MAB

By "their own alchemist's shop" I assume they mean not reproducing the set from parts, but using the blacksmith building replacing the blue roof parts with green.

It is a different scenario these days. Long gone are the times when LEGO needed to persuade retailers to stock their sets. The popularity of LEGO and the number of direct sales through LEGO.com or LEGO stores means they don't have to use reveals at the various Toy Fairs to attract retailers to take their stock.

I don't think it would be as it is easily claimed that every CMF purchase gets you very similar contents - a figure and accessories. They all have an equivalent nominal value. It is not gambling in the sense of 1 in 1000 gets you something worth 100 times the value of other boxes. I imagine the QR codes are primarily meant for internal purposes for quality control so they can identify set boxes once packed to guarantee they are putting correct numbers of each in a box. But of course LEGO know customers use them and if it avoids stock being ripped open to identify then that is a good thing too.

Life of George 2.0

It wasn't only feeling packets, part of the fun of the chase was also trading figures to get the ones you wanted. I must have sent and received well over 500 figures all over the world, trading figures I didn't want to complete series and build armies of ones I did want. Increased postage costs did a good job of pretty much killing that off except domestically. And the common practice of buying a box or buying complete series didn't help either.

I think it is highly unlikely that we will ever see the printed bases again. Not just the raised (and printed) baseplates, but even just the flat printed ones. I think the modern style is now to build the base rather than use a single large piece. That has become almost a standard not just for adult sets but for kid sets too. Plus LEGO knows people used the PPP metric and large baseplates are expensive and obviously just a single piece and so push that metric too far in the wrong direction. As to the remake of the Black Pearl, I reckon it will look stunning with nicely detailed minifigures, and probably look better than the original but also come with a hefty price tag.

It might have also been collectors that wanted to build an army, given those figures are army builders. Or even a few collectors wanting one each that got there before you. Pretty much every series aside from the boxes without bar codes have had some way of identifying them. And if they can't be identified, they get ripped open and dumped.

LEGO fans are used to sets being released on 1st of month, even April.

There is plenty of discussions about rumours and leaks here. It is not allowed to post confidential images but that has been in place for years.

For me, cost was and is a factor but not necessarily the biggest factor. I stopped collecting them all about S14-15, as I realised that I didn't like a lot of them at that stage. I had always collected them all and collected army builders of interest to me up until then. But after too many repeats and boring figures, I decided why bother displaying what I don't like. When you have that many on display, you lose the detail and they just look a bit of a mess. And that led to me selling off all the ones from past series that I didn't really like and also not actively seeking out ones I didn't like in new series just to be complete.

If it turns out to be true, then it shows that what happened in the past isn't the way it must always happen in future or, alternatively, sometimes things change.

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.