This Week Everybody's Catching Something

LEGO Pokémon launched in March with oversized creature builds, added SMART Play interactivity last month, and now has minifigures five months in, with two more waves already dated for August and October. Most licensed themes take years to earn minifigure treatment. If this cadence holds, Pokémon could be LEGO's fastest-scaling license yet.

Two videos this week land the same punch from different angles: Stud City refuses to open 'exclusive' Insiders promos on principle, and Held der Steine's catalog breakdown asks whether licenses are crowding out original creativity. Neither is a boycott, but both read as early friction with how LEGO is packaging scarcity and IP into its second-half calendar.

The five-set Olivia Rodrigo collection is LEGO's most prominent music-artist collaboration yet, and Brick Fanatics is already pitching who's next. That's usually a sign the format worked internally. Watch whether LEGO Editions, the sub-line built for this kind of pairing, gets a second artist announcement before year's end.

Since the 2018 AFOL Designer Program, BrickLink's format has cycled through Rounds, Series, and now Waves, with max quantities climbing from 5,000 to 30,000-plus and a new one-selection-per-year cap. The 2028 wave narrows further to two Castle factions. The program keeps optimizing itself; whether that stabilizes it or just adds more rules is the open question.