MAB

I cannot see them doing choice of any past sets from the past. More like remaining stock of stuff that didn't completely sell out / get given away. The VIP polybag has been available a few times through VIP points, Dickens, the camera is currently. Are they really going to print instructions and boxes for small runs of past sets, and even redesign them where the parts no longer exist? I doubt it. Even the BDP runs of 10K sets don't tet printed instructions.

And their dad when the kids have finally gone to bed! :-)

I don't see how that would work. What is the point of bringing a license back and doing just a very small range with Eowyn, Witch King, Gandalf and a Balrog, if you do not have a full Fellowship? Or are you saying put the Fellowship, orcs, uruks, Saruman, into the "big" 100 Euro set (hardly big these days) because those small sets would be Frodo based. To me, this would be a worse job than what they did before. Eowyn is relatively minor compared to many other characters and in any new range, they would be putting in the more popular characters first, ignoring what they did a decade before. They wouldn't care about stuff they made 10 years ago, they would care what would sell to consumers now.

Start small. Build a 4x4x4 boulder. Then build a 8x8x8 structure. Then a 12x12x12. If you haven't got the right colours, use your most common colours to practice. It is fine to build red and yellow rocks if you are learning about form and shape.

Nice thorough review. Out of interest, did they just supply it, or has it been sitting for a few years waiting to be built? As it seems odd for them to supply a review set so long after it was released, unless they know it will be out for some time.

Some of the big German BL sellers were selling the torsos for about $1 US back in 2012. Luckily I bought loads then. I hadn't used about half of what I bought, so they were a decent investment. I've sold most in the past year.

I imagine that feels like getting a Christmas or birthday card by email.

Is it going to be that useful? To me it is just an existing part in a less useful colour than those that already exist. Maybe if it had been a more natural redhead colour it would have been useful to me as minifig hair but not bright red.

Well, like most of the animal as an accessory CMFs, it is a nice animal with a boring figure. To me it is a foal that comes with a girl, rather than a girl that comes with a foal. At least the body parts are more useful than some though and we get some more mid length legs.

That looks fantastic. The snow in particular looks very real, compared to the highly aligned snow that sometimes happens in builds. There is also a lot of action going on. The only part I'm not a fan of is the apex of the roof (I think the fourth picture) where the joins don't quite look right. It would also be good to see the whole diorama at once. Individually the builds look great, but I reckon they are even better as a complete scene.

You can tell if the tube has been cut badly, as it often whitens at the ends if it is crushed as it is cut with scissors or chopped in one motion with a thick blade. Whereas someone doing it neatly with a craft knife and rolling it under the blade will produce an almost perfect cut.

If LEGO wanted to attract kids using knights, dwarves, elves, etc then they'd be better off doing kid friendly Castle rather than trying to tempt them with licensed sets from a movie franchise they probably haven't seen. Yet that is not really what they did with LOTR and The Hobbit. They kept repeating Frodo, Gandalf, Aragorn, Legolas, Gimli, Bard, instead of putting in generic no-name army builders. There are very few army builders in sets, compared to the number of named characters. Star Wars, like Batman, always did well with marketing toys aimed at kids under the ages the source material is aimed at. I think it would be rare that under 10s would want LOTR sets, whereas SW is popular even at 4+. Similarly it is unlikely that parents would buy those kids LOTR based items, whereas buying SW is common. I don't really see the correlation between LOTR and Star Wars, they are so different in how they are marketed.

I don't think Witch King vs Eowyn would sell that well (now), unless they were backed up by lots of other sets containing all the other characters again. And how to do that? Would they put 30 or so minifigs into one big set (just for LOTR, that is, not including the Hobbit)? Unlikely outside SW. Otherwise, they have to do a range of set sizes again, including sets like the Uruk-hai wall and Dol Guldur Ambush, to include those figures in context. I thought the Mines of Moria, Weathertop and Orc Forge sets were fine for what they were at their price points. They gave a bit of context without being overly large. I agree it was a challenging task. So much of LOTR is either big landscape or big location, neither of which can be done with a small number of bricks. So instead they had to concentrate on small vignettes. The Uruk wall really got bad mouthed at the time, which was great as it meant it was sold off cheap. But how else to get Eomer and a Rohan soldier into a set and include bricks with it? They could have done a huge hall of Edoras (wouldn't sell well if expensive) or a small bit of wall at Edoras, or a rock in a field ... so the wall extension was probably not that bad an idea. A lot of people thought they should have done the Prancing Pony. But to do that would mean either repeating the four hobbits plus Aragorn or losing other sets they were in. And it wouldn't have been any bigger than Weathertop or Mines of Moria as the bigger price points were taken. I was pretty happy with the first two waves of LOTR. It was the missing third wave that screwed fans. No Witch King (or just his helmet), no fell beast (Smaug style) and no Gondor soldiers. I don't mind missing Eowyn and Denethor so much as they are easy to MOC. Faramir's armour is a bit harder if you want the Gondor tree on it. Its a shame there was no Pelennor if it had come with a Smaug style mumakil. I don't really mind missing the locations though, as they would have been done small anyway. Although Black Gate is a nice (half) set, I still don't really understand doing the Mouth of Sauron and not doing the Witch King. Of course, it would be great if they just did the figures without scenery but LEGO likes selling bricks! If they do anything connected with Amazon's LOTR, it will be a different era so different looking characters. Plus unless they do another 12-15 sets outside of that, based on the movies, they won't be able to cover the subject like before and probably just repeat the Fellowship. Remember it also has a large child age fan base, even 6, 7 8 year olds. The LOTR movies do not have that range of fan ages. The new series is unlikely to have kid fans either. The Great Hall was great for adults and kids, and was backed up by many smaller kid sets too. The more recent adult focussed HP sets tend to be the statuette type sets and art pieces rather than minifig based. A microscale LOTR set like the big Hogwarts set might work, but I'm not sure how well LOTR mosaics would sell if they went that way for adult sets. Buy nine copies of this mosaic to make the Fellowship...!

