[ryanmercer]

>The comment you're replying to doesn't suggest any of that.

Uh

>The analysis ignores 99.99% of LEGO that has been sold and is now worthless.

That blanket covers 99.99% of anything Lego, combine that with what this article is about... speculating on Lego sets... my comment is fine.

"worthless" though is not the case. Individual elements absolutely have value on the secondary markets. Bricklink has more than a million mmebers, 10,499 stores and 125,105 unique elements with millions and millions of pieces for sale.

Parting a 'worthless' set out can often yield you more, if not several times more. Sure it might take you years to sell every single element of a set, but by no means is 99.99% of Lego 'worthless'.

>really obvious counterexample is Star Wars-branded stuff associated with a current feature film.

Plenty of Star Wars sets have gone on varying levels of sale/clearance (some quite drastically) via both shop.lego/Lego stores and non-Lego retail outlets in the past several years. 42 of the 97 Star Wars sets are currently on sale on shop.lego for example and almost certainly won't rocket up in value, ever. The Clone Wars sets were probably the worst failure here.

Lego also has plenty of series that just never gain traction. Most recently I'd point at Nexo Knights. Kids just weren't interested, despite the cartoon, and most of us adult fans only bought it because we wanted space and/or castle/knights to come back and this was the closest offering. We basically got 2 rounds of releases the they scrapped it.

Legends of Chima is mostly a flop.

The Minecraft series had some of the steepest discounts I've seen directly from shop.lego/lego stores.

Architecture sets are more often miss than hit and you find unopened sets fairly regularly in thrift/budget store chains.

Bionicle flopped hard and only has a small die-hard fan base not unlike the Dreamcast.

Angry Birds had pretty steep discounts direct from Lego early on.

TMNT several years ago was a pretty big bust and hasn't retained value.

Etc.

[phazon_dude]

>Bionicle flopped hard and only has a small die-hard fan base not unlike the Dreamcast.

This is a very poor example; Bionicle sets have skyrocketed in value.

Plenty of things may go on clearance now but become worth a lot of money years later.

[ryanmercer]

>This is a very poor example; Bionicle sets have skyrocketed in value.

Comic con/promotional exclusives, yes. Everything else, no. The biggest increase I'm seeing is a 14$ set going for staring around 42$ sealed (and only 7 new have sold in the past 6 months on Bricklink and 0 since November with only 16 new available), a 300% return that is not impressive - especially considering this is one of the 3-year old reboot sets which means the bulk of that value is likely from speculators and not actual collectors and will probably go down considerably over the next few years. You can see this clearly on Bricklink:

https://www.bricklink.com/v2/search.page?q=bionicle&brand=10...

[phazon_dude]

> only 7 new have sold in the past 6 months on Bricklink and 0 since November

Yeah, on Bricklink. Have you tried looking at more mainstream places like Ebay? There are dozens of sealed sets selling there.

>a 300% return that is not impressive

Really? You dont think 300% ROI is not impressive? Most of the regular sets from the 1-4th generation also sell at that kind of inflated price so its really not that unusual.