My brother and I have only missed two in our collective bag feeling career. It was the series with the flaminco dancer, and the Statue of Liberty. We kept searching for the skirt, and forgot that the statue has the crown. We finally found one. But I feel like only missing two over the course of twenty series, is not to bad.

I managed to nab this minifigure by pure luck in my local Tesco, I was doing the weekly food shop when on a random shelf in one of the food aisles was a HPCMF bag with a tear in it, to my surprise it was the elusive Percival. My guess is that some kid picked it up opened it and their parent told them to put it down, or they seen what minifigure it was and wasn't interested, so dumped it on a shelf. Anyway lucky for me I now have this rare beauty to compliment the rest ofy HP collection.

Percival Graves, I hunted him down like a madman trying to finish my series too... If I were to pick between the Fantastic Beasts films, I'd say the first was the better of the two, so its not like I was to discouraged by the source material to seek out Percival. But it felt like I had spent ages feeling blind bags and digging through figures just to get him! Fortunately at the local Lego Store most of the people feeling the blind bags are adults... so I didn't get to many strange looks when I tried there.

I happened to visit my local LEGO store the first saturday after this series was released. The aisle with the minifigures was constantly occupied by 5 adults (!), mostly male, at a time, feeling the bags for, what I assumed, was Graves. So yeah, I really believe those people were resellers. LEGO got a lot of criticism for that, but given how the distribution of the Disney 2 MFs was, they don't give a single f.

Back when I collected cmfs, my local shop used to feel and number each figure and give every 5th free. It was great!

I am a "feeler" I got really good looking for the Wizard of Oz figures. It got to the point I could open a case and pull every one on my first time through. Have so many of those sets. I was not going to buy the DC, because I really want a MARVEL SET OF CMF'S PLEASE, PLEASE, PLEASE!!!!!! Anyway, I ran into three unopened cases in Wal-Mart. Went and grabbed an outdoor chair and a table from that aisle and set myself up. Went through all of them and only came away with 4 doubles while building three sets. Not a bad average at all.

I feel your pain hunting for the exact figure and have spent many hours in shops feeling my way thru to find the unique piece in each bag! We have a solution in the southwest, one of the local toy shops does it for us and has them all hung up by number!!!

I feel your pain. But I have to be honest: after spending quite some time in the toy store trying to get all of the lego movie 2 cmf (and achieving it as well) i felt frustrated and a little bit silly (after all I'm much older). So I became lazy and having the advantage of a job that leaves some leftover cash I resorted to buying whole boxes. Though to be honest I still practice the "feeling" the cmf, only this time in the comfort of my home and being sure that ALL cmf are still in that box.

I'm looking forward to the wizarding world series 2 minifigs.. I enjoyed collecting the 1st series and the dc comics CMF,s too but I wanna see marvel CMF,s now and I have some thoughts of who could be included:

Reed Richards
Sue Storm
Johnny Storm
Thing
Namor
Domino
The Watcher
Daredevil
Bullseye
Jessica Jones
Elektra
Doctor Doom
Silver surfer
Stealth suit Captain America
The punisher
Enchantress..

And lego price them back at £2.49 so we can all get 4 for just under a Tenner!!

@jkb said:
"I happened to visit my local LEGO store the first saturday after this series was released. The aisle with the minifigures was constantly occupied by 5 adults (!), mostly male, at a time, feeling the bags for, what I assumed, was Graves. So yeah, I really believe those people were resellers. LEGO got a lot of criticism for that, but given how the distribution of the Disney 2 MFs was, they don't give a single f."

At least in the case of the Harry Potter series, it did become a bit of a shelf warmer in the years following its release. I can still find Harry Potter blind bags at local Barnes and Noble stores. So my guess is the re-seller value was hurt by how long the figures stayed on shelves. Now... I don't know if its shelf warmer status was intentional or not, knowing how big of a fandom Potter has, Lego might have produced a lot just to keep the figures on shelves in some form or another until they get replaced by a second series. Not to dissimilar from how back in the day Lego kept the 2002 Bionicle Toa Nuva wave on shelves up until 2004's Toa Metru finally rolled out to replace them.

