MAB

The good thing about the hole being a bit small is that the bearing stays in place well too.

Really? They are £11.99 in other UK stores. LEGO is frequently cheaper in the UK than Germany, especially as we have quite a lot of competition between stores and so get decent discounts. I rarely pay more than 70% of RRP for any normal retail sets (ones that are not exclusive to a particular store). LEGO has been adjusting prices, for example the new Dinosaur fossil set is £54.99 / $59.99 / 59.99€ - so here our £55 set should cost you Eur 62.70. You get it cheaper. Whereas 75229 (Death Star Escape) is £24.99, 29.99€, our £25 set should cost you Eur 28.50. We get it cheaper. Plus the realistic price is probably £15-18 due to many sales. I don't know what the realistic sale price is in Germany to compare to though. I think this is more to do with LEGO's use of fixed price numbers and charging what they can get away with charging rather than trying to make prices "fair" across different countries. However, back to the PAB cup. If they tried to increase the price from £12.00 to £14.50 (equivalent to your Eur 17), then they would simply not sell as well. To make such a price jump on an existing product is hard. As for the GBP sinking, it depends what time-frame you look at it. GBP:Eur has been relatively constant for the past two years. It has risen if you look at only 2 months. If you compare it to ten years ago, it is about the same value. If you compare to five years ago, it has dropped. But then you could just say it peaked in the middle of the decade when the Euro lost significant value in the 2013-15 period. https://www.xe.com/currencycharts/?from=GBP&to=EUR&view=10Y

Even when Coast Guard has been and waiting to come back, then chances are there will be something with a boat / ship in between iterations of it. That was my earlier point, that even though sub-themes change within City, the types of vehicles within them remain fairly constant. There might be different colours or insignia, but the vehicles themselves are constant. So even though there are individual sub-themes that are short lived, they don't feel as short lived since the types of sets are repeated so often, almost yearly. This is where City sub-themes are quite different to the old one-year themes. For example, this Volcano set: Change the trans-orange to trans-blue and switch out the minifigures, and it is essentially an Arctic set just with lime green vehicles.

For me, he has the most versatile pieces in the whole series!

Jewel thief, art thief. ... CMF crooks are obviously high class thieves.

I didn't realise it was going to be knockout until the winner had 50%+ and I assumed the most votes in the ballot would have won, like in earlier rounds. 6 is currently up 10 vs 5 for the rest, so hopefully it can be finished without going to a head to head.

You could have added to the original thread if you wanted, but it doesn't really matter either way. It is nice to see you have acted on suggestions and by doing so come up with an even better design. Having the folding wings makes it good for different poses too, so a good addition.

They are short lived though. They last one year. Similar ideas might be repeated again in 5-6 years time, but each incarnation of it is still short lived.

I was thinking about short lived subthemes - recent ones, like Arctic, Jungle, Deep Sea, Coast Guard, Volcano, etc.

That is great, and I think the colours of the armour are even better than the last one you did. It really looks like it is battle ready.

Yes, pale prints over dark parts do not look good when LEGO does them. Many of the fake companies have better printing density than LEGO. But having a sticker doesn't really help there. Sure the print looks better but you then have the problem with alignment and the edges of the sticker showing, plus the possibility of the sticker peeling or the edges being damaged, and so on.

Probably not for City, as these tend to be quite similar in structure in terms of sets so a bit more formulaic - no matter what the subtheme is, there is usually a helicopter, a big truck, a small truck, some sort of base, etc. They seem to change the colour scheme but not that much else.

This is great microscale, and could be further improved once the new double 1x1 cheese slope becomes available in red for the roofs. The first image is a real optical illusion. It looks like it is on a hidden slope underneath when in reality the base is flat.

I think that is probably the only 'good' thing that can be said about them.

I think that is the biggest issue now. It has both been too long and not long enough. Too long in that people cannot buy Simpsons minifigures on the primary market, so they'd need to redo them to make sales to new collectors (and probably keeping redoing the core Simpsons family, like Han and Luke in OT SW sets) but not long enough in the sense that many fans of the Simpsons and fans of LEGO will already have the sets and they cannot really be improved upon using new techniques. Plus I don't see them doing characters they missed first time around for the same reasons they didn't do them first time around. Skinner, Moe and Barney were the big misses for me.

It is easier to buy a custom centaur body such as https://brickforge.com/products/centaur

Given how many we get in City, I'm glad they haven't done another one in the CMF. Although I still don't understand why all the crooks wear stripy prisoner shirts. Don't they have any other clothes? If they didn't wear prison clothes then they might blend in a bit better and not get caught so easily.

Didn't Series 6 just beat 5 and 15 in the last poll?

At the time, I don't think most of the one year themes were considered that good. Atlantis, Alien Conquest, Galaxy Squad and Pharaoh's Quest were available at a long time for very substantial discounts (50%+) here in the UK, and even MF had similar discounts for most sets, aside from The Zombies. If we were still getting a mixture of one-year themes then I doubt people would remember the old ones so fondly. It is only since they went away that people appreciate them more. Of course, there are always some fans but, for example, Atlantis seemed to be enjoyed by as many people building historical or classical MOCs as it was by people that actually enjoyed the theme for what it was meant to be.

If you manage to damage a printed part, chances are you will also have damaged the decoration on same part if it was stickered. And you cannot replace the sticker as LEGO do not supply spare stickers with sets. Of course, you can buy spare sticker sheets on BL and occasionally from LEGO, but then you can also buy replacement printed parts that way too.

I don't think either have actually increased in value in time though. They both started on the secondary market at about £12-13 in the UK, and have pretty much remained there. Of course, that is a great return if you bought at RRP but the price has remained fairly consistent. The same thing happened with the Spartan in S2. Since about 2012, they have been £15-16 in the UK and he hasn't really risen at all in all that time. So it wouldn't surprise me if the Monkey King remains high but doesn't actually rise that much in the next few years.

Modern stuff is always bad. The PT was taken fairly negatively at the time by adults that had seen the OT as kids, especially Episode I. Give it 20 years and the kids of today will probably see the new Star Wars movies of the future (if they are still coming out) as poor compared to the Kylo Ren era they saw as kids.

To complete the effect, maybe your knight should wear this torso:

Given the similarity in the name and the website name and the number of posts about it, I think they were just promoting their own website.

Yes, I wasn't meaning for purist reasons as most people won't care, just that for collaborative displays where balls are shared often people don't mind mixing and taking back however many (or whatever weight) they put in, but not if they are all mixed up with non-LEGO ones. I've only displayed a couple of times recently and the LUG has provided the balls.