What are your 'accidental' collections?

andhe

Do you collect star wars figures but have accumulated harry potter heads?
In an attempt to complete your trains sets have you ended up with a million droid arms?
What are your 'accidental' collections?

This 'just for fun' survey stems from discovering my large amount of lego owls, spiders and scorpions that I seem to get a bunch of with every lego castle lot I buy on ebay.

Also despite collecting mainly castle, I just can't resist a good lego chef figure.

What have you collected a truckload of through no deliberate intention of your own?!

AScaryOctopus

I have a lot of dogs for some reason even though I've been mostly getting oriental and underwater themed sets.

Duchessa

This is a topic for me! :)

I have lots of Lego animals. A favourite is the pony from the old Paradisa sets. I have the two sets with the ponies, and two spare ones. Along with those i have lots of parrots in odd colours from a PaB-special here in Sweden five years ago.

I also have printed 2x2 flags, lots of old knights from the classic castle themes and chrome silver pieces. Lots of them :)

MinifigsMe

I always seem to end up with a bunch of aquanauts, though I have no sets. Every loose lot seems to include the figs, but none of the other bits.

I'd rather have owls :( I think the HP decorated ones are just awesome!

iadams

You mean other than the monorail I kept accidentally picking up on eBay when my low(ish)ball bids won?

richo

I seem to be getting attached to tiles, in particular unusual printed ones. Just got a great 2x6 tan one that appears to have a printed set of bones on it, which is perfect for my Chichen Itzu MOC I am doing. If anybody has any idea of the set it comes from, I would be intrigued!

andhe

@richo this is the only one I can find, but is 2x4 http://www.bricklink.com/catalogItemIn.asp?P=87079pb028&in=S

princedraven

Clocks: White tile round 2x2 with clock design, I seem to have ended up with tons, if anyone ever wants to build a house of a hundred clocks, I am your man...

richo

@andhe,

Thats the one, thanks! 2x4 I meant. oops!

POTC, interesting. I only have the bigger sets, which explains why I hadn't seen it.

rich

andhe

...if anyone ever wants to build a house of a hundred clocks, I am your man...

Do it! That would be amazing! And if you want a hundred locks for your hundred clocks I seem to have collected more keys than I have doors!

Si_UKNZ

Windscreens!
Pointy plates in all shapes and sizes
Train dashboards, have about 30 of them from a yellow grab bag (which, incidentally there were none of in the westfield store today)
Wheels, oh my god, wheels. No wonder Lego is the world's biggest tyre manufacturer, I've got them all and I don't know why.
I also have something of an owl fetish, but that's entirely voluntary.

Silber334

Lego folks, and so many of them! I can build an army with them! Anyway, back to topic. I was buying Lego sets to accumulate enough pieces to build an original house or car. And then I noticed I got so many Lego folks.

Istokg

It's ironic that LEGO tiles were mentioned.... back in the early 1980s LEGO tiles were very rare in the USA... the first sets that had very many of them were the USA/Canada Homemaker sets. I bought about 30 of the 261 Bathroom sets (and a few 268 Kitchen and 269 Family Room sets) just to get the tiles back then. Ditto for arched bricks... a rarity back the 1980s... now I have so many of both...

StuBoy

^ I think a better question for @Istokg would be what parts you DON"T have an abundance of!

legomatt

I have an accidental Atlantis range. I liked the HQ submarine, and thought it would look great if attacked by the giant squid in an underwater section of a beach display. Got them both during a sale... and as I'd already got a small shark thing from a newspaper polybag giveaway, I had nearly all of those special atlantis 'keys'. Then I bought an on-sale atlantis Scorpion to battle my CMF Spartans, and so figured, what the hey, I might as well buy the shark and crab to have the whole set of 'keys' and figs.

bluelion3

Round 1x1 plates, flames and plumes -- all from the spare parts included in every set.

Istokg

@StuBoy.... Having so many LEGO parts lying around untouched for years in so many odd places (basement cupboards, drawers, closets, boxes, tubs, buckets...) it's almost like having "LEGO Alzheimers".... you meet new pieces every day! lol

Funny... but true! (C:

PaulTR

Trees...good heavens, do I have trees! I'm always picking up sets from the 1970s and keep getting massive amounts of tree pieces. All in all, I have around 30 trees of all shapes and sizes, not to mention leaf, bush, and shrub pieces. The sad news is I don't even use them because I'm a miserable scenery MOCer. So there they sit in my bins, laying uselessly...sigh.

1265

After completing several sets of Series 4 Minifigures, along with some certain extras, I stopped. However, I found myself stopping by the Lego section in search of only the Hazmat Guy. Not that I found it to be my favorite in the series, but it was super easy to identify. Grab a hand full and quickly scan the side of packages and identify due to the large helment. Anyways, after a month, I wound up with 106 of them.

