MAB

2015 had the spooky CMF series 14. 2014 had the IDEAS Ghostbusters set too. If they did horror again I hope they either do non-licensed like MF and the various CMFs that have appeared over the years, or go 18+ and do more modern horror characters.

I'm completely purist for bricks / other parts, except for minifigure accessory parts. I use a lot of brickforge and brickwarriors parts, and also buy knock-off brand minifigures for their accessories. I normally replace the figure with genuine LEGO, while keeping the third party armour or accessories. I will also cut, glue and paint minifigure and accessory parts but not bricks/other parts.

This is pretty much why I wrote it. It is useful to know about reselling practices even if you don't resell. I do a bit of set reselling but it is more at a level of funding the hobby than making an income. But I also do it by parting out sets / minifigures to get parts I want for builds. It is very useful to know what sets are being quick flipped or stored longer term. I find some sets (such as HP and SW) are good castle parts packs and have very good return on the figures within so are worth picking up as almost free parts packs once the figures are sold on, whereas other similar looking sets with similar parts in are not so good as parts packs because the minifigures don't sell as well and the parts are far from free. Similarly, knowing to avoid picking sets with minifigures in that are repeated in many sets that are being stored is handy to know, if I am going to store those minifigures away for future sale once the line has ended. So yeah, it is useful sometimes to know about what people are storing away, or are going to target, even if you are a collector and not planning on reselling. And to do that, you need to read about reselling. If all the resellers go elsewhere because they get abused / snarky remarks / constantly told they are bad people and bad for the hobby, then that information goes away. It all comes back to the same thing - if people gang up on someone else because they do something different, those people tend to go elsewhere. Whether it is people that collect sealed sets and never build, or resellers (of which there are many, many different types), or people that like kid themes instead of adult ones, or people that like Bionicle, or digital rather than physical builders, or people that like fleshies instead of yellow skins (or vice versa) and so on. They are all part of the LEGO community, whether people like it or not. Hate on one group enough that that group go away, and they still influence what happens, you just know less about it. There are so many different types of reselling practices. Some are bad, but some are good for collectors. People buying on day 1 purposely to gouge on day 2 is often seen as bad (but only bad by the seller, not the buyer). People buying sets to sell off the minifigures and keep the bricks is good for them, and good for minifigure collectors. But bad if someone else wants the whole set and it goes out of stock. I have a lot of 10+ year old sets that I bought on clearance at the end of shelf life. Those sets could have gone to kids, been opened and used, enjoyed for a while, then parts lost, mixed into bins, instructions lost and torn and finally sold off by the parents as bulk boxes. Occasionally, those bulk boxes may be bought by a collector that can slowly piece together an old set again although often stickers are missing or parts are dirty and damaged and an important minifigure has a chewed head. Instead they went to me and collectors today can buy a new boxed set, with a perfect set of bricks and instructions inside and the joy of just building it without having to sort it all out first. I see that as a good thing for the collector. Of course, it is good for me too. I don't do it as an altruistic service. I bought them for profit. If I did do it altruistically, and sold them at RRP or even what I originally paid, chances are the person buying it would then sell it on. I've seen it happen, I've passed on decent deals to someone else at cost price or RRP as a favour only to see them sell at the real market value. And in that case, I'm the mug for selling below the current market value - even if I made a profit too. I think that is what people often forget when they complain about reseller prices (whether "good" or "bad" reselling) - sales only take place when both the buyer and seller agree on a price. If buyers don't buy, sellers cannot sell. The complaints of "you are price gouging" may be true, but the seller is only selling at what someone else is willing to pay at that time or they are not selling at all. Who is to blame there, the seller or the buyer? Especially on the quick flip price gouging behaviour, if buyers were willing to wait for sometimes just a few weeks for items to return to stock at RRP instead of paying above RRP as they must have it now, the whole practice of buying early to quick flip fails and would not occur. The market only exists because of the need-it-now buyer. Yet some of those people will be admired by other LEGO fans as they are the builders, even though they are partly responsible for the market behaviour. Yet only one side gets the abuse. That is why I often think people hitting out at people selling LEGO for profit are often missing the real problem and only blaming one side. And the big thing that is also missing comes back to LEGO and not the people - the lack of stock at release time.

There is a newly recoloured part good for medieval latrines. I think Pomfrey's skirt is Leia's existing one and it is a shame the torso has the big broach / hourglass pin. It would have been more re-usable without it but I guess it was always going to be there. The headgear looks good though.