@Brickmasterboy we're still missing a handful of the elemental masters, Dr. Julien, an uncorrupted Cyrus Borg, and so many more. A Legacy series would be an amazing way to deal with it. Given the Johnny Thunder and Dash Justice like figures in recent CMF series perhaps even a more general LEGO Legacy series would do!

I used to absolutely love CMF, but as time's gone on the sets have gotten more and more expensive and they've started adding more and more characters per series. It's becoming way to hard to find the characters you need, especially given every Walmart I've gone to just dumps the bags into a basket instead of leaving them in box so I can't even use a cheat sheet of default positions to find who I want.

I used to collect them from series 1, but gradually they lost their appeal for me and ultimately just an obsession to have them all. When Mr Gold happened in series 10 I just stopped and sold them all. My nephews on the other hand enjoy collecting them so I will occasionally buy them some, and whenever I go to a Comicon (or similar event) there is usually a stand or two selling them out of bags and I will go on the hunt to find the ones my nephews really want - Watch out for the fake ones though!

This sums my opinion on CMF, I would love for the company to incorporate them in sets.

I get them on eBay for less than $2 a figure. But that's without the silly Chase figures.

I have no idea what that's like, and many fellow members of my LUG would attest to that. Between the first two series, I had 17 of the barcodes memorized. Some were the ones I was actually chasing (I've got at least 70 S1 Robots), but others were just because they were easy to memorize. For the next couple series, I tried using the dotcodes, but I quickly learned that they were rough sketches and not 1:1 schematics, so I gave up on them very early on. I'd already started palping the packets to verify my dotcode results, and just switched to that. I can burn through an entire sealed case in half an hour tops. If I'm only hunting for a specific minifig, I can probably do the same in under five minutes because it's very easy to rule out most minifigs in a given wave if you're not trying to actually figure out what every packet contains.

Of all the minifigs I own, the only one that I was never able to find on my own was the S18 vintage cop. I'd gone through the entire bin of minifigs and pulled one of every minifig in that wave except the cop. There simply wasn't one left to be found. The store manager (who passed away last year) helped me out with that one. Took him two tries, though. The only other minifig that I've never been able to find in the wild was Mr. Gold. If I had, I might not have stopped trying to stay 100% complete on CMFs.

@jkb:
When a new wave of CMFs launches, the hardcore collectors all show up in force to try to complete a set ASAP. DC Superheroes landed on a holiday, so I wasn't tied up with work and could actually head to the LEGO Store to buy a complete set. I got there maybe 15 minutes after the store opened, and I couldn't even reach a single packet without risking inappropriate touching. But, as people were able to complete their sets, they quickly cleared out, and I was then able to go through the entire bin of leftovers and scrape together my own set, plus a couple extras of Batman (because you can never have enough Batmen). Now, that's for a set that had a normal 3/4/5 distribution, where it was really easy to find a complete set. Imagine if there were ten people around that bin and only four copies of Superman to split between them. When I got started on the DC minifigs, about half of the bin hadn't even been touched. With a chase figure, they're all going to be checking every last packet just to try to fill that final hole in their set, and most of them will come up empty. Some of them may then recheck the leftovers in the vain hope of finding one that got missed the first time.

I would really love to see a Star Wars CMF series. I know that would be extremely popular.

Thanks for sharing your story.

Since it wouldn't be possible for me to like every character in every series, I made a promise to myself that only half of each wave would be collected. This has made the hunt more enjoyable and cheaper! I have only the minifigures that are wanted and it hasn't gotten completely out of hand when trying to display them.

I took a look at the whole set and they don't seem to be too difficult compared to other CMF series, as long as there's one unique part or at least unique parts combination you can find them without too much issue.
The Policeman from series 18 was a huge pain though, I went to multiple different stores till I finally found one, I actually found 2 in the same aisle but left it for another potential collector looking to complete the set or at least someone lucky enough to get the rarest minifigure in the series.

Speaking of difficulty, the real challenge or rather the impossible challenge is getting all the Unikitty blind bags without duplicates, I had the opportunity to search through a complete box so I took the time to separate them into 3 categories because that's as much as you can tell what they are without opening them and managed to complete the set with 11 duplicates, luckily all of them were variations I didn't mind having more than one of.

@legoavenger14, My understanding is that the Fantastic Four licence isn't available which is why LEGO hasn't done them as CMFs or in sets. Whether that will continue to be the case, I don't know.

