle not to mention a bunch of stuff on the grounds (Quidditch, Whomping Willow with Ford Anglia - LEGO love that damn car! -, Triwizard Tournament tasks if they even go there, Forbidden Forest, Care of Magical Creatures Class). I do think that @Ferders list is too comprehensive, I doubt we'll get many teachers' offices or that any House other than Gryffindor will get their dorms, but there's still quite a few sets to be squeezed out. And I've already omitted everything which is canonically part of the castle but not really plot-relevant such as Binn's Class and the various other classes we only hear about in passing. If they were in a rush to finish this thing we'd be seeing it in the set names for January 2026. So either this reboot will last longer than the previous ones or it won't be complete. I don't see any other options.

Doesn't matter much since the stickers at least are exclusive. Since I don't collect the new Hogwarts system I don't care either way. But I do wonder who this is meant for. The new Hogwarts sets all aren't exclusive or even part-exclusive except for the Flying Lesson (which doesn’t make the spending limit) so it would be unprofitable to buy them for the GWP, and people who buy other sets (such as DA which goes EOL this year) might not have much use for it. Is LEGO trying to encouage resellers?

German YouTuber Held der Steine has a video review up of the HP booknook. Near the end he compares it side by side to the Reobrix one and the LEGO LotR one. Until then I hadn't realized that the two LEGO ones aren't remotely the same size - the LotR one (for all its many faults) is much taller than the HP one. Do the designers not talk to each other? I cannot imagine that displaying both on your bookshelf would look good and that's without factoring in the Sherlock Holmes one, too.

Just found the lifestyle pic comparing DA and Hogsmeade side by side. Wow that's a bad angle, whoever decided to put WWW in the middle really did Hogsmeade no favours at all (since WWW is the only DA building without much of a sidewalk in front and therefore looks even more massive than the others in comparison). The Three Broomsticks is the only Hogsmeade building (barely) higher than WWW and that's without accounting for the many slanted roofs taking away so much space. Or, you know, the fact that DA has one more module. If you put the two sets up side by side and tell visitors that they cost basically the same (assuming you bought DA early before the price increase) it's like a textbook definition of LEGOflation.

Ugh not Garp again. I love the Netflix adaptation but I do think Garp and Koby got too much screen time in season one to the detriment of everyone else. I was hoping we'd be done with his waffling over whether or not to stop Luffy for at least one season. That said, consensus over at the usual place seems to be that a February 2026 release date for season two is likely, so let's all cross our fingers that the wait will be over soon! I'm really not a fan of LEGO doing this (same with the HP chocolate frog cards and then portraits). The randomness completely defeats the purpose of "Collect 'em all". With One Piece it's even worse because while chocolate frog cards are at least supposed to be random even in Canon, storywise you'd really need specific wanted posters for specific settings - i.e. Luffy's poster needs to be at the Baratie; why would Zeff put one up of Kuro or Alvida instead?

Consensus is that the Sorting Ceremony will be like the Duelling Club, i.e. yet another set you can replace the original contents of the Great Hall with. That would make it the fourth one (the Great Hall, 2024 AC, Duelling Club being the first three) and that's part of what I meant when I said they've been wasting slots. I really cannot see how we'll get anywhere with this Most "Complete" Hogwarts system ever in a reasonable timeframe. They could, but there's two problems with this. One, like I've said they've been wasting so many slots already - shouldn't they concentrate on giving us additional parts of the castle instead of redoing things like the Great Hall interior or the RoR again and again? Two, we now know that the RoR, closed up, equates to a single small slide-out module. I could actually see them doing it in another set like you've suggested so you can then replace it with the GWP. But given how crappy those placeholder modules tend to look and given the space constraints I cannot see how they would do the training or Fiendfyre version without it looking very bad. Maybe the Vanishing Cabinet as a stand-alone, especially if HBP Draco happens to be part of the set already, but nothing else. By the way I (somewhat to my surprise) like the hammock version, mostly because of the hammocks. They should sell this for EUR 10-15 (which sounds about right for one fig) or even EUR 20 if they include two more figs, and I bet people would buy it. But that's how it's been for some time; more and more I've been feeling that LEGO keep their better and more creative designs for GWPs (that is, marketing purposes) while regular customers are stuck with their second best.