Eric

106!? Damn...

andhe

That's one major hazmat clean-up team.

andhe

I ended up collecting a load of the series 4 werewolf for under cost price hoping I could use them somehow. I just have a box of werewolves now.

Matthew

^ There's quite a good use for the hairpieces here http://www.eurobricks.com/forum/index.php?showtopic=56573

yys4u

I actually got a pretty big collection of lego sharks. A bunch of original sharks from the pirates theme, then some sharks with the saw on their nose, a couple white sharks and the large one from brickbeard's bounty.

LusiferSam

I have a rather large accidental collection of late 60's/early 70's bricks, red slops particular. I bought a this lot off eBay not realizing just how big it was and pretty much blind to everything but the parts I wanted. Basically it was too good a deal to pass up, so now I'm the proud owner of a rather odd lot of Pat Pend era bricks.

andhe

^I'm sure Istokg will be able to enlighten us all on those :D

Odindusk

Relatedly, have there been themes you disliked/avoided but loved one of its sets so much that you had to have it?

Just curious if this ever happens to anyone else.

Ninjago is a garbage theme to me; no offense intended to anyone here that collects it. It's a lineup that I would have been all over as a kid, but as an AFOL it just strikes me as overly absurd and not very interesting.

With that said, the other night I was conducting evening business on the can and was looking through my new LEGO January catalog for the first time, when something on the inside front cover caught my eye: 9446 Destiny's Bounty. I fell in love with it instantly. It has enormous eye-appeal and I simply love the ship design and sails.

My head was under siege by a battle of intense conflict. I was trying to fight off these Ninjago demons and attempting to reason with myself, but I was quickly losing the fight. Then today I found myself at Target and saw a single copy of the set on a shelf, and I knew it was over. I loved it even more in person. I sighed, and walked out with my first Ninjago set. =)

Merged threads / Edited Transition: YC 1-6-12

bor2112

^Ha. A little too much info, perhaps?!

Don't fret. I was totally underwhelmed with the Red Ninjago line, but with a 7YO, Ninjago it is. The Green line, however, is really great. We have built quite a few and I have enjoyed them tremendously.

prof1515

...my Chichen Itzu MOC....

It's Chichen Itza. What are you creating, El Castillo?

Si_UKNZ

@Odindusk ,,, so you were on the can and you discovered your destiny?! Has a nice ring to it :)

BeardedCastleGuy

The Red boxed NinjaGo are merely part supplies, the dragons look interesting but it's all about the parts. The Green boxed NinjaGo just seem to be SO much better and I'm likely to get the full line (verus what what I bought on sale for the parts of the Red box line).
I should now have the full regular line (not necessarily promos) of the Pharaoh's Quest line, saw some deals......
Prince of Persia was also kinda of an accidental collection, but price per piece on some nice newer colors was FAR too difficult to pass up....

JRDA0406

I buy a lot of Lego Pirates mixed lots on ebay, mainly for the Imperial Soldiers and Guards, this has led me to a massive bag full of rowing boat oars; brown, reddish brown and red. Also, I get a lot of 'Castle' minifig accessories as people seem to confuse Pirates and Castle.

Jenni

We have three of the Ninjago dragons, we like dragons, they're currently terrorizing the Friends. The only green Ninjago that calls me is Destiny's Bounty.

sandtherapy

My original attempt to collect Harry Potter quickly turned into a Star Wars, Life on Mars, Arctic, Adventurers, City and Sponge Bob. As I continue to buy bulk lots I find myself with an abundance of sharks, dinosaurs and Jack Stone stuff.

LegoFanTexas

I never meant to collect any Ninjago, but with the 50% off stuff, we have ended up with plenty of it. Oh well...

y2josh

It wasn't an accident, per se, but back when I started amassing troops towards my thousand stormtrooper army, it wasn't very commonplace for the stormtrooper lots to actually come with the rifles (the newer style rifles that actually look like E-11s... not the megaphone with a 1x1 round attached), so I kept purchasing lots of the E-11s separately. Long story short... my E-11 purchases outpaced my purchases of stormtroopers that weren't furnished with them... so I have tons of rifles in a bag... with nowhere near enough troops to actually use them with.

Odindusk

@Odindusk ,,, so you were on the can and you discovered your destiny?! Has a nice ring to it :)

Well-played, friend. Heh.

Si_UKNZ

I never meant to collect any Ninjago, but with the 50% off stuff, we have ended up with plenty of it. Oh well...

I did the same with atlantis. At least it got me into City of Atlantis, which is a great set, but otherwise I think I'll be burdened with the others for quite a while. Or I can give them away as presents I guess ...

Yellowcastle

^ It was Atlantis for me too. I liked the HQ and decided to buy it one day during a sale. It went downhill from there as I kept stumbling upon different Atlantis sets the past six months, each strongly discounted. So now I own a dozen or so of them including duplicates but have no intention of ever building the sets.

