MAB

Do you have a picture of the unicorn with those teeth in too?

Use the best quality, thinnest decal paper you can. So of the cheap stuff is really thick and the edges of the decal show when attached.

or scatter 1x1 round plates in either trans clear or the ground colouring behind the figure. Works OK for sandy type landscapes with tan.

That doesn't work though. If you slash the price of a premium product to try to kill off competition, you damage the premium brand.

I think the goal of NK was to make money.

And the bad thing for anyone buying it is that it doesn't show the real set.

Yes it does. People voted for it. There was a business case for it. LEGO made it. They improved the design to increase the size and hence the price, as I imagine just one bike and figure wouldn't have sold as well and would probably have a cost of more than half of this set.

Could you have done a significantly better Mines of Moria, but kept it at the same price point?

No, 31031 had a pooping parrot. Nice dino though, although I don't believe it is for a seven year old. Admit it, you made it for yourself! The poses you've done and the facial expression remind me of the T-Rex in the Ben Stiller movie, Night At The Museum.

It's a good review, but a shame they didn't (or maybe couldn't) compare the actual product against their original submission.

It is very regional, but there are loads of brand names that are used generically. In the UK, we have hoover, sellotape, cellophane, coke, biro, post-its, tippex, tupperware, google, ... loads more too. All brand names that become used as generic names, which is what LEGO tries to prevent.

They've done a good job, the final set looks better than the original submission. I guess it would have been too small with just one light cycle.

And repeats of the ones that did. It's been a long time since the original sets.

These are clear stickers aren't they, not waterslide decals.

Licensed character parts can take a while to feed through into the replacement parts service (not bricks and pieces for sale section, the missing parts section) and this is where brickset gets it data feed from. I think all those parts are for sale on BL.

In Series 6, episode 11 (The Santa Simulation), Sheldon says LEGOs: "... while I sat in front of the fire and tried to build a high-energy particle accelerator out of LEGOs." Howard says it in a few episodes, but Sheldon also says it at least once. And he is always right ...

They might want to, but not do it as they have other things that are more important in the pipeline. More than three series a year is probably not viable. With two tie-in movies this year - TLBM and TLNM - the current slots are taken. Even if they are not as good sellers as the original Disney CMF were, they are important for promoting both the larger sets and the movies.

It depends on how close you want to be to the set. Building that (or any) specific set, it will nearly always be cheaper to buy the set at retail rather than buying the parts. However, if you don't mind doing it in another colour, use different sized windows, change a door, switch out multiple 1x2s for 1x4s or larger, or vice versa, or changing the design of a roof slightly, remove a play feature if you are only wanting to display, and so on, you can often build something similar cheaper than the retail cost especially if you can build using bricks that others do not want. Building the set and something like the set can be very different in cost. For example, I recently built my daughter a dolls' house style house. It looks a lot like the MF Haunted House, similar scale and part count. But it came in at about £70-80, so just about half of the RRP for Haunted House. Now this is like the haunted house in terms of size, part count, and so on but then nothing like it as it is mainly done in shades of lavender and pink with a magenta roof, colours often shunned by most AFOLs and so quite cheap but ideal for what I needed - for a younger girl. That does bring up one of my peeves with LEGO (rather than the community) - availability of bricks across the colour range. Some colours are abundant in 1x2 and 1x4 bricks, so much so that they are very cheap. But try finding the same colour in a 1x1 or 1x3 and they are non-existent, or so rare they are expensive. So bright light yellow, missing the 1x1. Medium dark flesh has recently got much better range, they exist in 1x1, 1x2, 1x3, 1x6, 1x8, 1x12 but miss the 1x4 while having 1x4s with studs on the side, masonry, and log forms. Roof slopes are even worse, some are common in one form in one colour, but don't exist as corners. Whereas the corners will be abundant in another colour but they won't have normal slopes, and so on. That said, would parts packs work? If they made sets like the basic classic boxes in single colours only with a range of parts, would they sell as well as the mixed ones. Bearing in mind that they would probably need to make at least 20 different sets to cover a good proportion of the colours in the lego spectrum, probably not. While they would be good for people wanting specific single colours, they probably wouldn't be financially viable. Plus there would still be complaints that the basic set contains too many wrong parts, and that they want single part boxes in single colours, and those 20 basic sets suddenly need to be 20 different part types in 20 different colours, so 400 service pack type sets. I can understand why they don't make those and have PAB (in store or online) instead. For me it depends on the thread. Personally, I'd like to see wishlist threads completely separate to rumours / future sets threads. These are very different discussions and should not be combined. But also in wishlist threads, language like "LEGO are stupid not to make what I want because ..." or "they would make a mint if they brought back ..." should be allowed to be argued against. If someone says they want classic castle back as they like it, that is fine and there is no argument against it. If someone says they want classic castle back as lego would make a fortune doing it from nostalgia sales to me and people like me, that is different.

I cannot see it. What is the Chi in Aztec culture? I don't think any of the stories are based on Aztec mythology. And why use animals that are not from those parts? Many cultures have some mythology based on animals. Chima is about a civilization in which there are multiple tribes, one of which governs and distributes resource to try to be fair to all for stability and others that try to take power. The fact that the characters are animals is no more Aztec than it is Hindi, Greek, or George Orwell's Animal Farm.

You did. Aztecs were MESOAMERICANS. Have you watched any of Chima? It is not based on Aztec legends.

For UK promos, it is often the other way round. Stores have stock of promos after the online S@H has sold out of them. Also, in store they will often give you the promo after the close date if they have stock still. Online, they won't. Although they do normally give both / multiple promotions, the terms often say they won't. And they can use this later on to remove promotions. They did it recently for the 60th anniversary set, when people were combining it with the £10 off £60+ spend voucher. The cart and order emails were saying that the buyer got the promo, but they were removing them from orders.

