MAB

I bought aliexpress versions of the Iron Hill dwarves and Gondor soldiers, plus a Sauron and Witch King. I think I paid about 80c each. I bought them just for the armour and helmets. I'm not a fan of the minifigure prints so don't use heads, torsos or legs, but if you are painting the accessories they are still cheap enough.

If you know the set numbers, then bricklink, rebrickable, brickset, etc have those numbers. Or weigh them and quote the weight.

The roof on mine is 8x the size of that but yours shows really nicely that the tiles can give a nice pop of colour on even a small set. The scrolls also work well on the arches of the small set. It is good to see how details can be borrowed from big new sets and applied on small old sets or MOCs.

Yeah. they tricked us all into thinking that! Looking at modern SW battle packs, I think $30 with a build is more likely, although two horses in one small set might be pushing it. But I'd take any army builder at this stage. How about once Barad-Dur has gone, a LOTR version of this $10 set... Sauron-mech and Witch King vs 2x Gondor soldiers. Even with multiple repeated Saurons and Witch Kings, I'd go for that. (Joke over!)

I have all the original minifigures so couldn't really justify buying Rivendell, and also have the issue of space to display it. So instead of buying it, I bought the parts and built the gazebo (almost exactly as in the set), a courtyard for the Council or Elrond (mainly the chairs, plus a MOC base and a facade of the buildings and the roof (buildings=MOC, roof similar to the set). It cost me about £60 in parts and fits my display shelf perfectly as it was made to fit. The Shire sounds like they will re-re-re-release Frodo and Sam, and re-re-release Merry and Pippin. If they are in the same outfits, that set will be an easy pass. The original Bag End was a nice size to display with the Gandalf Arrives set, the other three hobbits and a few custom hobbits inc Rosie Cotton. No doubt a bigger set will look great but also take up a lot of space again so if it provides not much new, I'll leave it. For Rosie I use .. hair=Madam Rosmerta, head=can't remember, probably an HP one, body=Endor Leia, legs=plain short. A better torso print would be nice, but my existing one is fine.

LEGO hasn't really followed general inflation as it has become much more popular than 10 years ago. Look at what $80 or $100 gets you in HP or Marvel these days. If they released exactly the same Bag End for today's market, I doubt it would be $98 when LEGO know they can squeeze more out of buyers (or include even more smaller parts instead of larger ones).

The original Bag End was $70 and would probably be $120 these days for the same thing, so an $80-100 version would be not as good as that one. Anything cheaper would probably need to be just a bit of interior.

I don't want another big set (especially for the Shire), and I've already got Bag End. So whatever they do, I'll probably skip it. I've also got all the hobbits and dwarves from the first time around and lots of purist custom hobbits, so even the minifigs won't be interesting for me whichever movie they base it on.

This pretty much sums up BDP and IDEAS for me. But these sets sell, so they'll keep pumping them out.

The warthog standard is good. Are the parts from SPQR war gaming, or are they custom made?

They don't need to adapt though, Technic is doing very well these days with pretty much studless and licensed builds. What they are doing now is very successful. Would that be classed as Technic though, if it was an official set? To me that is mainly system parts, with a minority of Technic parts. Many system sets these days use some Technic pieces for their function but without becoming "too much" Technic. One of the good things about MOCs is people can mix and match with any ratio they want, whereas in official sets they tend to stick to one system with just as much of the other as needed.

If it doesn't include traditional minifigure parts, I doubt LEGO will refer to it as a Collectable Minifigure series, a bit like what they did with the Unikitty series. Even the packaging for TLM2 was changed to say Character rather than Minifigure due to one character.

European kids in a number of countries do very well for SW minifigures by buying comics for £4 or similar in Euros. The last couple of years there have been Sabine Wren, Emperor Palpatine, Coruscant guard, Chewie, 501st, Vader, Clone trooper, Tie fighter, Bo-Katan, 212th, Obi-Wan, scout trooper, stormtrooper, ...

I think that you are better off keeping them in plastic storage boxes rather than soft plastic.

Being able to use (all) PAB towards GWP is a big deal. My orders dropped since they changed it.

