MAB

These look great. I use the armour and weapons and often sell on the bodies cheaply for kids to play with but these show a paint job can transform them. I found just a coat of Vallejo flat/matt silver on the Gondor army parts toned down the very shiny silver finish. The double dagger blade is very effective.

Only if they agreed that with Warner, as that is who they license it from. But that license is very unlikely to be that they can make anything and everything they want. There will likely be a stipulation as to how many and the types of sets they agree to produce over the lifetime of the agreement.

Sure, they could make them if they had the agreement to make them. The sets they have done so far suggest that they were aiming for the premium adult market rather smaller sets. They would exclude smaller sets if they didn't originally plan to make them and didn't get the agreement to make them. Remember these agreements are usually made for multiple years and they don't meet every few months to come up with variations to what they agreed. It may well be that they didn't plan to make them as they didn't sell so we'll first time around in supermarkets and toy stores, and that with the increase in adult interest, it is better they do big and exclusive sets only.

You could probably get rid of it on ebay. Be upfront and say that it is untested and include some photos of any possible corrosion to show the general condition. You can test continuity in individual pieces using a battery, wires, an LED or small bulb but it doesn't guarantee that there is no surface corrosion, and sometimes the connections get corroded too.

Think about the other person's perspective. They have created something without knowledge of yours and put it up for sale. Only to be contacted by some random person that has also made a similar model telling them that they have copied it and asking them questions about it. That would affect their enjoyment.

Is it the blue or grey 12V track? With metal conducting rails. There is certainly demand for it although most of the basic parts are not worth very much. If it has been in a loft, you might find the rails have corrosion and need a good clean before it works again.

I really hope they don't do Animal Crossing as a CMF series. I prefer they'd follow the Mario model, and do it outside of the CMF. It would work for both CMF collectors and Animal Crossing fans. They could pump out endless numbers of series of 8 characters or whatever, and keep going if it works and stop if it doesn't. If it takes a CMF slot, it gets boring for those that like different CMFs, and for Animal Crossing fans, it would give more characters overall.

Have you ever thought about how you are taking the fun out of it for others? Somewhere else on the internet there could be someone saying they have designed a Speed Champions style version of the car from their favourite movie and put the instructions up for sale on RB. Someone else selling instructions for MOCs is harassing them saying they have copied their version and are trying to get it removed, even though they hadn't seen or bought the other one, the parts lists are very different and RB have said that they do not believe it is a copy.

Some of my best retail deals were the Tesco misprices of about 2012. Portal of Atlantis, £3.49, technic pickup truck about £7.50, Toy Story sets about 90% off, Captain America cycle £2, Endor battle pack £2, and so on. Too many to remember! And then there were cheap prices for individual parts from bricks and pieces. Palantirs 53p, Sabine Wren helmet 80p, Ghostbuster torsos were free, Dain torsos 53p, again so many.

Yes, and what I am saying is that there is usually an agreement in place about what type and size and how many products they will produce far in advance. They don't "have the licence" and get free rein to produce and sell whatever they like in whatever numbers they want during the licence period. There will be strict agreements over the details of set sizes, production numbers, characters to appear, descriptions of proposed sets, and so on. If they had an agreement to do, for example, 3 premium ICONs sets in the Rivendell price band for sales aimed at adults and another 8 brickheadz, they don't get to make kids sets just because "they have the licence".

I'm not against charging for anything. The point is, as soon as you start charging it becomes competitive as you have something to gain/lose by selling more/less, whether you want to be in the 'competition' or not. Why does it take fun out of the hobby? If he hadn't have made his version, you'd have made yours and listed it at RB. He has made his, and you've still made yours and listed it at RB. So no difference in either case. He hasn't copied yours, as confirmed by RB, so this is honest competition yet you still imply the other designer has done something wrong.

That depends on what they agreed to make. Agreements like that are rarely that you can do as much and whatever you like with the property. They will have agreed certain parameters.

The new brickheadz could also be a vip gwp with Barad-Dur, despite being a retail set. They have history here.

If you don't want to compete with anyone, then don't try to sell instructions MOCs based on popular movies or other intellectual property that other people are likely to make MOCs for. There is no code of conduct that the first person to make a MOC of a licensed object at a particular size has more rights than everyone else to make money from it or can stop others making their own versions. If you don't want to compete for sales and build MOCs for a hobby then give the instructions away. More users will download and enjoy the MOC than when you are expecting payment for it. There are of course rules that MOCs must be your own, and rebrickable does remove MOCs where they are reported if they have been directly copied from someone else.

