MAB

Mine arrived too, thank you copmike!

OK. I seem to remember it selling quite well. I bought a load of hive crawlers at 50% off, and they sold on BL and ebay at full RRP quite quickly a couple of weeks after retirement.

Something is not right here. If they are purged, then the orders are over six months ago. If you owed $50 in fees, then you would have been emailed multiple times over the latter four months by bricklink, telling you that you owe $50 and to pay your fees. And your store would have been suspended months ago for non-payment. You are invoiced end of the month, you get a month to pay and then you get suspended if you don't pay. So you get about 2-3 months to pay from the date of the order to avoid suspension. But as they are over six months ago, you must have been suspended probably three months ago for non-payment of fees to BL. Reading the emails they send also helps. They tell you when fees are due by email. Do you check the email address that you used to sign up to BL? Or do you ignore all email to that address?

In what sense were they a flop? I know they weren't top sellers for the years they came out (City and SW would have beaten them) but they still sold. They were available at discount, but that is true of all themes.

A cracked minifig hand maybe? Although is that still purist.

I've found that there are quite a few good castle pieces in new _and useable_ colours if you look close enough. Such as flat silver ... Flat silver ... Hood in purple ... And many other parts such as King Halbert's crown and beard, the "bots" tend to have quite good silver / grey helmets, then fairly regular stuff like this in black that are not unique to NK ... Would I pay RRP? No chance, but that is true for most themes. But when a good deal comes up then there are plenty of useful minifig parts and quite a few useful grey parts, and the stuff I don't use sells easily to classic space fans.

They'd probably less upset than an adult opening a box and finding the minifigs are not there. :-)

Some of the NK villains are also fantasy theme castle. Plus there are normal historic helmets too, so there is something, albeit small.

How would they know? If the sensor inside the box is exposed to light then it would be resealed inside the box again. They'd have to open the box to find out if the sensor had changed colour. And by opening the box, the sensor changes colour...

I think it was probably more down to availability of parts / colours at the time than any specific link to a real train.

If you aren't going to be able to buy them all, then it is down to personal choice. Go for ones you really want, rather than ones about to retire. Plus I'd wait for promos on the exclusive ones, rather than buying when ready to afford them.

It wouldn't catch the people that fill in the missing weight with dog food or megabloks.

That's really nice. Sand green would probably be better but much more expensive. I think the roof would look better using a combination of 75 degree slopes for the lower part, then the regular 45 on top. Cool minifigs!

Someone at LEGO had the same dilemma and Nexo Knights was born. :-)

Nexo Knights isn't the lowest common denominator. It is inventive, it is something not been done before (by lego). There is also a lot of quality in the sets. Some of the builds and play features are clever. Just because you don't like something it doesn't mean it is low quality. I find it funny how you use "each to their own" twice. In the first case you say "each to their own" about people building Nexo Knights MOCs in future. And then not "each to their own" as you cannot buy classic castle now. Those MOC building NK fans in the future will not be able to buy NK sets (at retail), they will have to MOC based on old parts and sets. Yet you then say there is nothing for you now, despite a large back-catalogue of sets and parts suitable for classic castle. This is exactly what you expect future NK MOC-building fans to rely on, a back-catalogue of NK focussed parts. You have way more to draw on now than the NK fans of the future. Would I like to see more classic castle style sets? Sure. But I don't want LEGO to churn out the same old stuff every year. I like the fact that they are doing something different. Although before they go back to the mainly European focussed classic castle, I'd prefer they did another era and/or another location. LOTR (and The Hobbit) and Castle were not mutually exclusive. There were sets like Dragon Mountain and King's Castle out at the same time as LOTR.

There are definitely better ways of doing spheres at that scale. Take a look at JKbrickwork's Sisyphus for example ... http://jkbrickworks.com/sisyphus-kinetic-sculpture/ If there is no motion in your model, I imagine you will need to get Atlas more human looking to get votes. The pins / joints are not necessary if there is no motion.

Did they finalise all the figure parts yet?

While at the same time I was recolouring my Series 3 CMF elves ears with fleshie paint. :-) I've tried painting out the little neck triangles with fleshie paint, they look awful. A better method is to just remove the print (takes a lot of care) and leave it the base torso colour, or just sharpie it black if the torso can take it.

It still doesn't answer the other question of ... when built, even though nobody can see the holes, why do some of us insist on not mixing up the different types?

If you want female forest elves, you can always pull the heads off the new ones and put them on the forest maiden torso and slope skirt. I'm also a fleshie fan these days and the (sometimes tiny) yellow flesh on torsos will stop me getting them. I can understand it on ones like the shirtless gladiator or weightlifter. But on the French guy, cook, and even the elf, that tiny piece of yellow at the neck is almost an insult to anyone that wanted to reuse the torso with a fleshie head. The burger boy and surfer look perfectly fine without a yellow neck showing on the torso, I wish they could do this as a default. The butterfly girl has details on short legs. And so does Bart Simpson, as pointed out earlier. Short legs can have detailed printing if lego want to do it.

I don't think I have ever seen fake lego parts with the lego logo. Although I am not sure I'd be able to tell. I see plenty of clone brands but none of them (even Lepin who copy sets pretty much piece-for-piece) actually put the lego logo on the parts.

Printing on short legs has already been done, back in 2014.

I found that independent toy stores in the UK often have rolled rather than folded ones. I got a load of Nexo Knights and Friends ones this way. Never seen the SW or other licensed themes like this though.

You can also push the little bit of plastic to one side and give it a tug. Video here ... The soldering iron trick also works (heat up the pin from the top) but for these large ones you have to be very carefully to pull straight or the hole can get significantly bigger.

We don't know what genuine lego will be like in 20 years time though. Their standards have slipped. You only need to look how many cracked torsos and cheese slopes there are these days. Because there is a difference between copying and counterfeiting. If they had LEGO on the studs, it would be counterfeit. But Lepin do not pretend to be LEGO. They are free to make many (but not all) of the parts. Copying sets is a different matter, and is probably what LEGO are trying to prove in court. How do you know they were fooled into buying them, as in not knowing they were fake? There are many knock off minifigures that are way cheaper than lego. That is normally the reason people buy them, as they are much cheaper than lego. I have a few of them, but I was never fooled into buying them. I knew exactly what I was buying.