MAB

I was also able to buy S1-4 on clearance at low prices (the lowest was S3 for 50p) but not in such huge numbers. Similarly I bought 4x boxes of 60 of S6 at £1 a figure. After that it was harder to find heavy discounts in bulk for me, so possibly that is when collecting became more popular. I could often buy the remnants of a box, but not 100s at a decent discount. I don't know if S5 was produced in higher numbers or if it wasn't so well received. At the time, stores here were quite strict about clearancing them as the next series came out and as that was a new series of 16 every 4 months, it might have been overload for some collectors. We also had Team GB at about the end of S6, which added more shelf space pressure in 2012. I felt S5 was reasonably strong. I kept the dwarves, the royal guards, gladiators and the mafia guys and some of the Egyptian queens. The graduates were sought after every summer on BL. The lizards and boxers also sold well. The snowboarder, fitness instructor, little clown and zoo keeper hung around for a while but 1/3 of a series hanging around is pretty average. The others sold OK. It does amaze me how much they cost now and that is part of why I no longer collect them all. By stacking regular discounts (especially WHSmiths privilege club) , I used to buy them for about £1.20 each so now they are about 3x the price. Sure they have better accessories but when it is just a generic figure, I wouldn't pay that much but that might just be that I have enough generic figures for any builds I make. Yet these days, people clear stores out if they see an "excellent " 10% off.

I had the opposite. I only ever saw 1 DnD CMF box on a store shelf. Not a box of sets, just one set! Someone near me must have really wanted them. I could have bought full boxes online, or sets online at lego.com but they don't interest me enough to pay up for random sets.

It could well be that the sets are already in the USA and so have no tariff. Although if not, there are other options if they don't want a high price in the USA ruining the reveal. They could release details for Europe, Canada, Australia, China, essentially the rest of the world - just no USA price. They could go further and release the set for the rest of the world and let Americans wait for a delayed release until or if tariffs settle down. Or just let Americans see the real price with their extra tariffs added on to the base price. Other countries have extra charges such as VAT that get handled that way.

Remove the flask from the roof (which looks a bit naff anyway) and cover the hole that is left, and the alchemist set is pretty much a civilian castle set. It even has a Lion Kinght, Wolfpack, tax collector and various civilians. I think some of these might struggle though. The robot is reasonably small so will at least be a reasonably low price point, but that ship hits the 4000 piece limit so will be incredibly expensive. Even the pretty big sushi restaurant will look quite good value next to it. I like the number of interest points the sushi restaurant has in it, not just the build but the tram and the street section. The furniture looks nice, but again this is going to appear very expensive for a niche interest item and I imagine that one will struggle.

Some are really hard. I bought about 400 of Series 5 on clearance at 66p each. Many were for me, and the others sold on. I think the last Fitness Instructor (sealed) sold about a year ago for £2. I think I still have some Ringmasters and Traffic Cops from the original couple of series somewhere that aren't worth the effort of selling. I imagine that will be the same for the Astronomer Kid and Plushie Collector in 10 years. I don't think I'd buy leftovers on clearance these days unless they were incredibly cheap. Even if they were £1, I think I'd leave them.

While the reseller market wasn't that big, the Spartan was still the first one that was reasonably hard to buy in stores and relatively higher priced on the secondary market at the time than the Wolfpack is now, although this will vary based on region. There were collectors that wanted to get 300 of them. I remember the BL and ebay price at the time was £10-12 (for then a £2 figure) and went to about £15 a year later. It hovered about this for many years and even now is probably only £20-25 for a new one. I had 14 of them, and so tracked the prices for a long time occasionally selling one or two on BL when the price is right. I think the Wolfpack is easier to get hold of than the Tournament Knight and Viking in S20 were, but that was probably effected just as much by covid restrictions than anything else. But it is down to timing, getting to the box first. And yes, this is down to the number of people wanting to buy as many as they can, whether they are resellers or collectors. At least now they are available in a wide range of stores.

And a hood to go with the Nazgul parts sold on PAB.

I've only found three in the wild and two on the bottom correlates with my experience. The first ne I found was not in a green box, they were spread out in a large plain cardboard box. But the second two were in the bottom layer of a CMF box another store kept on their toy department sales counter so I guess hadn't been scanned. I have another six arriving thanks to the previous post to yours with me swapping two wolves and some other animals, so I'll have a group of nine along with a wolf.

There is loads of interest in the remakes of 6285 and 6278, and that is why the secondary market prices are similar for the reissue sets compared to the originals. But those are genuine reissues done just a few years afterwards. The POTC will not be a reissue. That depends what you are comparing. Some of the modern releases of licensed sets are way better than the originals. In Star Wars, the Death Star was pretty much the same, various X-wings have been produced that are way better than the original ones from 25+ years ago. In Harry Potter, modern sets are way better than those of the early 2000s. In Lord of the Rings, Rivendell completely outshines the original theme and especially the original Rivendell sett - the Council of Elrond. It wasn't strictly a re-release, but the same name 10210 Imperial Flagship was way better than 6271 Imperial Flagship. Will the original Black Pearl go down in price? Probably not, but that will mainly be sellers not wanting to drop prices below what they once were. However, the volume of sales of the original is likely to drop. On BL, 20 (new) and 46 (used) have sold in the past six months. If there is a new, larger, more detailed set available at a lower price, the volume of sales of the original will drop. We've seen it with new issues of the UCS Millenium Falcon, Taj Mahal, Death Star, and so on.

I'm fine with what City is. It is a child's theme aimed at children and so has a focus on action rather than a more pedestrian view of life. Adults have the Modulars for building cities. There are now 20 buildings to either buy or use for inspiration for MOCs. City sets can still provide minifigures, printed parts or stickers and other parts to make buildings and vehicles. Other themes such as Ninjago also occasionally provide some lovely buildings or street life type sets that can be used as is or adapted to fit in.

