MAB

You could check other walls contents in the region. They tend to be very similar these days. Or you could contact the store and ask them. If you are buying that much, they might be willing to put a quantity aside.

No, I don't work for LEGO. It could easily be turned around in that you could appear to work for a rival company due to the amount of hate you post about LEGO products on a LEGO fan site. Whereas the reality is probably closer to I enjoy LEGO's modern offerings and say so whereas you seem to enjoy only old sets and do not like anything modern and say so. As to the set - why do they need an armoured truck? Presumably to stop the money being stolen. Adding one or two robbers to the set would have made it more interesting for role play and story telling for kids, which is pretty much what they do now with bank sets with the cops and robbers. Having the money stolen and a chase to retrieve it adds more interesting play value than having the money dropped off or collected safely by security staff, even if that is more realistic for day to day scenarios.

The online PAB contents sites were a good idea but only ever as good as the users that updated them. I used to add some details to wallofbricks when it was going but it was frustrating that I seemed to be the only one doing my local one. If it had been longer than a few weeks, chances are it was out of date. Yeah, this might be the best option. Live stream PAB-wall picking!

You don't. Someone will always have something bigger and better looking than yours. However, you can aim to make one that you have space to display and you enjoy looking at. Personally, I prefer to see a smaller number of nicely designed Modular rather than City style buildings in a row (so essentially a one dimensional display) than a large and more two dimensional table top display that takes up a lot of room and you cannot see details in the builds in the centre. But others will be the opposite.

Even the 1997 Bank set has an armoured truck. A bank without any action is probably just not interesting enough for 5-10 year olds. I doubt many young kids build complete cities and want to have a bank with a couple of clerks and no action. And for older kids and adults, there are the modulars.

I always get an email invoice, usually a day or two before the order arrives. So I know what is coming.

I use custom parts for minifig accessories but not much else. I don't really care what others do so long as they are upfront about it when showing MOCs.

I doubt they have a measure of "better" for comparing old and current colours. I imagine they continue with the current ones to have consistency with sets from the past couple of decades and not need to go through a change again. The original change from old to current was down to processing rather than any colour ideology. Even if they could change the colours, why bother when there are already very similar colours and a change is not necessary for other reasons. A new old grey probably wouldn't match anyway, as even if the colour matched the surface shine and feel would be different.

Amazon have no incentive to discount it if they are the only other retailer. Their business model for discounting is usually to match other stores prices. If there are no other stores to match, they don't need to discount it. You also need to be careful to check whether it is actually amazon selling it or a third party - for Rivendell it is amazon (at least, currently).

If you display rather than play, then I find sticker quality is not a problem. I have sets from early 2000s, 2010s, and through to 2020s where the stickers look like they were applied today. However, I sometimes leave them off, not because of quality but because of too much decoration. I prefer models to look like LEGO rather than scale model kits, so leaving the extra decoration off (or replacing printed parts) is sometimes necessary.

If you need such information in future, if you know of any minifigure, part or set with a specific piece in you can look up the inventory on bricklink and it will tell you the colour.

Why not just open them? Then there is no packaging to get wet.

It is just a new ID rather than new part, the pearl gold torso/arms/hands was in the HP architect statue in the 2019 advent calendar.

We already had a pretty decent version for a Wagner inspired viking style opera singer.

Not so good this time. The last few packs have not been bad at all, but this one does not look so good.

That's rather boring on both counts. It seems a shame if they theme these using in-house themes. I can understand having a female footballer although hopefully more than one team, although it is easy to buy the football table torsos online so not as interesting as it might have been.

We already have an (old) Sean Connery minifigure.

The numbers should be raised if like the old ones, much like the LEGO logo on the backs. Are you saying the number sides are completely flat with the number printed (with ink shadows) instead of moulded?

