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I loved the Captain America: Civil War movie. I loved the chance to get Giant-Man, Agent 13 and War Machine. I felt lukewarm about the chance to add another Iron Man and Captain America to my collection. Here was my chance to recreate the epic airport battle between 3 iconic super heroes and the 9 second-stringers that they brought along. (I say that with love since I have always had a soft spot in my heart for Hawkeye, Winter Soldier and Black Widow.) Wait, the packaging conveys so much depth of scene, but when you take away the graphic, what are you left with? Why couldn't Giant-Man have been released in a set similar to Hulk Buster? I need to look more in depth at this set to answer at least one question. REVIEW: SET DETAILS Set #: 76051 Name: Super Hero Airport Battle Theme: Marvel Super Heroes Parts: 807 Price: $79.99 BOX CONTENTS Some people may wind up picking up a set that is open box or, want to verify the box contents before beginning a build. For this set, there are 5 numbered baggies and a bag containing a sticker sheet, a comic book, and an instruction book. BUILD AND EXECUTION: BAG 1: We start this large LEGO set with probably the biggest let down. It's a tiny LEGO car that feels like it would be more at home in a $6.99 City set, or maybe a polybag. To add insult to insult, you have to apply 2 stickers within 4 steps. I can understand that they feel that a small vehicle adds some value, but not to me. Especially when it looks like the Mighty Micro's inbred cousin. It's a luggage mover, so it needs a trailer. Looks like someone jumped the gun and hitched the trailer without wheels. What makes a tiny baggage cart even less useful? a launching mechanism designed to fling the bags. I wanted to give you this view so that you could see the play feature lever that is soon to be hidden. You activate this particular play feature by shoving tiny Ant-Man into the mouse hole. You may recall that I take a strange sort of pleasure from pointing out the ubiquitous fire extinguishers in every Super Heroes set. Well, here it is. Wrench and fire extinguisher. Clearly the only tools you would ever need at the airport. The entire front of the second level is missing, but with that lever set up, you can tell that it will be wall exploding time before too long. I guess it's fine that the luggage cart is so small since the people going to Wakanda, Socovia, and Bielund are only bringing briefcases. Iron Man and Agent 13 round out this bag. BAG 2: I didn't do a great job showing it here, but you fill in the wall on floor 2 in 2 chunks. I'm actually somewhat pleased with how that was done. So far that's the highlight of an unexciting tower. I was trying to show the computer screen stickers, but I don't think they really stand out, which is fine because they're just not that interesting anyway. I do like the window treatment. It really does look like a very short traffic control tower. It's kind of undersized for a major airport, but really, no one is buying this set for the traffic control tower or the luggage cart. Add some boxes from Stark Industries, Hammer Tech and A.I.M. as well as a gate, and you are done. Scarlet Witch and tiny Ant-Man round out bag 2. (You may be wondering why I am not talking about the characters. I'll get to them in the summary at the end.) BAG 3: The bag that everyone was waiting for. It honestly took me a minute to figure out what I was looking at here. I finally realized that the angles corresponded to the angled torso of your standard minifigure. It makes sense, since we are building Giant-Man (I looked it up, it is hyphenated. Stan Lee liked his hyphens unlike DC creators that just made compound words.) So, the Torso is not terribly complicated, you just need to add some bulk and attachment points while maintaining the roughly trapezoidal shape. The legs actually require much more work than the rest of Giant-Man. I didn't take any pictures of the build process of them because I was actually enjoying the process. I love how they use the slopes to approximate the curves of the minifigure legs. By the way, yes there are 7 stickers shown here. Sadly, there's still one more to come for this character. After the legs, the arms are way too simplistic and give a worse approximation of the smaller figure. Even the torso was more interesting to build than the arms. The inside of Scott Lang's head. The face is printed. It's a good thing too, because I'd be pretty mad if I applied his face wrong. He's got a flip down mask. The mask is a sticker and for those of you with OCD I am sorry. I think I applied it upside down. After you complete the front of the head, you still have to try to make the back round, or roundish I guess. Maybe more round adjacent? It's round like. Anyway, don't forget to tack on the "ears" of the helmet. Ta Dah! Giant-Man. Just for giggles, they threw Captain America into this bag too. BAG 4: Here, we begin the Quinjet. I could derail myself here by talking about whether it is necessary to release a new Quinjet while last year's model is still filling shelves, but I am going to hold off until the wrap up. Strangely (to me that is) I realized at this point that I was actually liking the build of this Quinjet more than the 2015 version. It didn't have a big hollow body to accommodate a motorcycle and the techniques used were at least a little more varied. When I see these long technic bricks, it says action feature. It also says wing stability. Boom, action feature. Did I get something wrong though? Those stud shooters are facing backwards. No, it's