Great little article, a fun read! I can almost see that fear of someone coming & ruining your method. For me, I’m an early riser so I get to B&N when they open & do my searching then. I do give a side eye or two as people walk by...:P

As for not getting duplicates, that’s pretty easy. I’m only a few series in on feeling the bags, but I’ve been on point for all the ones I’ve gotten. You just have to focus on the accessories and/or hairpieces to figure out who you have. It certainly can be time consuming though.

The first couple of series were $1.99 USD each. It is sad that prices have gone up so much since then. I gave up around series 20 and have sold most of them on Bricklink. The “chase” is fun but I found I wasn’t doing anything with them once I completed the series.

Hoo boy. Have a love/hate relationship with the minifigure series. Personally, I quite enjoy feeling through the packets to try and determine which character is which. Sure, the blind bag is a blatant way to get you to buy more packets, but the fact you can feel for the pieces is already a huge step up from other similar products. I've noticed they put the toy around a plastic casing of some sort so you can't even use that method to determine which one you will get. Plus I enjoy learning which ones my family members like and trying to find them once I've picked up all the ones I'm looking for!

But there have been a few speedbumps. I'm really miffed at the inconsistent number of minifigures per box because that's the biggest way to ruin an entire series for me. I think it was series 4 where I always kept getting Frankenstein even if I felt carefully, so I ended up with far too many. History repeated itself with the Disney series where I ended up with a bunch of Stitch and Genie repeats. I like Stitch and Genie, but I don't need 4 of them while I'm looking to get Buzz and Maleficent. Then during the anniversary series I kept getting the blue unicorn guy. I am glad they didn't pull a Mr. Gold again because that was ridiculous. The "one per box" method isn't much better, but at least there's more than a handful of them to keep secondhand prices from getting too bad.

Now, recently there has been a price increase and more minifigures per series. The latter I'm actually okay with. The more the merrier, right? The former I'm not a huge fan of. I live in the US, and the $4 was much easier to get at an impulse compared to $5. Got five bucks? Minifigures right there? Hey, why not? Ten bucks gets two minifgures with some cash leftover. But the cost of the minifigures adds up quickly, and that extra dollar does make it a bit harder to pick up a packet if there's a chance I'll end up getting a Frankenstein scenario and wasting my money. When the prices were lower, I used to pick up a lot more minifigures. With the prices now, I try to only find a couple that I really like and leave the rest to hopefully go on sale.

What is interesting is that the price of CMF jumped to 2.99 USD per for Series 3 once LEGO realized they were getting bought up at 1.99 USD.
3.5 USD for a figure is fine for me, after all it is what the Build a minifigure bars in LEGO stores essentially is (3 for 9.99 SD) and now you get exclusive prints found only in those bins.
5 USD is stretching credibility (and there are long drawn out discussions to this point for and against),
Having said all of that, I cannot help to feel this article is more of a 'rant' and less of an informative article IMO.
There are easy solutions to your 'concerns':
-Keep feeling (honestly it takes time for me to get into feeling packs, but once I do I can pretty much figure out a figure fairly quickly)
-Many outlets will do the hard work for you and will pre-sell you a set directly (through both on brickset.com and ebay) . Sure it may be a bit more per pack, but they are doing the hard work (and will have spare figures aside from the sets) but how much is your time worth to you?
-Many places also pre-sell a whole box for less than 4.99 USD per pack. My advice is buy a box with two other people, get the three complete sets out of it (as I think LEGO FINALLY learned from the chase figure debacle that it is not worth doing that anymore.. at least if the last few releases have shown) and split the cost on the remainder or just find people that want the spare uncommons/commons from the set (as Im sure there will be).

@Zander said:
" @legoavenger14, My understanding is that the Fantastic Four licence isn't available which is why LEGO hasn't done them as CMFs or in sets. Whether that will continue to be the case, I don't know. "

They are marvel characters..originally and lego have a licence for marvel so it's rather sad they haven't made them yet, hopefully that,ll change soon!!

I enjoy blindbag minifigs, but admittedly my stance on them has shifted over the years to "oh boy I hope I don't need too many of them". Gotten pretty good at ID-ing them at least!