I got a standard order yesterday. One big ziplock bag with two long/thin ziplocks (each containing 100x of one part) inside, along with other mixed up parts in the larger bag and another large ziplock bag with smaller quantities of mixed up parts inside. Whereas a bestseller order (much smaller quantities) from a couple of days before was a heat sealed bag. So I guess it depends on the contents of the order, maybe the total volume of parts and maybe also keeping large quantities separate. I'm glad they didn't mix up the 100x of each part, as they would have taken ages to sort out.

https://www.bricklink.com/v3/designer-program/series-1/main.page They go on sale (to crowdfunding) Feb 2024. Expect delivery end of '24 or early '25.

I don't think the designers feel they are being taken advantage of, I imagine it is an honour to have their MOC created into an official LEGO set (that is, one with the LEGO logo on the box). There is choice to enter a design or not, there is no compulsion that LEGO is taking designs and telling designers they have to agree. To me, the BDP sets are not Castle, in the same way that the Blacksmith, the Castle from Monster Fighters and the new ICONS set are not Castle. Everyone gets to define what their collection should be composed of. If someone wants them in their Castle collection, that is fine. If someone doesn't, that is also fine. This is exactly what they are, just in a box with the LEGO logo (and BL logo). I also don't buy them. I find they are expensive for what they are and I prefer my MOCs to these. My MOCS might not be quite as detailed or use as many small, greebly parts but I prefer them as they are mine and therefore mean more to me than following someone else's plans. But it seems that there are many AFOLs that collect and/or build but don't MOC these days, and these sets fill a niche that LEGO designed sets don't quite fill. They also act as a "community engagement" tool allowing AFOLs to interact with the company in a way not possible before. I think the BDP (or what was previously the AFOL Designer Program) was a major influence in the purchase of Bricklink. By having it run by a separate company, the BDP does not overlap too much with the LEGO-controlled IDEAS.

They were dealt with separate to PAB (standard and best seller). I know as I had an order that included a regular boxed set, 40x online-BAM figures, standard PAB and bestseller PAB. They all came in separate parcels and the online-BAM arrived much quicker than the PAB parcels. This was when they had some good parts in the online-BAM, so I haven't tried it since then!

It is crazy to think that a good chunk of value is essentially in the box. I didn't buy any of the previous rounds as I wasn't really interested in them and didn't think it right to buy to sell with this type of set. But if I had bought some and wanted to build them, I'd be buying the parts (after sourcing from my existing collection and BL store) and keeping the set sealed. But then the same is true of vintage sets, where the parts may be relatively common but decent condition boxes and instructions can sell for more than the actual sets (without box and instructions).

Those small bags are often common parts that would get stuck inside larger parts and would have been produced and stored, then bagged when necessary. The same with the bags with printed parts in, they are parts with individual item numbers, produced, stored and bagged when necessary. That appears to be different to the DOTS letters, and the small single colour item bags like in Friends, superheroes, Star Wars, and so on which appear to be produced and bagged as a single item. If LEGO could print all decorated parts instead of using stickers at a similar cost, I reckon they would. That they don't suggests that they cannot cope with the capacity, whether it is storage, printing issues (availability of jigs, downtime between part shapes and calibration time, etc), or the cost differential is large enough that the product becomes not viable at the profit margins they want. If you don't buy the arguments, you don't buy them. It is then your choice to buy the sets or not. The sales volumes over recent years suggest most buyers are not bothered by stickers enough to not buy LEGO, even if they prefer printed parts.

We have only seen (so far) that they can do bagged printed parts for 1x1 round tiles, with single colour printing. If that is the limit, then I'd take stickers to decorate different shape and colour parts over that. If they could do multi-coloured printing on maybe 2x2 square tiles or 1x2 rectangular tiles then that would be much more suitable. Even if all the decorated parts in a set were the same colour 1x2 or 2x2 tiles, it might be OK so long as the build can be designed to take just that shape part for decorated areas. For things like Speed Champions cars, where many different and often curved surfaces that are decorated (with stickers), printing all those in one go seems a way off. The logistical problem there is not storage but the printing.