I don't expect them to. For one thing these versions would still all have to be called Hogwarts Castle: Room of Requirement and if two or more were available at the same time it would lead to confusion. For another, the way they've been going about things with the Most Expensive Hogwarts Ever, we have a TON of ground still to cover. They've wasted so many slots on things with barely any story relevance already, I really cannot see them doing the same location two or three times. That said, I agree that the hammocks version is less appealing than the training or the Vanishing Cabinet or the Fiendfyre version of the RoR. But it easily lends itself to the slide-out module format and hasn't been done before which is probably why it was chosen.

Am I the only one who thinks the Death Star's box art is extremely misleading? I was staring at the first picture and couldn't see a single stud, so I figured that LEGO had gone all out and made a giant new half-dome piece to cover the entire back of the set. Which would have somewhat justified the price, and I wondered why people weren't excited about that. Then I looked at the other pic (the back of the box I assume) and nope, it's a slice, not a half-sphere. I wonder how many people will pick this up in a store fully expecting it to be a half-sphere if not a sphere based on the pic on the box. You think HP these days is priced fairly? Boy am I glad I'm not a Star Wars fan. You guys seem to have it even worse but since 2018 we"ve gone from decently priced playsets to EUR 150 facades with crappy minifigs and modular prices for half-empty sets where you need to buy a bunch of other sets as add-ons in order to complete them. Not to mention the new UCS Hogsmeade set.

I fully agree with this, and I do think that recreating the characteristic roof shapes with slopes instead would have elevated the design and made it look more polished and less flimsy. But LEGO these days doesn't care about that - it just has to look somewhat like the original while being as cheap to produce and using as few parts as possible. To be sold at premium prices of course.

I know how you feel. I do love LEGO but these days, more and more sets seem to be streamlined by the controlling department based on "How little can we get away with?". To give just one example, the D2C DA had shades of this too (especially the Daily Prophet office which is inexplicably missing a floor) but there were also plenty of aspects like the many built shelves, the leaning front of QQS, the storage area at Ollivander's, and the entire WWW building with the figure inside where you felt like the designers just wanted to build something cool without caring how many parts it took. These days I rarely get that feeling from a HP (or generally LEGO) set. Instead the sets feel like they've been downpared to the bare minimum before release. Like with all the minifigs missing printing (especially on skirts!) where we already know LEGO can do better. Or those hideous white doorframes in the Astronomy Tower because tan would have added a few extra cents to the budget. Or those stupid and impractical grid plates in the 2021 modular Hogwarts where you can't pose minifigs or build anything, really - I've recently built the 2021 Flying Lesson and through the instructions I could pretty much feel the designer trying to design around the grid plates in order to eke out an extra stud or two to work with. I don't think that's much fun for the designers and it's not much fun for the customers either. And then there's the blatant cash-grab that is the new modular Hogwarts where you pay through the nose to get a half-finished product filled with placeholders, and then have to pay some more in oder to beef it up with add-ons. I know a lot of people are getting tired of the price discussion but to me it's not just that list prices are too high these days (although they are), it's also the growing discrepancy between LEGO marking itself as a premium product and what is actually delivered. Pretty much every set description has phrases like "treat yourself" or "spoil yourself" in it but an overpriced, underdesigned product doesn't feel like much of a treat to me. And there's all those lifestyle pictures where people proudly display their sets in their home, but who wants to display an expensive sets full of stickers that only looks good from the one angle they use for the box design? Again that's perfectly okay for a playset - if the price matches what you get, and these days it usually doesn't - but if you pay hundreds of euros for a supposed display object it had better look good from all angles.