How exactly? Are you equating a figure with a bird's head with the "whole" Aztec culture, as in that is all they are, bird mask wearing people? Or did the Mesoamerican's drive Speedorz?

Yes, and in fact if anything, it was last year that was a big drop in growth in terms of revenue but that was still their most successful year ever in terms of revenue. In terms of growth in revenue (not profits), the last decade or so goes like: 2009 22% 2010 37% 2011 17% 2012 25% 2013 11% 2014 15% 2015 25% 2016 6% 2017 -8% That's double digit growth for a decade before 2016, even after the recent drop, they are running at almost 4x the revenue in 2008. With profits every year. Of course, what they have done is cut the number of staff to be able to retain such large profits based on a lower revenue going forward. While double digit growth has been possible in the past, lego is so saturated into (Western) lives now that further growth at the same rate is highly unlikely. Yes, this is probably one of the bigger issues for customers. Less big stores competing for our money means less incentives to discount.

Yeah, totally agree. Although they have overproduced / undersold every year, as nearly every theme will have some sets that need to go to clearance to get shot of them, the balance is normally not too bad. I think part of the problem here is that they have ramped up production in the last few years - not just in volume of the sets but in the variation of sets / ranges, expecting TLM type growth but they have oversaturated the market. Possibly to the point of too much choice. On a very small sample of one (my son), he enjoyed TLBM but decided not to get any bigger sets. He has a few poly bags, some CMF and the odd small set he has been given, but there was so much choice for more substantial sets (30 USD + type sets) and he knew he couldn't get it all, he just didn't want to buy in and has chosen to play out scenes using his old Batman and Joker and his bucket-full of mixed lego (OK, it's boxes rather than a bucket, but I mean his general stash). If it was a bit more of a reasonable line, maybe he would have wanted them. But yeah, the TRU issue will be an interesting one. Will their sales just shift to other retailers, or will they lead to losses for LEGO too? In the UK, one of the TRU-rivals has been offering discounts to TRU loyalty card holders in an attempt to grab their customers at the time they are closing down.

I get the "build it yourself" view and think it is OK to say it if it is in relation to a build. Often what AFOLs want would never be produced commercially, since it would (i) cost too much, as anyone that has MOC'ed a large display will know, and (ii) wouldn't have the market anyway. Plus we have so many pieces available in so many colours, just about anything can be built. Although it may cost a lot of effort. However, I don't get it with minifigures. Minifigures are so specialised these days, that it is impossible to MOC them to the same standard as existing ones, especially for licensed themes. Take LOTR. Of course, it is relatively easy to MOC someone like Eowyn or Faramir from existing pieces and they will look quite good. A Gondor soldier can also be MOC'ed but they wouldn't have quite the right shape helmet. For some, that is a big deal, for others not so much. They also wouldn't have the correct armour, with the Tree of Gondor on the breast plates. Again, for some that is not an issue, for others it will be. However, a Gondor soldier like that would not look as good as a "real" one, he also wouldn't look as good as, say, Aragorn with his tree printing when standing next to him. One would be movie accurate, the other wouldn't. It's possible to get OK, if not quite right. Even worse are characters like The Witch King, where very specific headgear is needed. Sure he can be MOC'ed and just wear a black hood and look like the other Nazgul, but he looks poor in comparison to, say, the Mouth of Sauron where the movie accurate head gear exists. It is not such an issue for non-licensed themes where things don't have to look license accurate but even so, I can understand wanting more factions, or continuity of heraldry across armour, flags, banners, etc. Although, of course, it is unlikely that LEGO would release large numbers of factions at once like many AFOLs want, especially in multiple ranks / styles within a faction, and there would be complaints either way - too many factions with too few ranks or too many ranks with too few factions. Or just the wrong factions. Or the right ones but the wrong colours. In some sense, for some (many?) themes it has. SW, SH, LOTR, ... all those licensed themes have collectors of just the minifigures. Although all those themes also have collectors of the sets too. And kids that like playing with them and others that will break the sets up and add them to their buckets. And some people that like the builds and not the figures. The same is true of non-licensed themes too though. You only need to take a look at the "show us your army" thread to see that. Some people like the non-licensed minifigures compared to the building. I'm not actually sure that the fact that some people are just minifigure collectors and not builders is an issue, no more than people that collect sealed boxes vs builders, or set builders vs MOC builders, and so on. It is not like LEGO only cater for just one group, the minifigure collectors, at the expense of the other. There are large numbers of sets available for builders. I could understand it if LEGO stopped doing brick-building sets and concentrated on minifigures, but they haven't. Some may complain that the builds are affected since the minifigure is the star and the build is just there to increase the price (which again is probably partly true). However, the build probably wouldn't exist, at least at a builders point of view scale, if it wasn't for the minifigures. It is rare that LEGO make something where the build is the star (for a licensed movie theme), simply because often it is the characters that are the stars of the movies. In SW, some of the ships are the stars too, and this is catered for in the UCS series. In some cases the build is the star in the SH range too - however, those sets tend to be high priced and would not exist if not for the smaller sets in the theme that sell in their 100s to kids for every one large set sold. Some will complain the builds are non-existent / too small / too kid focussed but this is necessarily so, without them, the large sets would not exist. Then there are the non-licensed themes aimed at builders, the modulars for example are hardly about the minifigures rather than the build. I also find collecting minifigures can inspire building too. Up to about Series 12 of the CMF series, I used to make an 8x8 vignette for every minifigure. No matter what they were, I took inspiration from the figure. In that sense, the minifigure can inspire creativity in the building side, if the builder wants it too.