It is actually quite amazing how reselling has changed over the past ten years. It used to be that you could buy just about any set as late as possible and sell it after two years or so and make a little profit. If you picked well, you could double or treble the price. Rarely did you lose out. LEGO didn't seem to mind it, as many resellers only stocked up at the end of shelf life, when LEGO had done selling those sets anyway and often put them on clearance. Now that is much less common. If you buy at full price and hold, chances are you will not make much at all after all fees and postage is accounted for. Often barely break even. It is probably partly re-releases or remakes, and partly just the number of sets produced now that there is always something else new to buy. Another big factor is the apparently low volume of sets LEGO produce at the start of the sales run which means there is an earlydemand/supply problem. I don't think fakes are that big an issue. People wanting to pay a low price for a fake are unlikely to buy a retired set even for a modest markup any way, and there are people willing to pay for the real thing. So this has made resellers change their behaviour. Instead of buying near retirement and holding, the alternative is to buy early (in quantity) and quick flip instead. A lot of popular sets are targetted and go out of stock on release and, with LEGO's current popularity, enough people are willing to pay above RRP to get them quickly. It doesn't matter that many people will wait, there are still enough that want it now. Of course much of the early demand is from people wanting to build the set, but you only need to read reseller forums to know that it is also down to reseller demand. There are discussions (on certain website forums, not here) about which sets to target, and likely resale prices, as this only works if sets go out of stock and remain that way for weeks / months so some cooperation is necessary. Buying on day 1 for resale used to be a stupid idea, as you had to hold for a long time to be able to sell it for profit, and miss out on any future discounted sale prices, aside from one or two very popular sets before Christmas. Now, it is very different. The "good" or at least "not so bad" practice of waiting until retirement (when many people that want the set will have already got it) then holding for a few years has been replaced by the "bad" practice of getting in first in as large a quantity as possible and quick flipping to those that missed out and want it now. It was about 10 years ago when LEGO tried to stop the hoard and quick flip reselling after the Green Ninja fiasco when there were lots of parents' complaints about the prices being charged on ebay (and elsewhere) in the run up to Christmas and no stock availability at LEGO. What LEGO tried to stop by trying to identify quick flip resellers is now probably the most profitable form of reselling, because of the way they have changed the long term market with remakes at the same time as creating high demand but low supply at release for new sets. Many reseller discussions used to be about what retiring sets to buy. Now it is more about what soon to be released sets to buy, as that is where the real money is.

Often people will jump in and complain people are buying for investment and talking about it. Not so much here, as EB is not great any more for discussing good investments. Possibly because resellers have moved elsewhere if they are made to feel unwelcome. There have also been threads about bricklink sellers (or other marketplaces) complaining about prices charged there. Personally, I don't care what people buy and whether it is genuine. Especially if I am going to cut and paint minifig parts, for example, I think nothing of buying a fake of that minifig. But if people are happy with buying fakes of retired sets to beat reseller prices and discussing it here, then I see little difference between that and buying fakes of current sets to beat LEGO's prices or even buying copies of MOCs where the design has been appropriated by a knock off company. But then I imagine most people won't care about fakes harming resellers' sales, but that it is a worse offence to buy fakes of current sets and even worse still for MOCs.

Different people, different viewpoints. Saying someone "only collects sets for profit" could also be seen as abusive towards them, as if they are not a real LEGO fan if they sell LEGO too. I doubt many pure resellers with no interest in building hang out here, as there are much better sites for reselling info. I sell LEGO sets that I invested in in the past (and yes, it was invested, I buy some sets purely with the intention to sell on and not to build), and resellers sometimes get abusive messages for doing that either in the forum or by personal messages. Yet without resellers, no current fans can get the joy of opening a sealed older set. Just today I sold someone a Black Pearl, and he was very happy to get hold of a set he didn't have in his teens but can now afford. And of course I have profitted very nicely from it. Good for him, good for me, no difference to anyone else.

From the precise angle, I think they mean the technic angled connectors, although I've never had a problem with them.

Based on past distributions, it seems more likely that we'd get 4-6 sets aimed at kids, or one big one aimed at adults / older kids. I don't think they can really test the waters with such a timescale, they need to do it or not do it. As to longevity, it is likely the merchandising (whether lego or other brands) will decay with future movie releases. Unless they do something really special and different with each story, then more, more and yet more Na'vi vs humans in mech suits won't make for either good stories or, more importantly here, interesting sets. LEGO messed up Minions, they jumped in very late when people were bored with Minions merchandising. If they do only a couple of Avatar test sets first, people are likely to be bored of Avatar merch by the time they come to do more sets.

^ Magnets.

If you are paying $5-10 then I reckon you'd get a $5-10 set and no more. So probably something like a polybag or a MMMB set.

Yes, I know. There will be many other unequal costs too after averaging over customers in a particular nation, such as warehousing and distribution, customer support, website and translations, and so on. I was pointing out equal prices across the EU after (unequal) tax was included is not the same as equal prices across the USA before (unequal) tax is added.

It will be interesting to see if these parts are and remain CMF exclusives, or if they also start appearing in regular sets too.

They do have different prices in different regions of the US, after applying different sales tax rates. Which is why consistent pricing across the EU is odd, as VAT rates are different. Equal prices in Germany and Portugal means that lego gets less per set when sold in Portugal and more in Germany.

Good luck with that price rise LEGO!

A bad nose bleed. Or extracting juice from berries by headbutting.

Yes, I just checked. It was another designer that had a similar model train based on the same movie get to 10K but didn't pass.

Didn't this already get to 10K, or is this a new version?

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I wouldn't buy the LEGO hat or official motors. If you are going third party for the controller board, you might as well use generic motors too. For the parts, I'd use bricklink and buy technic bricks (with holes) some larger wheels and a range of gears. Technic bricks are often more useful than technic beams as they are studded and so act more like regular bricks for building the structure. Or look in the SPIKE sets inventories and buy the parts you might use.

Same reply as to your other thread about the same thing. My feedback would be at 50c per image / figure, forget it. You can upload an image of unknown figures to the bricklink forum and people there will identify them quickly and accurately for nothing.

What one? Do you mean The Titanic? If so, the set has nothing to do with the movie.

16x16 are quite easy to get off a baseplate. Use the pointy end of a brick separator and lever it.

If they were going to start producing older sets again, why would they do it for just VIPs? If there is money to be made, they'd sell them more widely and not just to people that have given a little bit of personal data to LEGO to use for marketting purposes.

There is already an existing long running thread on this in the correct forum (historical forum), that you posted on before starting this one. Is there really a need to fragment discussion like this?