Redroe

I do just that. If I find a set I really want, I sit tight until I find it at a price I think is decent. Generally works out ok, but sometimes I miss out - I never saw a Cloud City for less than £250, which I still wasn't willing to pay. What this means is I hardly ever buy from Lego.com, and miss out on the VIP offers. I'm in a strange place with lego Star Wars atm. Mostly because I now have a child to raise and no time for my own hobbies, but also, I've got almost everything I want out of the theme: every ship I like either moc'ed or modded, almost every figure I like from sets, aftermarket or custom. It's almost all OT. I will probably sell on almost all my sequel stuff cos I am kind of sickened by it. I want a Razor Crest but will try not to get one. The cantina will probably be my last ever big LSW purchase, it fills in the last gaps in my collection (unless they ever make Beru Lars) which saddens me but also feels like a good curtain call for a part of my life.

I'm holding out hope for the battle packs until I see a confirmed set list for next year. Although really, personally, I think we have seen the golden years of Lego Star Wars and it's diminishing returns from here. Also purely personally... that's kind of OK.

Useless is a strong word. They're useless to "us" as adult collectors who have battle droids dating from (literally) 20 years old. That's older than almost all Lego's target market. Take the phase 1 clone trooper pack from a couple of years ago: two clones! Awesome for us and for the kids. Two cool looking Jedi! Awesome for the kids. Awesome also for us, on the first time. Extra Jedi... um, ebay I guess. 501st battle pack... 4 clones! And, for the kids who might never have got a battle droid, 2 droids to fight. All but the luckiest kids will only ever get one copy of a battle pack.

Imperial lander would be a good one actually. More easily scaleable than a Falcon. Razor Crest also needs a tan cylinder to park in, though...

That's possible. Like the instructions for the Assault on Hoth encouraging everyone to rush out and spend another 100 quid on an AT AT. Preferably on day one, of course.

I don't think we will. A quarter or third of a circle I would expect, with a sliding door, maybe some falling bricks play feature, some crates and pipes. They did a flat empty landing platform in Cloud City after all and it looked superb with a midi Slave 1 sat on it. And apart from the cantina, the Mos Eisley we see in ANH consists of streets, a crashed ship and Docking Bay 94. That's what I want from the set. Others want different and that's entirely fair.

I am hoping against hope that it has a downscaled Falcon cockpit of some kind which would scale better with the system Falcons. But that's a long shot.

If you count 10188 Death Star and 75159 as basically the same set (just new figs and extra money) then yes its been continuously available for 12 years. But retiring soon apparently. Ewok Village hung around a lot longer than Hoth. Neither Hoth nor Cloud City were great sets: Cloud City had so many different people to please, it was bound to fail on some levels. Of course whether or not it sold well is difficult for us as consumers to judge. But large, system playsets that aren't strictly MBS, but pioneered that style, are generally well received. 8038 Battle of Endor, Jabba's palace: both great "ensemble" sets.

I might be about to get the years wrong here, but Boushh came in the same set as Oola with her underboob printing and the updated metal bikini Leia came a year later, 2013 I think. Both are fairly extreme (I don't mind them at all but I see how some do.) Edit in light of comment above: yes, maybe the figs were in the pipeline before the takeover and just sneaked in.

I am curious to see if slave Leia even makes it into another Jabba set now Disney holds the reins. Her and Oola are both rather, er, contentious designs which they probably wish they could slide under the rug of history.

And some back printing on R2 please, lego. But he will still have a squiffy head print.

I'm just going off what they've done previously. R2 was in Cloud City and hardly contributes much to those scenes except a smoke screen and a funny line about a computer. Whereas "hey! We don't serve droids" seems enough reason to throw them into a cantina set. But I'm firmly convinced it's going to be spaceport, rather than cantina. Give them a little door to hide behind.

But there will be a lot of repetition from previous sets. I predict: Luke, Obi Wan, Han, Chewie, R2 & 3p0 Greedo, Wuher, 3 Bith, Hammerhead 2x sandtrooper Ponda Baba, Garindan, Evazan Random astromech droid If we get many additional molds, then I will count us extremely fortunate.

They can include a grand total of 3 as long as one of them is Garindan.

Was gonna say he doesn't have a nose let alone a mutilated one! But actually, the nose is the most grotesque part of his appearance and they might well have shied away from including that disfigurement on a toy deliberately. (Poor Anakin doesn't get the same consideration)

The old old old Lego Original Trilogy game had a great little aqualish head as well, more similar to the above and probably less accirate as a result. Still, we take what we can get.

Oh yeah, I don't doubt it's legit. Still not sure I like it, though. As many others have said, it matches the real thing better than my wrong impression. Yep. That was my reference pic before I got on my high horse about rubbish molds. He is not called walrus man for nothing.

Only found one pic and I'm not sold on Ponda Baba. Looks like someone pulled rhe head off an action figure and glued it on.

Someone educate me. Who is this Falconfan?

Not the helmet: just the torso. The belt area matches the movie versions but the chest plate has the bolder lines and shading of the CW versions.

Thanks for the pic! That is dedication. What really strikes me is how consistent the CW vs. Non-CW torsos are. The printing is actually very close between variants, much closer than I had thought. I hadn't realised how CW specific the 501st printing is. Neatly done. The sharp delineation between animated and "real" still bugs me however. Edit: the 2010 phase II clone really has a foot in both camps. Was a weird release at the time. I think this remains more likely than phasing out the low price BP altogether, but I still can't see beyond this 501st one as a one-off, feeling more like a "set" than a battle pack. Gosh, how excited the 16 year old me was when that very first pair of BPs was released. I think it was 8 gbp . If they stop the battle packs a part of me will curl up and die.

That was my knee jerk reaction but I think I actually prefer the stylised look of the new ones now that I look at them together. I've totally lost track of how many styles they've done over the years.

Thanks for the detailed breakdown. The torsos seem a closer match to the old 2008 clones. I wish they'd stick to a consistent print over the years, but I'm hardly overloaded with different types. I will wait to see what future BP's we get (hopefully standard ones!) before trying to fill up older clones off the aftermarket.

I can't see them ditching battle packs. This 501st one is a bit of an outlier, being campaigned for for years. Yeah we've dropped to 2 per annum, but that is probably because they realised they were spreading themselves thin (senate commandos, really?) And with not a lot of new content on the immediate horizon, except Mandalorian and the Bad Batch, they might want to pace their releases.

Curious, I am. How are the builds bad? I don't care for the 501st colours, and both are obviously oversized. But "bad" why? I'd still get the whole set for the useful parts each build contains, rather than spend however much on individual figs from BL.