It looks like arms and armour were good things to invest in, seeing as they can now afford a much bigger store with loads more stock! Lovely little build.

It depends what you mean by easy. It is not easy if you have to get it all right now. Whereas if you are in it for the long term, it is quite easy to find new figures or parts to add to a LOTR collection. I bought a lot of CMF S3 elves, for example, when they were cheap, around the time of the original LOTR sets came out. A few years later I sold the heads and hair, and git about what I paid for the figures. Another year, the Legolas head from Dimensions was cheap on PAB, so I bought a load of those. HP and Owen torsos from JW gave a source of cheap fleshie hands. Cheap heads from HP theme now give more variation. If you play the long game MOCing minifigures is possible. Similarly, Gandalf and Eomer were very cheap in 2012/13, as they were in small sets and people tend to only want one or two. The reasonably generic parts for that type of figure are very useful for new figures whether in you are building for LOTR, POTC, POP, SW, etc. If you keep your eyes open in other themes, there are always useful parts to find.

Yes, the PAB price was very high for the tge headgear. Click the image, there is a full breakdown of the customisation of the parts. Or see the post in the minifigure customisation workshop section.

I think I'll buy two or three of the new one, as that is all I will likely use in a moc. As it is a CMF part, I wonder if this new appearance will be it or whether it will also appear in regular sets.

It will likely depend on other variables too, such as temperature, temperature fluctuations, light levels, location (chemicals in the air from food, cleaning or deodorant, etc) , as well as a good dose of randomness experienced by the part during production.

Sure, but then you can also split bigger themes up, and collect only LOTR and not The Hobbit. And in SW you can just go for your favourite movie or trilogy or TV series. It is also not necessary to keep up with everything they ptoduce. If you are an OT collector, once you have an X-Wing, a Millennium Falcon and a landspeeder, then you don't need to buy the next one or the next one. Plus you can have an X-wing, a MF and a landspeeder bought years apart if you want to spread the cost. Lots of sets means spreading the cost - and that wasn't possible with the original LOTR. You had to buy it all within two years or so. The same with figures. You can choose to have however copies you want of the same figure in slightly different outfits. You don't have to own every figure variant or every vehicle just because LEGO produce it. One good thing about them producing so much stuff is that it comes down to deciding what you want, rather than needing to have it all. After all, they are compatible toys that you can mix and match rather than collectables with a checklist. Harry Potter has gone like that too. There are so many similar sets with a bit of building and so many variants of Harry, Ron and Hermione, you don't need them all to have the core characters and a display to put them in. For many people, that is enough without having to own everything.

This isn't a fact. It wasn't like that Bionicle idea would have been made if The Office or Seinfeld wasn't passed. If LEGO thought that Bionicle would have sold well as part of IDEAS then they would have made it, with or without licensed sets being made. It sounds grim to me too. Yet if they made a $50-100 set, it would probably attract huge numbers of buyers that would not normally buy LEGO. Especially if you could slot your phone in it and play her songs.

You don't have to have it all though. Just like you can enjoy Castle or Pirates without owning every set. In that sense LOTR and The Hobbit are quite bad (at least the originals) as you have to own just about every set to own the main cast. It would be a bit weird to have 7 out of 9 of the Fellowship or just 10 of the company of Dwarves. Obviously now you can buy the big set and be done in one go.

I imagine it is because the masonry brick tends to get used mainly to represent bricks in a building, and usually only in sets where the build is somewhat natural coloured rather than very brightly coloured kid sets.

The CMF have been a great source of new parts over the years. It is a shame that some only get used once or twice and never appear again. I really wonder what the demand for the goat is. It became a bit of a cliché as a most wanted part, like Galidor became the most hated theme. Now they are going to be plentiful, how much demand will there really be.

It is perfectly possible to collect LEGO SW without it being a money pit. You just need to define the limits for your own collection. Being a collector doesn’t mean you have to have it all. For my SW collection, I limit myself to mainly minifigures in small vignettes, original trilogy only, I don't need every variation of every outfit for every character, only a couple of larger spaceship sets but plenty of the small advent calendar, polybag or planet series ships.