MAB

Exciting MOC, and I hope he gets ripped to shreds.

I imagine it is different for different themes or possibly different for licensed vs non-licensed. For SW, they like to put desireable individual characters into larger sets, whereas for in-house they like the core characters to be easily available and have huge variations of those core characters. Here, it gets complicated even further by the figures that come with comics. Ninjago ones frequently have slightly different versions of the core characters (esp Cole and Lloyd) over and over. I get the impression that the market for Ninjago is more kid aimed than AFOL, and I doubt kids army build as much as adults.

This is where there is an issue with the different types of buyers. For someone that gets just a few or a complete series, it is often nice to have the fairly unique figures as they are something a bit different. Whereas if you buy 100s to fill out a City or to army build, then the thing that makes these unique characters unique is what makes them annoying to get loads of. The aristocrat lady is really nice as a one off, but get loads and it looks weird. Same with the paper boy and potter. Whereas the orc or spaceman or falconer lend themselves to army building more. I guess it is very hard to balance the different audiences - those that want a set and those that want to army build. The unique figures cause a problem for the army collectors as they are hard to get rid of if you get them and are not very useful as multiples (or even individually), but the army builder figures (or maybe it is the army collectors) create a problem for the series collectors as they remove the army builder figures from the market, pushing up the scarcity and price. By going to uniform distributions of figures, they have favoured series collectors wanting one of each, but not really done either extreme any favours compared to if they produced more of the obvious army builder figures as the army collectors still remove the army builders. Personally, I never minded the chase figures when they were 1 or 2 per box of 60. They were not that rare and if they are the less popular characters, they are still reasonably easy to get hold of if you want a complete set. If anything, making them slightly scarce seems to increase their desirability. I remember back at Series 18, the Classic Policeman. My son got one and didn't really like it as the figure was boring. And I sold it for him, and he bought a few other figures he did like. So long as not-too-hard-to-find chase ones are not going to be popular enough to army build or with kids, I don't mind it. Obviously not at Mr Gold extremes though, that does get silly.

They don't know which one is selling fastest, as these are blind packs (and single SKU code per pack). To find the in-demand ones, they'd have to monitor the prices on the secondary market. Even though the date codes on the old packets indicate that there were different packing dates, I'm not so sure they can easily increase the amount of one CMF from a current series. What they can do is do a "best of" type series like they did with the Top 5 VIP set back in 2012. Although there were claims that was rigged, as it missed out the Spartan from S2, yet included something similar to the Space Villain from S3 and was essentially just a rehash of 5x S3 characters as a way to get rid of excess production parts. Doing themed character packs after the series like the Halloween pack and the rock music pack, basing characters on those in the series but with subtle differences is another option.

It might have been true in the early days of CMF but now I imagine they know which ones will be in heavy demand these days. It might be difficult to decide which is more popular between two so-so figures such as the potter and the referee in the last series but compare either of those with the falconer or the brown spaceman and it should be quite clear which would be more popular. Whereas compare the falconer and the brown spaceman, that is presumably quite hard to predict. Whereas the brown spaceman vs the robot warrior, even though a similar futuristic type theme, it should be quite clear. Both, and also (probably mainly adult) collectors that want one of each without army building. From what I have seen with my own kids, they often don't care too much which figure they get if they get just one as they will play with it anyway. Whereas if they get more than one then they often want different ones. I noticed my son preferred male figures and my daughter preferred female figures so the way Playmobil do it, where they split the series into blind packs where you know whether the contents is a male or female character, would have been ideal for them.

I like the peacock, the spaceman and the camera. Although I don't think the designer ever used a film camera. Why are there developed slides that are still in the film canister? If they had pulled out some film from the canister, it would be brown / dark grey / black. If it had been developed, it would not have been put back into a film canister.

"Go back to making", rather than "start making"! There were many such packs released up to about a decade ago for in house themes (especially Castle). They started to disappear around about the time that CMF took off. When they used to do them, I don't think they sold that well, or alternatively LEGO got the numbers wrong and didn't sell as many as they thought they would. Battle packs used to be very easy to pick up cheaply at the end of their run.

That is not what I mean. I mean that any brick building set will sell well if it is cheap in a supermarket, no matter which theme it was. Wild West selling well for them would not mean it would sell as well for (expensive) LEGO. If Playtive does cheap Fire, Police, and Town sets, they'd sell well, as would cheap Spaceships sets and cheap Castle sets and cheap modern military sets.

Presumably that is because they are cheap, rather than because of the subject matter.

LEGO or other brands know how they regularly use their parts. In fact, with digital models it is fairly quick to determine the distribution of the number of studs on a part used to connect it to other parts. Plus designers typically avoid connecting parts in such a way that they are hard to pull apart and likely to end in breaking them.

If a part is regularly meant to be connected to one other part via multiple studs, then it is better for the clutch of individual studs to be lower than if they were connected through a single stud, so that the parts can be taken apart.

