Re-Make Impact Evaluation (4th Edition): Republic Gunship

So, it's been a while since my last blog entry, but I finally managed to find some free time to continue with one of my favorite articles to write, the effect of re-makes on LEGO sets.

This time, I wanted to analyze the impact the newly released Republic Gunship had on both of its predecessors. For some reason that's beyond me, this particular ship seems to be one of the most popular vehicles of the whole Prequel Trilogy, and LEGO has seen a lot of value in releasing it for the THIRD time this past summer.

This new version follows the same path as the 2008 version by having a pretty decent piece count of just over 1,000 pieces, along with a pretty nice selection of minifigures. As far as the actual ship design is concerned, both 7676 and 75021 share pretty much the same appearance. As one would expect, there are some changes here or there that make the new set unique, but other than that and a couple of new cool minifigures there is really nothing that would make me buy this set if I owned any of the other versions, especially 2008's.

Now, let's take a look at the price charts from Brickpicker for the older versions of the Gunship and see if we can determine the impact 75021 had on them:

I think this graph pretty much says it all. First of all, the graph shows both previous set's price trends, along with their lineal trend as well as the first month when we started seeing the new Gunship on the shelves (represented by the black vertical line). As you can see, the oldest version of the 2 has dipped some since the announcement and subsequent release of 75021, but it is 7676 that has seen the worst drop in value.

Despite going up around $40 from March to April and hovering around that price for a couple months, it suddenly dropped almost a full hundred dollars by pretty much the same time the new version started hitting the shelves or at least when it was expected to be released in a short period of time. So far, this has been the largest drop in value I have encountered when writing this series of articles, and this helps to make the inference that the market feels pretty much the same way I do: the similarities between the 2 newer versions justify just passing on the older, more expensive version in favor of the newer, cheaper one.

Those investors that unloaded their 7676 stock prior to the month of July are certainly happy they did, while those that decided to hold may be regretting it. Thanks for reading!