MAB

It depends on the country. For UK and Europe, prices must be shown including VAT and so thresholds already take into account the VAT. However, baskets are still calculated on goods only and not service charges or postal costs. Although these days most thresholds are above the minimum order amount to get free postage anyway, so only need to check there are no service charges for small PAB orders.

The issue stems from different people wanting different things from the product. Some people want one of every figure. Of those, some buy a whole set in one go whereas others believe they are buying random sets and hoping for a complete set. Some want to be able to buy a couple of random ones and not get duplicates. Some want to buy large quantities of one figure. I've been mainly in the latter camp (I used to collect them all, but also army build individuals.) I used to buy any Roman soldier I found when i was shoping, but I'd like to think I did it in an ethical way in that I didn't sweep every store every day checking for new boxes and remove all the valuable ones. Whereas now people are willing to pay large sums for popular figures while the series is current, I think this has led to the much more widespread scalping of them. If you can find just two popular figures in an hour, the profit made per hour is higher than a low paid job. It is no wonder the boxes are stripped clean of the popular figures now. I know some people go as far as asking sraff for more boxes to be brought out, and even hide existing boxes so more stock is brought out, so they can be cherry picked. I think the change was inevitable. Of course there were other things LEGO could have done. If they thought a character was going to be popular, put it in a set instead, or better still in a battle pack. The Viking, for example, stick three similar figures in a battle pack for £15 or in a bigger set. They could even repeat the same or similar figure or parts of a figure in CMF and regular sets (like the troubadour and falconer), which partially helps stop the army building fuelled scalping of the CMF.

Probably not. It looks like just the one ICONS set and the three Brickheadz for now.

Yet people buying random boxes will actually have a better chance of getting the sought after ones than when they are in bags. Many kids don't get whole sets, and are often happy with whatever they get when buying a one off. When my kids were younger and they got one each, both were happy so long as they each got one of the right gender (I have a boy and a girl). In that sense, I'm a bit surprised that they have never gone down the route of playmobil blind bags, and do a boy series and a girl series, marked so they get the 'right' ones.

That is all down to the writing and direction rather than the actress though. If that is what the director wanted then any other actress would have given a similar performance. And there were still numerous good scenes she was in that would make great sets. She was probably closest to the action hero / Legolas appearing in most action based scenes. But we don't know if it is there as a link between the different stories for those that watch closely and listen carefully, or if they want to trick viewers to think it is him only to reveal later that it is not. For example, someone else (the real Gandalf) might show up later and they want to hide his identity, so they make people think the Stranger from S1 is Gandalf. We already know they like to mislead with identities and it is a simple trick to make something so obvious without saying it, then flip it around to trick viewers later. When something is that obvious, is it too obvious?

No, not absolutely. I didn't like her at first mainly down to the character rather than the acting but when you accept she has lost pretty much all her family, I quite enjoyed Galadriel in the second half.

The Snow White Evil Queen looks by far the best for generic pieces to me. That one looks great, both as a complete figure and as parts. The animal ones have useless heads and feet/legs (Oswald's legs are OK if plain). Even with a different head, the Queen of Hearts will look like Disney's Queen of Hearts. Some of the princesses might be OK but I imagine they are going to have some Disney detail that will make them look like a Disney figure. Some look great as complete figures, like Robin Hood and King John, and Coco, look great in their own right but probably not as historical parts.

I cannot really see much in the Disney CMF of use for historic. It is all too Disney-looking to be anything but Disney.

You can objectively state what your feelings are, but that doesn't mean the show is objectively abysmal. It is personal opinion, so those feelings are completely subjective rather than objective. It is an objective observation of subjective feelings. When future seasons come out, it would be funny if amazon could ban any accounts that left 1 star for Season 1 from viewing it, with the explanation that they are protecting those (non-)viewers from themselves. I really don't understand why people watch it all if they think it is so terrible to give one star. I'd still like to see sets from RoP. But unfortunately I don't think it would be smaller playsets even if they did RoP given the demographic of the audience and LEGO's direction of going bigger and bigger for 18+.