Why delete the LEGO account if you are worried about losing the IDEAS one? Just don't use the LEGO one and leave it dormant. If you want a different account name, use a new email address for a new account. So long as you are not using multiple accounts to get around purchase limits, I don’t think they care if you have more than one.

From what I have heard Super Mario is selling well, both the nostalgic adult aimed sets and the interactive more playful kid aimed sets. Vidiyo also sold quite well once reduced to a more realistic price (reduced to similar price per part values as other regular sets). They are mainly kid focussed sets, and JW is probably more popular with kids than LOTR. To push prices up, you only need high enough demand from people that are wiling to spend that much, not high demand. Look at the number of people willing to pay 60 euros for a figure. It is actually quite low. That they occasionally sell at that price is not an indicator of high demand, just high enough demand for the very low supply that still remains. There could be millions of people wanting to buy at a much lower price or there might be very few. The high price doesn't tell you much about the number of people that would buy at a lower price.

That's exactly what they did for CMF series 1 and 2. You could bar code scan a whole box of series 2 in about 3-4 minutes and pull out all the Spartans, ready to flip at 6x the price. Hardcore fans could only do their thing if they beat the resellers that make their living flipping things that are cheap but limited and valuable, whether they are into LEGO or not. The way LEGO reselling is now, popular ones would be stripped fast and probably not by a LEGO fan.

Is it purist? No, unless it is LEGO thread. It is purist to cut longer threads as that was often necessary for real sets. But does it matter? If you are happy with it, that is all that matters. If you enter it in a contest and rules state only LEGO parts should be used, it should be disallowed. But if they allow custom strings and stickers and so on for decoration, it is fine.

I find it quite reminiscent of Atlantis, especially the Portal of Atlantis set.

How do you tell the demand is really high? I think the opposite is true, the demand is actually quite low now, mainly because prices have rocketed. Some people are willing to pay high prices for retired sets, but that doesn't mean the demand is high. Just that the pockets of the people that are buying it are deep. LOTR also suffers from being aimed at higher ages than HP and LEGO knows this from first time around. Kids and adults can enjoy HP, whereas LOTR is mainly aimed at older kids and adults, missing out the younger age bracket. Sure they could do a large Helm's Deep set aimed at adults, but would it sell that well given they already did Helm's Deep and without backing it up with other characters from the stories, people might be less interested in stand alone large sets. If they do sets based on the movies again, I would prefer they did a range of smaller sets rather than just one or two large ones (hence missing lots out again) but that is not how their marketing to adults seems to work. If LEGO do sets based on the new Amazon series, I hope they concentrate mainly on that. Of course, nothing stops them from also bringing back the old LOTR theme based on the different era covered in the movies if sales based on the series are successful. Yeah, as LEGO didn't do a dwarf army or a Gondor army, I went for the Koruit ones. I replaced the figures with LEGO, but kept the detailed armour from Koruit. It gives the best of both worlds.

I'm not so sure that would have the effect that some people want though. It would make it much easier to pick all the sought after CMFs so the fastest person would get all the army builders (whether they want them for themselves or to sell on), leaving the less sought after ones sitting on shelves. At least in a blind bag there is a barrier to clearing them all instantly. Unless they scrap the small purchase sets and sell them only as larger sets (for example a series of 12 CMFs) but then it really changes what the product is.

Don't forget the Daily Bugle and Avengers Tower are also Modulars and belong in that row ...! PS, it is not just Americans.

Over the past decade or so LEGO have slowly been catching up with all the cool parts that brickforge and brick warriors did first. Roman soldiers, Spartans, centaurs, LOTR style elves helmets and armour, great swords, and so on

Checkout should tell you how many VIP points you are getting before you place the order. Were they showing double VIP points there? I guess the issue is what do they use for their time/date. I know sometimes UK items don't appear at midnight (our time). Are they using Central European time, or Eastern, or Western, or something else to determine the date? I always assumed they used CET for all European countries , as many are served by the same warehouses whether they are inside the EU or the CET zone or not.

It was easier to use VIP vouchers in the past but, at least for online shopping, it is pretty simple to use them now. You check what you want us in stock, you ask for the vouchers and get them instantly, and you apply them. In store it is slightly more complicated if you are buying sets that might be out of stock, as you have to be in store to check they have stock. As for the rest of the VIP scheme, maybe this is an unpopular opinion, but I like it. They are starting to do one off sets, like the camera, that are not available in other ways through the VIP scheme. This is exactly what I expected when I answered the survey about what customers want from VIP points before they made the change. It is also good that they have done second chance on sets like the VIP store polybag and I have got a few of the prints, that look great. The coins issue wasn't great but there they seemed to underestimate demand. I think it is better now than it was both before the change and just after. Of course, they still do those wallpapers and colouring sheets that they expect people to use points against that makes LEGO look rather cheap but at least we are starting to get some exclusives.

As I said, that was how it used to work. B&P orders have received VIP points for some time now.