The vast majority of LEGO sets are not in blind packaging. Putting CMF in clear packaging would probably increase prices further. If someone can identify all the in demand figures in a box in maybe 20 seconds, then they can clear out all the popular ones in the store very quickly. At least having to feel them slows it down. It would be impossible for LEGO to impose a limit per day, given how many other companies sell the CMF. Most companies want to sell their stock, not put barriers in the way of customers or get into arguments with them.

The person you sell them to must love that they can sell them on for a higher price, if you leave money on the table as you don't realise what they are worth. No only would they have no stock of $5 tournament knights, they would be left with large stocks of the less popular figures at $5 as they are in less demand. I used to sell figures from S1-S15, and if I had sold them at RRP then I'd have probably made a loss overall as some figures simply do not sell at RRP once opened. They would just sit for a long time unless discounted. The higher prices for popular figures offsets the lower prices for unpopular ones. I also used to swap them, and typically would receive fewer popular ones when trading larger numbers of unpopular ones. Few people would have traded a Spartan for a Traffic Cop, for example. Supply and demand soon settles prices to what people are willing to pay. Last week on BL someone parted out many of the advent calendars and the price they were offering for one of the minifigures at seemed very good to me whereas other figures were overpriced even though they were the same price. So I snapped up the ones I think are undervalued and left the overpriced ones.

No I am not, I am talking about clutch power of an object as a whole, rather than clutch power of a single stud.

Then inside a bigger bag, then inside a bigger box for extra security. Ideally buried in the garden, in case the geckos learn to play with matches and start a fire.

Last time, it was keeping dust out of opened LEGO boxes. At which point he knew about wrapping in cling wrap, but was concerned about the environmental aspect so was going to tape them instead. Quite how dust quickly accumulates inside a box that has been opened and closed again, inside a wardrobe, I don't know. Now it is sealed boxes, and they are OK using much more plastic in the form of bags to seal new sets, to keep those pesky geckos from getting into the sealed boxes. What will the next one be? Will mice eat through plastic vacuum seal bags and enter the sealed boxes? Do mice even eat or play with LEGO?

Well done for figuring out something by yourself.

So if you buy two or more random ones and you get duplicates, what do you do with the spares? Especially if you have popular ones and you don't want them. Do you sell them at cost price or do you become a scummy scalper and sell them at the going rate that other people are willing to pay for them? Nobody is forced to pay 2x or 3x RRP. They can continue to buy random boxes (the product that lego sells) at RRP and hope.

What does fit too strongly together mean? The clutch between two parts depends on how you use them. Take a 16x16 plate and put some bricks on it. They come off easily enough. Put some small plates on it, they are harder to remove but come of with a brick separator. Put another 16x16 plate on it and they are incredibly hard to pull apart as they fit too strongly together when the full area is used. Yet they are not imperfect.

Indeed, the cost of plastic wrap needed to totally cover a box is much cheaper than the set, or just a replacement box, or the cost of a plastic tub, or even enough sticky tape to seal (and damage) the set boxes.

Before I read this, I was about to say it looks like it is based on the real thing! But of course, there is not enough cash laying around to be the real thing. Fun MOC!

I think many of us do, at least those that were into LEGO and LOTR the first time around. For the type of MOCs I build, 16 is plenty for an army and I bought the cheap Chinese Gondor soldiers, binned the figure parts and kept just the armour and helmets. It cost about $20 for all 16, so a relatively cheap stand-in until / if they ever do anything official. I use them on the Heroic Knight CMF body/legs, with the cheap Legolas head.

Yes, some adults collect regular playsets, but they are typically marketed at children. That means that they tend to be sold in many more retail locations than the large adult sets, and so need to shift huge numbers of sets to be worthwhile. A single small battle pack without other sets from the same theme will not sell well in those locations. And if they do a full theme of playsets, they need a huge number of people to buy them hence targetting them at children and not adults. And kids tend to go for what is popular at the time, which is why companies do movie tie-ins. And that is probably why they didn't do any Indy and Avatar sets, until there were movies out that made those IPs current for kids.

Kids back then that have now grown up will presumably want adult sets and not play sets. To be successful (as in, sell as well as some other IP aimed at kids), it has to appeal to more than just kids whose parents like it. There is a big difference between individual and expensive sets aimed at an adult audience that can sit on shelves (or internet warehouses) for a couple of years without really taking up much retail space, and entire themes of smaller sets aimed at kids that would normally need more significant shelf space in regular retail stores and supermarkets. Although both are LEGO, they are very different products. Those small sets have to sell in very large volumes for retailers to want them on their shelves. I think that is the best hope for smaller sets. Pushing the movie back again to Dec 2024 probably doesn't help if they were planning to do a LEGO tie-in.

Because it didn't seem to sell that well (especially to kids) first time around. Pretty much every day, since about 2000. Plus I frequently saw and still see kids, young and old, wearing SW t-shirts or with SW lunchboxes. SW lost popularity in the late 80s and early 90s but grew again with the growth of the internet. Same with HP. I regularly see both adults and kids wearing HP clothes or having HP accessories. But LOTR, very rarely. Of course there are die hard LOTR fans, but within the general population I don't think it is popular enough to be ingrained in everyday life like SW or HP.