right. The round brick is actually a knob that will cause the stud shooters to pop out on the bottom. Hooray action feature! I'd like to take a moment here to point out just how many pieces of Dark Blue are included in this set. I always like to see that color because I don't feel there's enough of it. Attach your wing and you're done with this bag. Winter Soldier's a little miffed that it's not flyable yet. Bag 5: I wanted to show off the new 2x2 wedge pieces that are used to fill in the internal structure of the wing. A lot of pieces stack to give the wings their unique shape. snap on the wing and add an engine. lots of rounded slopes to shape the body of the aircraft. It looks a little squat though. Don't forget wheels. You need wheels because LEGO planes don't really fly. You extend the wings and add a hatch on the back with a rope. There's no depth to the hold area because of those stupid cannons. Why you need a rope is sort of beyond me. Everyone that I have seen exit a Quinjet just sort of either walks out or jumps out. Slap on the cockpit cover and we're done. Don't forget War Machine. REACTION: Giant-Man is definitely the star. If not for him, there would be very little point to this set. The Ant-Man micro figure is nice to have (especially since you get 2 of him.) I'm really kind of irritated by the inclusion of the Quinjet though. It makes sense in that it does appear in the movie that this set is based upon, but it was a very minor part of this battle. Marvel Super Hero sets suffer from a lack of iconic vehicles and for better or worse, the Quinjet is one of the few. However, there's still a Quinjet on shelves from 2015's Avengers: Age of Ultron sets. Too bad that almost every Super Hero set includes some version of a jet, a helicopter, a boat, a motorcycle or a jeep/truck and the horrible baggage vehicle would never suffice to fill the disappointing vehicle role. A lot of them also contain a disappointing partial building full of play features. I guess we get all the standard stuff. Disappointing plane and partial building to make the Giant-Man set an $80 set instead of a $30 one. I guess they needed to make it a big set in order to justify 6 minifigures. I would have preferred a regular plane that broke up into chunks that they could fight around. The Quinjet is the smallest one yet. For the minifigures, let's skim past Captain America. This is the same Captain America that they have been making since Age of Ultron. He's in 4 sets at present and will be soon appearing in a fifth. I talked about this Winter Soldier minifigure previously. Still love it though. Onto the wholly new and unique. I spun the wheel and landed on Agent 13. Sharon Carter is a character that long time Captain America fans know and if not love then tolerate. To me, the figure looks bad. It's just a weird looking outfit that either needed to be wholly uniform or civilian. It comes across as a mismatch. Plus her hair should be more blonde than strawberry. Her inclusion seems like a knee-jerk reaction to all the #wheresblackwidow from 2015. They included another woman in order to bring the number in this sub-subtheme to 3. (Don't even mention Maria Hill.) Scarlet Witch is a new costume including a cloth "skirt." The skirt makes the plain black pants somewhat acceptable. I'm not a fan of red eyes. Even though I tend to display my Super Hero minifigures with their scowl faces, I'm just not likely to with her. Iron Man is Iron Man. He's different from all other versions, but not in an interesting enough way to make him stand out. I doubt I could successfully pin an Iron Man to a set without looking up the subtle differences. War Machine is nice. I'm a lot happier with him than the silvery version released for Iron Man 3. all the kibble on his back overbalances him though. I hate the stupid giant stud shooter on his back. Not pictured here is Ant-Man. Ant-Man isn't really a figure in my opinion. It's a nice representation of the character, but it's completely non pose-able and the detail is low. FINAL THOUGHTS: Keep checking Amazon for a likely standard 20% discount going forward. Giant-Man might be released again, and if he is, this set will tank. People are less likely to buy a knock off Giant-Man, so he's who you need to keep an eye on for any future viability of this set. I think people are getting tired of Captain America and Iron Man minifigures and none of the rest are good enough to prop up this set. No one wanted a smaller Quinjet, and if they did, another one is probably just around the corner. People have been parting out this set already, they'll probably redouble efforts when the mark downs come. I anticipate rate of growth to be low due to the bloated cost from all the chaff that was included. COMPARISON SHOTS: I thought I'd give you a few shots to compare the Giant/Ant-Men and the size of the Quinjet. EXTRA PIECES: the only real piece of note is the extra Microfigure of Ant-Man. If you like Super Hero sets, please check out these other reviews: 76049 Avenjet Space Mission 76065 Mighty Micros Captain America Vs. Red Skull 76022 X-Men Vs. Sentinel 76044 Clash of Heroes 76037 Rhino and Sandman Supervillain Team-up 76047 Black Panther Pursuit 76050 Crossbones Hazard Heist DC Mighty Micros 76053 Batman: Gotham City Cycle Chase 76052 Classic Series Batcave