Odindusk

I like the HQ quite a bit too. It reminds me heavily of that 80s movie, "The Abyss".

drdavewatford

Buying ANY "orphan" sets from a theme that you don't actively collect is a dangerous game if you're a completist; having picked up a few interesting-looking Atlantis and Ninjago sets on big discounts late in the day I'm really hoping I don't now feel the need to trawl eBay for the remainder.... Kingdoms is a similar scenario - I have the castle and a couple of others, and will definitely be getting the Joust, so will have to try to look the other way if the "missing sets" come along....

With the 2012 sets now appearing on Amazon I hope my attention will increasingly be focused there from now onwards.

Duchessa

^ I'm a total completist, so I try to avoid picking up bargain sets from themes that I don't collect. That could be devastating for my bank account :)

LostInTranslation

My accidental collection is Lego dice. I've bought several games at a good reduction which I've broken down for parts. But what can I do with the leftover dice??

DaddyWhale

My accidental collection is the modular buildings. I got the Fire Brigade because I liked the fire engine and that the set was big/complicated. Have ended up getting Pet Shop, Green Grocer, Grand Emporium and Cafe Corner, in that order.

Am on the fence about Market Street. I don't want to be obsessive about completing the whole series, though.

Oh, and I like the motorized amusement park sets. Have Grand Carousel and Ferris Wheel (4957). Are there any others?

Would love to get a LEGO rollercoaster. But there aren't any as far as I know (maybe because it would be very fragile). Am thinking of MOCing one.

mr_benn

^^ The faces of the dice are really nice as tiles, and the dice themselves make for some good 'dalek' style bricks from some crazy MOCs.

OK, not amazingly useful I appreciate, but still.

I have an accidental collection of the 3x4 collectible minifig bases. Hundreds of them. They're piled up into giant stacks, like 2001 A Space Odyssey-style obelisks for my Banana Balance monkeys to bash with bones...

Coolsplash

Hmmm...on my part....I would like to mention the first wave of Ninjago spinners. Got 3 of those each back then. Then stumbled into PQ, got all of those, still have some of them MISB. Then whole of the Atlantis range, except the last wave. So sold off all the Atlantis ones.

MinifigsMe

Hey mr_benn - are you in the uk? I'd happily buy a bunch of bases from you if they're spare. I make custom minifigs, so would be handy. Lemme know :-) ta

princedraven

First thing is first, this is NOT about bragging, anyone that knows me knows that is not what I am about, I just wanted to start a thread about this as I was genuinely shocked at how out of control my collecting is.

OK I think we all know that it is easy for scope creep to occur in this hobby/obsession, but sometimes it shocks me just how much.
I started collecting Star Wars only and then added Modular (and have a 5yr old boy so get a few 'randoms').

Recently I came across the Autumn 2011 Catalogue and before binning it decide to just have a flick.
It quickly became apparent how uncontrolled I have been.

Advent Calendars - I own 2 of 2
Minifig Series 5 - I own 16 of 16
Trains - I own 0 of 2
City - I own 9 of 9 - this is the big shocker for me, I don't even like City
Ninjago - I own 8 of 10 (4 spinners)
PoTC - 3 of 4
Exclusives - Got MMV, Tower Bridge, Pet Shop - Haven't got Maersk Train
Cars2 - 5 of 5
HP - 5 of 5
AC - 5 of 5
Spongebob - 1 of 2
Atlantis - 1 of 1
PQ - 1 of 1
Kingdoms - 2 of 2
Creator - 2 of 3
Technic - 0 of 4
Starwars - 8 of 13

Totals - 71 of 88
(Keychains, HF and Games not included)

And this in reality is just the tip of the iceberg as I know I have ended up with at least half a dozen Atlantis sets, same for PQ, same for Kingdoms, I have to say I am stunned at how these bricks get to you, had no intention whatsoever of getting a large percentage of these sets.

So, question, how is it that I looked at, for example, Atlantis, and thought, that holds no interest to me at all, yet now am sat here with a few hundred pounds worth of Atlantis sets in my loft? And, thinking about it, I really like a lot of the sets too... Where did that change...
I think there is some kind of subliminal messaging going on or some form of drug that they apply to the bricks and you absorb through the finger tips.. :)

princedraven

Wow, super fast shifting of my message, thanks mystery Mod, didn't see this one.

littletoki

So. Um. Sponge Bob. Which is weird because I don't have any kids and I've never watched the cartoon.

But I picked up one set when it was 50% off and then another. And another.

Maybe I'm drawn to the bright colors. I can't explain it.

princedraven

Yeah, Spongebob is a weird one for me too as my son doesn't watch it, I have never seen it and yet there is something about them that is appealing. Suppose it just looks silly, and who doesn't like silly at some point or another :)