Now the cases contain a whole number of "sets" (complete series). So resellers buy whole boxes and sell three complete series. Quite a few collectors now buy complete cases, take out their set, and sell on the other two sets. Now they will have to open to check and will nto be able to sell individual sealed boxes. Yes, those two in particular were bad. The Viking in the UK started off at about £15 when still on shelves, and quickly went to £20-25. No wonder the shelf boxes got cleared of them because they can be felt for. That type of thing did not happen a decade ago. There were always popular characters, and they always sold for a bit more. But it was still quite easy to buy them relatively cheaply on the secondary market when they were on the shelves. I remember paying £3-4 Roman Soldiers on ebay and BL when they were current. I was a little late in collecting Spartans, but even towards the end of their shelf life they were still only £5 or so including postage. This was when figures were £1.99 RRP, but could be had for ~£1.20-1.40. The profits were not so huge that it was worth spending time grabbing every popular figure from every box but that is what the market has evolved into. That is why I genuinely don't mind that LEGO are making these truly blind. There is still a simple way for AFOLs to buy a complete set, and LEGO have facilitated that market by having a whole number of series per box. And now there will be a genuine chance of getting a random figure when opening an individual box, rather than getting a "lower class" figure as the valuable ones have been removed. If putting them by tills to stop people opening them is required, I doubt that is that big a deal to anyone buying a couple at a time.

There has also been some trouble with bluebrixx. There were those three IDEAS 10K sets that had to be removed from the bricklink designer program because it was found that bluebrixx had already released them. LEGO's rules should have meant they could not be commercialised for three years after being advertised on the IDEAS site (and rejected), but the designer and bluebrixx obviously made a deal to create them without LEGO's knowledge and the submissions were then removed from the BDP once LEGO/ bricklink were informed.

So why don't you buy a complete set in one go? So many resellers do that now, often at or very little more than RRP. The downside of identifying and picking the individual ones you want is that other people may also want those in multiples, and take the lot. Especially ones identified as going to be popular and good for resale. It seems to happen much more these days than it used to, from day 1. And this leaves a very unequal distribution and hence complaints.

They do in Friends.

If they are like Vidiyo then they will still have thin inner plastic bags, just not the thick foil outer bags like now. As for trading, I think that is gone. It used to be that before now popular figures became valuable, people would trade freely. I used to swap fairly random figures for Roman soldiers, and used to buy them on ebay for £3-4. But look what happened with the recent viking. People knew he would be in demand and his price was instantly £10 or so while they were on the shelves. Nobody would trade him for a more random figure now.

When I use "thrill of the hunt" I was using it not so much for the gambling side of will it be / won't it be what I want, but for the searching and feeling for what you want (the joy of feeliing a spear in S2 and S6!) and also the subsequent trading of unwanted figures, as opposed to the no-thrill of purchasing a complete set from a reseller. I think part of the fun was like being back in the school playground trading stickers. There used to be loads of trading threads on brickset (and some but far fewer here) as well as sites like swap figures. I think the "buy a complete set" sales have pretty much killed that off. For the recent sets (and here I mean probably S15 onwards), there have been too many people knowing the values and pulling all the popular figures as soon as a box is out. So I can understand why they now are shifting to boxes to stop this (if that is the reason).

I painted one for that reason.

I used to do the same, but I also regularly traded with others to get a complete set while also building armies. I was a bit late for Spartans and only managed 16 of those but bought / traded over 50 S3 elfs and over 100 S6 Romans. I've not been that impressed about the army builders in more recent sets, and they all disappear so quickly anyway now so many collect / sell them. Also up to S10, I rarely paid more than £1.25 a figure through various discounts. At that price, it didn't matter if you got unwanted ones as plenty of others were into trading them. But that side of it seems to have died out. The thrill of the chase also worked with trading. Finding someone that wanted a fitness instructor and would swap it for an elf, and so on. Back in the early days, they felt more collectable in that you would slowly build the collection. Whereas now they feel more that you buy the series in one go and you are done.

I also wonder how many adults still buy CMF one by one by feeling. I see so many people now buying a complete set online, or buying a box and selling the spare sets. Part of the fun for me used to be the thrill of the chase but since resellers started widely selling complete sets and certain popular figures became cherry picked as soon as a box is opened, this was killed off.

I thought it was fine for a TV show, nowhere near as good as the movies but nowhere near as bad as the 1 star reviewers on amazon were making out. I don't really get the view that things are either five stars or 1 star and nothing in between that seems to exist these days. While watching it, I thought that there were numerous scenes that would make good sets, from smaller playsets such as Elrond and Durin in the rock breaking competition up to larger builds like the elf ship or a palace or building in Numenor. Then there are the harfoots and elf soldiers, that could make decent smaller sets too.

Little benefit since most sets sold in stores have not been bought and returned, let alone bought, opened, parts stolen, resealed and returned.

You are going to have to pay shipping on any other parts people suggest.

I doubt it is up to the designers what they do. All the last sets had the Warner and New Line logos on the boxes. The latest Rivendell is from the movies and also uses the movie logo. So I doubt we'll get anything that isn't in Warner's movies, no matter how long ago they were.

There are sellers in the USA with these for under $1. Any alternatives or trying to brick built something similar is going to cost more than that.

LEGO are reducing single use plastic packaging. It also doesn't really help on the larger sets produced today.

LEGO don't make statements like that, so no.