When I first got into LEGO as an AFOL I was looking at all of the Star Wars sets that I had missed and how much they cost. It became necessary to figure out a way to get the sets cheaper or make more money. I knew that some people must be making money buying bulk lots and taking out the stuff they wanted and selling the rest. That seemed like 2 birds with one stone. I looked at the bulk lots on Ebay, realizing that most of what I would get from these guys were common pieces. So I started looking at bigger lots, somewhat intimidated by their cost. I figured, however, if an Ebayer was getting $10 for a pound maybe I could make some money just throwing stuff in a box, easy money. I made a purchase of about 50 lbs for about $350 because I saw some Star Wars sets and minifigures in there. Oh boy, easy money and some treasures of my own. Boy, was I wrong. The money is anything but easy. I quickly discovered that out of my 50 lbs of mixed LEGO, at least 5 lbs were easily recognizable as not building bricks at all. Tinker toys, K'Nex, Hot Wheels, plastic army men, broken action figures, Lincoln logs, playing cards, thumb tacks, thorny burrs and even broken glass was mixed into the ABS blocks. On top of all that junk, the real problems started. All of the Mega Blocks, BTR, and assorted knock off blocks knocked another 5+ lbs out of the lot. That's at least 20% of my precious blocks that was basically trash. As you filter through, you discover broken bricks, severely teeth marked ones and yellowed pieces. profits are getting slimmer by the minute. Ok, so I regrouped and focused on the sets that were obviously present. I pulled out the stuff I immediately recognized most of a TIE Interceptor, a little car, Jedi Interceptor with Hyperdrive ring, half an ARC Fighter, etc. All of these I scattered around me like ancient peoples paying homage to their creator. How do I go from lots of partial sets to lots of complete sets that I can flip to make back the money that I sunk into this thing? Well first I needed to figure out what was missing. So, I looked at instruction books to see what steps I needed to take to complete them and what pieces were missing from there. Utter bust. That's an awful way to do it. So I took apart the sets I had figured out and checked the inventory against Bricklink. I discovered what was missing, and that sometimes kids substitute pieces in the middle of a build. Now that I knew what was missing, time to turn back to 20 lbs of assorted bulk. digging through mixed bricks looking for the piece or pieces I need was time consuming and futile. Time to sort them out to make it easier. My wife and I sorted that 20 lbs of pieces by color. We had 10+ bags of pieces separated loosely by color (old and new colors mixing futilely.) That made it easier to look for pieces, but still sometimes wasting a lot of time trying to pick out a small piece in a big bag. After exhausting my patience, I turned to Bricklink to acquire the pieces I needed, dumping more money into this hole. Eventually I sold a bunch of sets I made from this and a few other bulk lots. Between the Bricklink orders I placed to complete them and the fees and shipping, I think I made some money. My book keeping was pretty terrible. But it all taught me some things. Some of these things I learned could help some people just starting out trying to find treasure in Bulk lots. STEP 1: Valuation So, you're looking at a bulk lot that you found on Craigslist, Ebay, a garage sale, another auction or whatever. How should you evaluate it? Weight: The volume of pieces will tell you roughly how much is there. 2 lbs = not a lot. 25 lb = a lot. Since you're not buying the sets one by one, you have to immediately realize that you are going to be getting dead weight in addition to the treasures that you seek. Visible sets: Any visible set that you can place is good. That will give you an immediate idea of what you can make out of the lot. No visible sets or parts of sets means that there may or may not be gold in there. Minifigures: If minifigures are present that's good. If licensed minifigures are present, that's even better. a loose rule I use is to look for flesh colored minifigure heads and hands. Sure there's some dummies in that group, and some good figures that have yellow heads and hands, but it's a good starting point. Instructions and boxes: Both of these are a good gauge to show you what sets may be present, but could be red herrings. Sometimes the instructions stick around long after the main components of a set are lost. Non LEGO stuff: There's always some detritus. The flotsam and jetsam of stuff that parents scoop up into the boxes. The most common stuff is non LEGO bricks. They're not always easy to pick out at first glance, but they're usually there. What you are looking for is how much of the lot is obviously not LEGO. Do you see doll parts, nerf darts, Pokémon cards, buttons, etc.? usually this is a good sign to me. It means no one has searched it. but it is a pain to filter through. Filth: Sometimes you can see how dirty and played with the bricks are. Most bulk will be dusty or dirty. Some will even have paint or marker on them. So with these factors, let's talk about how they factor into the valuation. an average lot is usually in the $4-$6 per lb range. Average lots show some partial sets, some minifigures, maybe a few instructions, relatively clean, with not a lot of obvious non LEGO stuff. Depending on the quality and quantity of the better stuff, you might increase your valuation, but remember you're not paying top dollar for what you see, because there's still a lot of work to come. Plus, you're going to get some amount of stuff you don't want. I have been known to go as low as $2-$3 a pound for stuff that had no obvious sets, mediocre looking or no obvious minifigures and excess junk. Then again, I have gone as high as $10 