General LEGO discussion (inc. collectible minifigs)

Chat about stuff other than Transformers.
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

TRU still had some Series 3 packs out. Scored two Samurai Warriors, another Elf, and a hula dancer. Awesome!
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

I got the cheerleader from series one the other day. Made me very happy :swirly: Not really arsed for any more (the only other one i now own is a skater dude from series one what i got free with an issue of the Beano that also included a mini figures mini-mag and poster).
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

In an effort to fill out random characters in my fantasy/castle display, I managed to get a few new minifigs. Picked up a Garden Gnome from TRU the other week (which will not be in a garden but rather will be a tinkerer/inventor gnome a la the Dragonlance universe).

Target also recently started carrying these around me and I also picked up a Viking warrior (to add to the dozen I already have, but damn he's got a cool shield) as well as what I was really searching for, a Musketeer. The Musketeer is really cool, and has a phenomenally huge floppy hat. He'll fit in well with my Pirates...
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Post by Tetsuro »

Dammit, already cranking out series 3 and I'm not even done with series 2 yet!

Granted, I only really want the Mexican and the Disco guy, but still...
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

Tetsuro wrote:Dammit, already cranking out series 3 and I'm not even done with series 2 yet!

Granted, I only really want the Mexican and the Disco guy, but still...
I completely missed Series 2. That Spartan would have been nice!

And the Pharoah. And the Witch. Maybe the Vampire too.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

A little bit off topic, but what the heck. In the UK we have another Lego giveaway with our fabulous tabloid press. So far we've had a tiny X-Wing, Captain Jack Sparrow in a dingy with a bottle of booze, a tiny replica of the Black Pearl and today a Ninjago 'glider' (in reality a Ninja with a load of swords coming out of his back!). Later in the week we get a couple more Ninjago sets and a Pharoh's Curse set! Not bad for 30p a pop :swirly:

This is the fourth of these Lego giveaways we've had recently, and I like that we're not getting some City stuff for a change. Although there is a feeling that Lego are really pushing the new stuff hoping for follow on purchases of the lines...
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Post by Cliffjumper »

I was tempted by a couple (today's seemed to have Storm Shadow with it), but couldn't be arsed with the yomp into town after work to get them... Might get Sparrow when Smiths staff inevitably list billions of them on ebay for 50p, though.

The tractor in the last lot was ****ing awesome, mind. Shame the rest of them were usual giveaway "go-kart with blue lights = fire chief's car" silliness. Mind, they do charge nine quid for that sort of rubbish...
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Post by ganon578 »

It would be cool to get those little types of sets around here, especially the Jack Sparrow one. We get them here in stores like TRU and Target, and I think they retail for about $4. Too bad my local target is swamped with the dinky Atlantis set; it would be nice to get some new sets in!
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

Cliffjumper wrote:I was tempted by a couple (today's seemed to have Storm Shadow with it), but couldn't be arsed with the yomp into town after work to get them... Might get Sparrow when Smiths staff inevitably list billions of them on ebay for 50p, though.

The tractor in the last lot was ****ing awesome, mind. Shame the rest of them were usual giveaway "go-kart with blue lights = fire chief's car" silliness. Mind, they do charge nine quid for that sort of rubbish...
Ahh.. the little green Tractor! i love that wee set. It has a proper old-school feel about it :) i have two i like it that much! All the sets from that 2009 giveaway were pretty good, although I get what you mean about the go kart thing. In fairness though, those sorts of sets have always been part of the Lego landscape. i had a fire chief's buggy from the early 1980s that was just as ridiculous as these modern day efforts.
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Post by anthonyhscott »

I missed series 2 but am all over series 3
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

For Father's Day, my wife, daughter, and I all went about an hour southwest of our house to the Lego outlet store. They didn't have the new minifig series yet (Series 5), but they had something that was way frickin' cool!

In the middle of the store, they had this setup where you could build 3 figures however you wanted with a selection of legs, torsos, heads, headgear, and accessories. After you built your figs you snapped them into a little plastic container and they were $10 for the set. It was pretty awesome, if just a little basic.

What it did allow me to do, though, was make two medieval style females (barmaid-ish) and a pirate. Very cool way to do the minifigs, though I think some of the pieces were quite picked over and they hadn't replenished (for my pirate I had to get the stupid doo-rag headgear instead of a skull-and-crossbones hat). It was still good fun, and allowed me to help balance my female-deficient medieval/fantasy setup!