Why would you want the air out? You could vacuum seal the bag but that would lead to increased touching / surface area between the plastic bag and the figure. That is more likely to cause stickiness on the surface of the figure than leaving it in air.

Yep, 2014 and 2015. And I imagine they design way more than 12 for the original D&D series.

That is not restricted to Technic though, system sets get built and displayed too. People make MOCs with system parts, people make MOCs with technic parts, people make MOCs with both system and technic parts. Just because some people display their sets built with instructions, it doesn't stop others being creative.

Off the top of my head, we have had numerous fantasy CMF characters that come with figures - black bat, black cat, wolf, dark red scorpion, orange starfish, green frog, red spider and probably others. Whether these are fantasy creatures or not when they come with a fantasy character is debatable. Often animals in fantasy look not so different to those in real life, normally because the fantasy element is in some magical power rather than in looks, so when depicted in LEGO would look no different to a real life animal. LEGO also tends to be fairly traditional when it comes to fantasy in that they put a black cat with a witch rather than putting, for example, a two-headed dog or a bat-cat hybrid, simply because the stereotypical witch has a black cat. However, it may look like a normal cat but it could be a magical cat with special mystical powers or even an alternate form of the witch after she has turned herself into cat form. Similarly the bat could be the alternative form of the vampire, and therefore fantasy rather than real. Is the frog meant to be a prince ready to be kissed, and hence fantasy, or just a real frog that has been randomly paired with a figure that looks like a traditional fairy tale princess? I imagine the frog is there because of the traditional Frog Prince fantasy story.

Because rare vintage LEGO in good condition is in demand by collectors and so is expensive.

It is interesting, I learnt to build in technic first time around with the old studded beams, then had a long lapse of 25 years, then re-learnt to build in technic with liftarms. I find when I use studded technic, I think more like I am building system designs with lots of other system parts, just with technic holes and functions as a secondary feature. Whereas when I use modern technic, I use many more technic parts than system, and don't tend to grab system parts (and studded beams) where they might be the solution. When I started building with modern technic, I did need to follow quite a few official builds to learn how to use the parts, especially how to connect large parts together to get the right angles for what I wanted to build. In that sense, the studded beams are much more system like and felt obvious how to use them if you already are familiar with system. Personally, I don't think either is the right or best way, just different. However, when it comes to the look of the final build, I mush prefer the modern studless designs over the somewhat boxy and studded designs of the older sets. As LEGO has progressed through time, I think most people have come to expect designs to hide at least some of the studs giving a cleaner, smoother look. Some people might remember the (system) Beetle of 2008 (10187). Some people like the studs, but this got a lot of bad feedback at the time for being covered with studs when MOCers were already starting to use SNOT techniques to make much cleaner designs. When the Beetle was redone as 10252 with minimal studs showing, it looked much cleaner. I think the same has happened in technic. Not that it always works, sometimes the gaps between panels look unsightly although as builds have become bigger this becomes less of an issue (but cost becomes more of an issue). I think it is also worth pointing out that many of the "old" technic part range still exists and if anything has had a resurgence recently, just that this has been in system sets and not in technic sets. For example, the humble 1x16 studded beam / technic brick has appeared in 27 sets since 2017 but was in just 18 sets in the previous 20 years between 1997 and 2016. And of those 27 sets since 2017, just 2 were technic sets. I think this is an indication that LEGO sees these as system bricks with holes in, rather than technic beams with studs on.

It was fairly good value in the UK at £100, but also regularly available at 30% off. It was the big set of the range and reasonably expensive for a LEGO set at the time, but nothing compared to what soon happened to set prices and sizes.

The battle at Helm's Deep gave us a great castle set and an expansion pack. The Battle of the Five Armies also gave some useful castle parts although it was rather small and a lot of parts dedicated to the siege engine.

Indeed, some people prefer the City type figures to the more out-there figures. It is still possible to have City type figures that might not necessarily fit into a regular City set but the CMF allows them to exist.

Well competition is supposedly good for consumers, so let's hope they become even more widespread than the markets where they are beating LEGO. If people want technic with studs, they can switch brands.