a lb for lots of minifigures and several mostly complete sets of some value. Some people stick to a hard $5 lb. Some lots of only minifigures I have seen sold for close to $100 lb. Figure out your comfort level and stick to it. Be prepared to have wasted your money on a big group of Mega Blocks. STEP 2: Sorting and figuring out what you have Once you get the lot, now you have to do something with it. Boxes full of bulk sitting in the garage is just hoarding. You're doing this to make your money work for you. So, I start by trying to pull out all the non LEGO, but also anything that gives me a good idea of what is there. Pull out minifigures, instructions, partial sets and set them aside. I bag the partial sets, with the minifigures and instructions wherever possible. I would never again sort by color. Finding a red 1x1 modified tile with clip in a big bag of red parts is much harder than looking through a bag of 1x1 modified tile with clips of assorted colors. Instead I start by throwing all the flats in one box. Slopes go in a second box. Bricks are a third box, etc. It's the most general sorting at first. As I go, I look for unique identifiers of sets like printed pieces or unusual shapes. Once the initial sorting is accomplished, I sort again by element. STEP 3: Completing sets The best way to make back the bulk of your purchase price is to complete the sets that you received. Some people will complete everything that they can, others disdain anything below a certain dollar amount. It's up to you how far down the rabbit hole that you are going to head. Once you get your sets, you need to figure out what is missing. Even if the set looks complete, it is best to verify. Some people will make substitutions in the middle of a set. Your customers may not appreciate substitutions, especially if there are megablocks in the middle of a build. So, it's time to take them apart to verify the inventory. If the sets are partial, you definitely should take them apart to figure out how much is missing. Look through your new bulk to see if you can find the rest. Focus on the expensive sets first. Check through your minifigures, instructions, and interesting pieces to see what sets may have been broken down entirely and see if they are worth reconstituting. You could do another survey of your bulk to see if the seemingly random bulk is hiding some treasure. I look for the part numbers on the interesting pieces. Finding the part number can be difficult, since it's usually inside of the LEGO piece and hard to spot, except with the right light. If the piece appears in multiple sets, I check for context with other pieces in the lot. Again, the interesting pieces generally have a unique shape, sticker or printing. If you can't complete them this way, or even with other bulk you might have, then you have to decide if sinking some more money into them is worthwhile. Does spending $10, $20, or $50 more make sense? Only you know for sure, but you've already dug a hole into your resources and time. It's either keep digging, or see if you can punt it off somewhere. I tend to try to get as many sets working at a time as I can. Hopefully this will help me to get the most missing pieces for the least orders. STEP 4: Dealing with the true bulk You're going to have leftovers after you pull out the stuff that is easiest to sell. You have several options. You could write it off. Put it back in a box and donate it or stick it in the garage, hoping to forget about it. This is generally the least appealing option to me. I've put time and money into this, so I want to recover something more than the tax write off or another box in the garage. Sell it as bulk. You could try to recover something from it by selling it all as a big lot, or even breaking it up into more manageable 1, 2, 5 or 10 lb lots. There's a lot of competition that way, but it's not super hard to do. Save the pieces to help you complete other sets in your next bulk lot. This is appealing because you already have it on hand. There's no guarantee that it will do the job, but at least you have a chance to cut down on further expenses. Sell the pieces individually through Bricklink or Ebay or some other venue. This is the most time consuming way to do it. It's also the way to get the most total value from the pieces, eventually. A lot of pieces may not sell quickly if at all, but you have a higher return on every piece that does sell. So, after all of that. You have to figure out whether it was worth it. If you made some money, or got some stuff that you wanted for less than the going rate, it will give you that rosy glow. It's fun to initially dig through all of that stuff searching for buried treasures. When you find something, it really does feel like it's all worthwhile. In the long hours of sorting, searching for pieces, and waiting for Bricklink orders it may be less fun. Waiting for the stuff to sell to recoup your costs is even less fun than that. I like to do it, but at the end of the day, the monetary returns vs. my time may not be the best. It may be the worst paying job that I have ever had. You really do need to have a plan for evaluating what you are buying and for dealing with it once you do. If you've never done it before, it may be overwhelming. It will take a little while to get more proficient. It's definitely not a quick buck, but money is there to be had. If you are disorganized, if you lose patience, if you don't have the time,you're just throwing money into a hole. May the bricks be ever in your favor. pictures are used to demonstrate example bulk lots from real auctions.