They probably don't care too much about comments but they will look at sales data as a function of time. They know full well that GWP help drive very early sales, and sales create a buzz about the set. Especially if they can get stores selling out in the first few days, they can rely on FOMO to drive more sales for the next few weeks when they restock in a couple of days.

It was Juniors rather than 4+ but I bought the Defend The Batcave set 10672. I think I got it at £20 (33% off). Not bad for the until then exclusive SDCC Batman and Robin that were changing hands for 10x that at the time, plus a free Joker too.

Neither. If you like a set or the parts in it, it is a good set. If you don’t, it isn't. Different people will view the same set in different ways so there is no over or under rating. Just different opinions.

This is because BL had to disable all mainland China accounts, as their government insist that any company holding data on Chinese users must be based or have offices in China. As they don't, Chinese users got their accounts blocked. So many of them switched tgeir business address to Hong Kong (and some to Malaysia) but still ship from China.

I have two spare wolves, if that is enough for a trade. Are there any other animals or minifigures that you are after? I have got a load of dachshunds, Afghan hounds, and probably a goat.

Indeed, we don't know. We do know that for themes they used to design to price bands / price points and probably still do, as they tend to aim for low, mid and high price points within the themes. But for one-offs rather than themes such as this, I imagine they had a few designs for this set at different price points and probably even pitched the same designs with and without extras. For example, they could aim for $200-300 with a single design. It could well be that there was this set without the side builds at a slightly lower price, this, and this with even more side builds at a higher price point. One main design, but a range of possible price points to pitch to the sales team. OK, yes the rumour was probably just wrong. As above, I imagine the designers had a number of variations ready at different price points in the initial stages. Those could have leaked, or the leaked price could have been made up. But once it was in production I imagine they would have decided on the price probably plus or minus a bit. It wouldn't surprise me if they aimed at, for example, $250 18 months ago in the design stages then they decided they could squeeze another $20 based on previous LOTR sales figures.

That depends on what they would have done as an alternative. If they had the same Bag End without the side builds, it would have been cheaper. If they had a larger Bag End using the same number of parts as the whole set, it might still have been slightly cheaper if they avoided using the foil parts. It might also be that they could use exactly the same parts and charge more for a bigger spread out set than a smaller more compact set because customers see more value. I don't think I've ever seen those on shelves of regular stores, supermarkets, etc. When the original movies were out, and again when The Hobbit was released, there were loads of collectables for 'normal' people, such as action figures, mugs and fridge magnets, collector cards, etc. That is the type of reach LEGO would need if it was to do a regular LOTR theme containing small sets. Expensive high-end WETA models are essentially the equivalent of the large LEGO sets, for the more die hard fans.

I don't think LOTR is more popular now than 12 years ago. I don’t think there are more LOTR collectables, for example, available now compared to 10 or 20 years ago. However, maybe LEGO LOTR is more popular, although it is difficult to know as the number of people buying Rivendell and so on might be the same as the number of people that were buying complete series of sets in the past. Two things that have changed are that it is much more acceptable for adults to buy LEGO these days and people are used to paying much more for (large) sets. Those two things combined mean more adults are buying big LEGO sets for themselves. That also combined with LOTR still being popular (at least for adults) mean that big LOTR sets will sell. Whether they would sell even better if they did smaller, kid aimed sets, I don't know. I don't think enough kids would buy them to have a wide release in supermarkets and toy stores, and the drop in quality and size might put adults off as they are now used to big sets. It appears that LEGO like to keep them as premium sets that are exclusive to LEGO and often a premium type retailer, rather than going the HP or Star Wars route and have very wide distribution of kid sets in general retail stores plus premium products that are exclusive. That suggests they don't think the small sets (kid) market is viable and hence there is no need for a theme of small sets when they can do one big set a year aimed at adults instead.

All the parts except the hood have been available on PAB and the hood is in the current Wolfpack CMF. There are loads available on bricklink and the price has been dropping and is now down to about $10.

It is interesting to think back 12-13 years ago when LEGO was in a different position and people did not want to buy LOTR and The Hobbit sets. I managed to buy all the LOTR/Hobbit sets (except for Orthanc) with a minimum of 30% off RRP, often 50% off and on a couple of occasions over 60% off. Since that time, LEGO has done a great job at appealing to a much larger number of people and especially to adults by increasing the complexity, part counts and price of sets.

I expect we will get lots of small parts like cherries, sausages, etc. They are an easy way to make an interior look full and decorated and very cheap to produce.

You said you would want a set with 12 dwarves. Which 12 would you include? And why would you not want all 13 from The Hobbit? Bringing back The Hobbit and putting all but one dwarf in a large set would be a stupid move. And how would new collectors get Thorin?

They have already put the most important dwarf from LOTR in Rivendell, along with one other. And if you mean they should have redone Bag End from The Hobbit movies instead, it would be pretty silly to do a flagship set with 12 dwarves and leave one out especially as it would likely be the only The Hobbit set they do. Possibly down to size of parts. There are some larger parts in Bag End compared to a lot of 1x1 tiles in Rivendell. I guess we will have to wait to see the contents (and price!) to determine value. It will be interesting to see the price per kilogram across the sets.

The main set is Bilbo's birthday celebration, so having a Nazgul as the GWP is not really any closer to the main set than including Smeagol and Deagol. And it might seem a bit lame, given the last GWP was a Nazgul. I've tried to do custom Smeagol and Deagol in the past, the right purist parts don't really exist. So if it is true, I'd be after them.

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