I also snagged a blue baseplate for my pirate section, a small Ninjago set (the black ninja) to use as an assassin in my set, and the Dragon's Prison set from the Kingdoms line. Not too shabby for a single trip!
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

A Target that is local to me was selling Series 4 at clearance, so I picked up a few (basically the last ones left) for $1.50 each. Not too much new, but I managed to get:

Garden Gnome (x2)
Viking
Kimono Girl
Skater Guy
Punk Rock Guy

All of them are neat (could have done without the Punk Rock Guy though), and I Frankensteined the gnomes & a couple Vikings into a couple more Dwarves for my fantasy/medieval display.

I also found a small pack towards the front of the store that contained a white ninja from the Ninjago line. Cost $4, but it came with a bunch of parts to make a 'hang glider'. Basically I used the parts strictly as gold skimitars (cause that's what they are).
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

I had a similar experience in a Lego outlet here in the UK. Me and my girlfriend had a nice little experience faffing about building our own mini-figures. It's a really great idea, but as you say, you are at the mercy of whatever parts are available. I made some cool looking secret agent types out of some Blacktron and robot parts and packed them in with a police officer, whilst my girlfriend made some mad looking pirates (and got one with a skull and crossbones hat). There were a LOT of construction worker parts there mind! I also liked that there was a wall of bricks and you could pick and mix parts too. A really great little shop. The mini figures were cheap fun (£3.50 for three in a clamshell pack - not bad when the blind packed mini-figures cost £1.99 a throw) and looking around i was impressed to see all the premium collector sets available off the shelf, including an architectural series I've not seen before in neat black packaging. The prices were a little eye watering though. Suprisingly for a dedicated shop, even regular City and other themed sets were a good 10% above regular RRP, which made buying any proper sets from the outlet a massive turn off.

I've also done suprisingly well at managing to get nearly all of series four's mini figures (er, even though i said i wasn't going to bother with these!). I've just frankenstein and the chemical suit guy to go and i've got the lot! i do have four spare sailors though, who freak me out a bit with all that winking!
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ganon578
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Post by ganon578 »

Skull and Crossbones hat! You're lucky!

You truly are at the mercy of what parts are available. As I dug through there were loads of the construction stuff, like you said. It was a pain to find the barmaids shirts, and I only found one pair of legs to match. A shame they didn't have skirts to match. They also had only one Forestman shirt that I know of, and absolutely no hats or pants to go with him, let alone a decent head. I remember there being loads of black witches hats though. I thought the accessories could have used a boost too. Tons of hatchets and brooms.

This all just depends on what day & time you're there though. I bet on a Wednesday afternoon the parts aren't as picked over. We went on a Sunday.

I snagged a few more Series 4 guys recently (another local Target had some figs as well) and managed two vikings, two musketeers (hell yeah!) and a mad scientist. I think I was pumped the most about the mad scientist, basically because I am a chemist and I think he's one of the neatest figs they've had so far.
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Warcry
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Lego-related thread necromancy!

Post by Warcry »

Skyquake87 wrote:I had a similar experience in a Lego outlet here in the UK. Me and my girlfriend had a nice little experience faffing about building our own mini-figures.
I, er, spent far too much time and money at the LEGO Store while I was in Minneapolis, but this was one part of it that really disappointed me. They only had three or four different torsos at the time, all of them City prints except for a caveman. The heads and accessories available left a lot to be desired too -- nothing that'd fit into my Castle-themed collection. The Pick-a-Brick wall was equally dry when it came to stuff that I'd like, but at least in that case I'd expected it. After all, castles don't have the widest colour palette in the world and I imagine the grey bricks go pretty quickly.

I got myself a few of the collectible minifigs while I was down there, though. And even better, when I got home I found out that one of my local bookstores were selling the things for less than US MSRP when you factor in the 'member discount' I get for shopping there all the time. So far I've got the sumo wrestler and race car driver from Series 3, the artist, geisha and surfer girl from Series 4 and the lumberjack and dwarf from Series 5. I also had a pack with the Series 5 fitness instructor in it, but I gave it to my niece as a gift along with one of the two 'Alien Conquest jetpack guys' they were giving away to anyone who spend over $35.

I'm surprised at how nice they are, and since I've found a local source where I get get them for a half-way reasonable price I might buy more later. I'd be all over them for sure if I was a City collector, but for my purposes 95% of the figures fall into either the "cool, but not very useful" category or the "I'm cannibalizing it for parts" category.

Amusingly, while I was there I had a run-in with a 'serious adult collector' who was molesting all the Series 5 minifigs for what seemed like half an hour, and who gave me the dirtiest look imaginable when I scooped up a couple from the pile he hadn't picked through yet and went to buy them without even trying to find out what was in them.

