MAB

Ebay, or Facebook or similar local marketplaces. However, "valuable" lego doesn't sell quickly at higher end prices. If you want a quick sale, you'll have to be under the low end of sold prices, and significantly lower for local pickup, even more so if you have no history of selling.

Yeah, for UK the Nazgul torso is now £1.50 instead of £1.03, but still OOS. I was stupid, I put 50 in my cart and was about to checkout but thought I'd just buy the 9 I wanted for me and fill up the cart to £50 with other parts I want, instead of over buying and selling on the excess torsos. As for bl vs pab prices, the high pab prices tend to stop high volume of parts making it to bl but don't always set the bl price. Sometimes a part will be expensive on pab, but if enough sellers have them as it is in a cheap to mid range set, it is still competition between sellers that set the price. If the part is only in an expensive set and expensive on pab too, bl prices are more likely to be similar to (or often even higher than) pab prices. In the case of the flask, it is potentially as they won't sell very well at $2.50. Remember the volume sellers make money on selling volume rather than highest price. If they are paying 50c a piece, selling at $2.50 will give them $2 profit per piece but it will be a slow seller at such a high price and others will get the piece and prices will drop over time. They are unlikely to sell 10000s at that price. Whereas $1 gives them 50c profit per piece and it will likely sell much faster and they can shift them quickly and move on to the next cheap part they can get.

I'm surprised they haven't done a bottle suit costume yet.Ideally green like a beer bottle, but probably more likely red for a ketchup bottle.

Now out of sock!

Nazgul torso has gone to out of stock already. I had 9 in my cart, but all got removed while I was picking other parts.

It depends on the timescale the MOC is displayed. Blu-tak can harden and can be difficult to get out of any holes once hardened and can also leave marks if left on for years.

You can buy small round magnets that just fit into antistuds under a tile/plate. Then put a magnet in the book and let magnetism do its job. Even if you cannot get it to stay by itself in an antistud, if you use rare earth magnets the attraction is strong enough to hold a couple of pieces together.

And the Mouth of Sauron didn't even make it into the theatrical version of ROTK so has zero screen time, yet has two minifigures.

Depending on the theme, sometimes you can pull the minifigs and get a large part of the complete set price just for them. If you know the sets, look the values up on bricklink. Then you can decide if it is worth sorting them or not before doing the work.

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.