Ninjago Skybound Plane

Ninjago has been one of the longer running original IPs for Lego, and has successfully managed to stay very popular and in demand. The much larger dragons and mechs in the set are seriously some of the most beautiful and complex designs I've seen, and I hope to review one of those larger ones in the near future.

In the meantime, I was going through my piles of yet unopened, not yet reviewed/built sets and found a polybag that I had overlooked. This was was the "Skybound Plane" set, a simple smaller airship piloted by a single Pirate mini-fig.

This build was a bit of a let down. The minifigure is actually quite detailed, and has some cool aspects in detail, but I felt they really phoned it in on the plane design. It follows the Ninjago aesthetic pretty well for the most part, but at best, it was a 10 minute build. And surprisingly, this was the very first set I have ever opened that had NO spare bricks of any kind left over after building. That was pretty odd, as Ninjago is really REALLY popular with the age group that loses the hell out of bricks, only to have your bare feet find them later in the most pain inducing sort of "kill me now, I just impaled my foot on a bright yellow Danish stalagmite" kind of way.

Paints a hell of a picture huh? Yeah, call me Bob Ross. I know you won't.

So in conclusion, although the sum of the 30 LEGO bricks to make this plane are actually pretty awesome for kitbashing and creating other cool things from, the actual build is alright. Not the most sturdy, and even for the adult collectors, it's nothing but a bit above average.

I'll be back next week, with a different polybag build, to show how a cool mini vehicle can really work out with just 10 more bricks added to the count and produce a much sleeker looking build, with the LEGO Movie Super Secret Police Enforcer polybag set!

Stats	Rating/Information
Items	Ninjago Skybound Plane Polybag Set 30421
Made by	Lego
Rarity	Uncommon.
Classification	Out of production.
Condition	New
Procured	Toys R Us
Worth	$10 to $13
Investment	$5
Build Time	10 minutes.
Trivia & Fun Facts	The overall aesthetic of this subseries in the Ninjago universe has a distinct Clockwork/Steampunk meets traditional Pirates sort of feel to it.

- Mario, the Artisan Rogue

www.theartisanrogue.com

Fly high with a Lego Ninja into the sky

(Top) Front and back of the oversized package. (Bottom) Everything that came inside, and some rather new and unique colored parts, made specifically for this flyer model.

Ninjas. What comes to mind when you think of the mysterious stealthy warriors of the far East? Death in the darkness? Sharp edged sword fights? Flying plastic minifigures? Whaaaa?

Yes, since 2011, Lego has produced 112 sets for Ninjago that have ranged from incredible temples and a variety of insanely designed Asiatic inspired dragons, to weird offshoots like a line of zip pull activated "Airjitsu Wrayth Flyers", of which one I am reviewing today.

The Ninjago line has proved to be successful enough that it is one of the more popular add ons for Lego Dimensions, and has a full length feature film debuting in 2017, hot on the heels of the wildly popular television show.

Just 43 pieces in this build.

Now let me start off by saying that under most circumstances, I don't like what I call the "gimmick set" releases, and this one really falls into that for me. The build action is definitely secondary to getting the play value out of it. That's to be expected, as it really is aimed at the younger collector of Ninjago's line.

With just the aforementioned 43 pieces in this set, the time building it was pretty slim, clocking in at just around 7 minutes. It's not a difficult build, and did have some odd assembly and brick placements, like the two hidden 1x1 bricks in the lower right hand corner images above. And of those pieces included, 14 of them were minifig parts and weapons, and two spare bricks.

The actual reason I picked up this particular one was of course the minifigure, which had these wicked transparent legs with great details overlaid on them.

But looking past those shortcomings, it's a solid set, and I did manage to try out the flyer functionality and it works quite well (at flying out of control and scaring the %$#@ out of all of my cats in the process eliciting ninja like panic reactions from the fur foot clan..).

The best part of this set is the minifigure, as his design and weapons that are included are actually pretty bad ass.

For kids, this set is pretty cool and does have a real honest to god playability factor above the standard creative realms for normal Lego sets. For the older collector,... $10, which is what the sets average, is a bit high to pay for a single minifig, if that's what you're going for. But the set does include some great bricks and other parts in it that you'd be hard pressed to find outside of these flyer sets.

Stats	Rating/Information
Items	Lego Airjitsu Wrayth Flyer Set 70744
Made by	Lego
Rarity	Common
Classification	In Production
Condition	New
Procured	Retail Recovery Sales outlet
Worth	$10
Investment	$6
Build Time	7 minutes.
Trivia & Fun Facts	In 2012, the LEGO Ninjago Fire Temple was awarded "Activity Toy of the Year" title at the 12th Annual Toy of the Year Awards, which is held at the American International Toy Fair in New York City.

- Mario, the Artisan Rogue

www.theartisanrogue.com