I also bought a fair number of sets while I was down in the States. The biggest (and by far the most impressive) was the Medieval Market Village. It was fairly pricey, especially considering how small the buildings are once they've been assembled, but I've never seen a set that was even half as detailed as this one. The set has 1600 pieces, most of them very small, and the build took me over six hours to finish. The end result is lovely, though. The two houses that are the centrepiece of the set are so detailed that I can't quite believe that they're assembled from Lego, and pictures really don't do them justice. The only real drawback is the price -- $100 US is a lot of money even for a set this big, and it's even more expensive than that everywhere else in the world. I refused to pay $150 Canadian for it when it first came out, and even when it was reduced to $135 I was leery of it. I was just barely willing to spend $100 on it, but I'm glad I did because it absolutely blew me away.

I also bought one of the Pirates of the Caribbean sets, the Captain's Cabin. It's less a set and more a collection of nice pieces, really, and doesn't stand up as very good on it's own. It has a lot of useful parts though, including the globe, the map and compass. I also like the old-timey shelves, and the two 'bad guy' characters are the first black minifigures I've ever seen that fit in with a historical theme -- one of them is clearly a zombie, sadly, but the other one just looks like he's spent his whole life getting hacked up on the battlefield and fits in pretty nicely.

The Blacksmith Attack (which I actually impulse-bought shortly before we left for the States) is a neat set. The waterwheel is cool (although it's a scaled-back version of the one in the MMV blacksmith's house) and the shop stall is pretty convincing. I've heard a lot of people complain about the weapons that come with this set, since they're made from soft plastic and don't match the aesthetics of any of the previous Lego weapon molds. I agree that they're kind of funny looking, but they make great weapons for dwarves if you've got a lot of those. Not much else to say, especially since I've since taken the set apart and combined it with the previous set to make a cartographer's shop.

The last set I got was the Escape from Dragon's Prison, which doesn't impress me at all. It's not so much a prison as it is a two-dimensional wall with a jail cell built into it. It comes with some nice figures and has a decent piece selection, but the model itself is fairly absurd. It also tends to fall apart at the drop of a hat, something that's partly the fault of Lego's recent tendency to use smaller plates instead of a single, bigger baseplate for it's buildings.
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Post by Skyquake87 »

My Lego colelcting's on hiatus at the moment. The last set i got was an Alien Conquest one which was £4. A ncie small set with a jowly alien in a small flying saucer thing with a space ranger type guy with a pistol. And that was in June, I think.

The City stuff has taken a major nosedive in quality IMO, as the retro aesthetic has been pushed too far (2008 - 2009 there was a nice mix of the old and new) and the new Harbour series is ... ugly.

Pirates Of The Carribean is horrifically expensive. I've swerved it, aside from the Newspaper giveaways we had earlier this year. The cheapest set is around £20 and has a few figures and a bit of scenery and that's your lot. Likewise, Kingdoms is on a par with the main licensed themes (Star Wars, Harry Potter) leaving it an incredibly expensive purchase. Which is a shame, as they all look to be a decent run of sets. I must say, I am jealous of your medieval Market village. I would like that set, but as you say, it's very expensive this side of the pond.

I've completed my Lego Minifigures Series Four collection! Woo hoo :) I didn't know Series 5 was out though. In the UK, most places still have the Series Four and the a few packs of Series 3 hanging about.
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Post by Denyer »

Only partly minifigs, but some of the sets contain them... the Sun is doing free LEGO again...

http://www.brickset.com/brickLists/?5960

http://www.sacbee.com/2011/10/06/396551 ... -back.html

Not as impressive this time around, IMO.
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Skyquake87
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Post by Skyquake87 »

...a bit like Lego's recent offerings for their non-licensed stuff. We really seem to be on a downward trajectory following the sterling sets of 2008 - 2009.
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Post by Denyer »

And on the same theme, series 6 and 7 of the collectible minifigs have leaked...

http://www.brothers-brick.com/2011/10/1 ... aled-news/
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Warcry
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Post by Warcry »

Thanks for sharing that. :) I'd seen most of Series 6 before, but this is the first I've seen of Series 7.

I like. They've both got some nice figures and some good parts, but I think I like Series 7 better. The Viking woman, the Aztec, Little Red Riding Hood, Neptune, the bride, the black knight...all really cool. And am I the only one who thinks the rocker chick looks like Jem?

Not that Series 6 doesn't have a lot of cool stuff either...the Highlander, Roman legionnaire, Flamenco dancer and Minotaur for starters, and I really like the skater girl's hairpiece.

Obviously I'm not going to stop giving those crafty Danes money any time soon.
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