I have two family members that also collect Harry Potter so with the first case I took out a complete set for myself and sold the rest of the figs to them. Best way to do it

I enjoyed reading your story and this rare and so expected beloved minifig chase. I can feel much passion behind it, and even a bit of despair with missed tries, and all this really reminds me of many experiences and moments I have lived and still am living while for example I am waiting for a parcel from a Bricklink order, which can come from far countries in Europe and can sometimes be long, so long to be at last delivered, or waiting for stock of a new released set which is out of stock in a day... it's all about this indescribable passion we have for Lego, which can make us so happy one time, anxious the next, so impatient... everything but reasonable. I have changed a bit my mind now, but when I started collecting SW back in 2008, it has driven me quite mad a few times :) Thank you for sharing your experience and passion with us.

@Hawkibro123 said:
"I would really love to see a Star Wars CMF series. I know that would be extremely popular."
You're right! I had never thought neither noticed it had not been done yet. This could drive me a bit mad again for sure!

Great story! Reminds me of a story with this series:
I came home from school one day and discovered that my mother had found some HP CMFs at Woolies. We went to Target later that afternoon to see if they were there and it was so. I brought 2 with my own money after feeling them and being confident I had found Voldemort, which was one figure my brother and I both wanted.

Anyway, we opened them up and Lo behold... BOTH packs had Voldemort in them. Therefore we got one each without having to declare a nuclear war! One of my funniest Lego stories.

Now I feel bad owning 8 Percival Graves... :|

Nice one. Persistence pays off :0)

Missed out on him myself....and the policeman.........can live without them though.

I spent about 1 month Collecting 23/24 of the Harry Potter blind bags at my local Woolworths. I bought 4 or 6 each time, it would take 30 minutes each week doing so. I succeeded most of the time only getting doubles of Professor Dumbledore, Newt, Ron and Nevil. It felt so rewarding getting a new one, and most of the figures had a brand new piece or a piece that I hadn't gotten before! The only figure I didn't get was Credence, and tried a few times later on but could never find him. Oh well great collection, the one series I have collected the most of them all. I can only hope this second series is just as good!

I relate a lot to this one. I love the HP minifigs and don't like doubles, too. So glad you found Graves in the wild; I found him but not with such a lucky story!

My girlfriend and I somehow managed to 4 Percival Graves figures (2 each). Now we display one as Percival Graves and one as Grindelwald

As much as I love the CMF lines and the figs, I abhor the blind bags. I have so much hatred to the blind bag/box toy idea that nearly every company deploys. Let kids and adult collectors see the item they're buying! Lego is the only company I've bought blind bags from because the CMF figs are so great. Unfortunately I am prepared to spend countless more hours feeling the bags to get the figs I want of CMF Series 20 and the next Harry Potter line. Such a waste of time.

I would not care if Lego still did blind bags if there were some kind of printed code or pressed dots on the bags to identify the contents - that preserves the "fun" kids get (according to toy companies) but it lets thrifty/discerning shoppers only get what they want.

The 2020 prices of the CMF figs is ridiculously high.

The niffler is NOT EVEN CUTE! How dare you take away that position from Baby Yoda. Baby Yoda is still NUMBER 1! Other than that. Cool article bro.

Still haven't gotten Graves. Will have to trade or put out the $ for him at this point. I never found an unopened box at the stores to go hunting for him.

Graves was the first HP CMF I got my hands on. My mum was ordered by the store staff to leave as quickly as she could after finding it before the people surrounding all the minifig boxes realised he was missing!

@1947andallthat said:
"Graves was the first HP CMF I got my hands on. My mum was ordered by the store staff to leave as quickly as she could after finding it before the people surrounding all the minifig boxes realised he was missing!"

Wow! Pretty crazy stuff. Made me think about the scene in Willy Wonka when Charlie finds his ticket.

I was pretty fortunate to find an unopened HP box at my Walmart and could get the Graves figure. I had a couple of other AFOLs bug me about finding it and I just kept mum.

Sometimes it's just worth it to buy an armful of minifigs then take them home to find what you want and then return what you don't. Everytime a new set has come out, I think my wife is going to go nuts with hanging out in the toy aisle feeling up plastic baggies of toys. It's just worth it to buy a bunch and do it at home.

I'm quite happy I got out of catching 'em all after series 2, without the bar codes it became just too much of a hassle and made me sour on the entire blind bag thing. S3 felt pretty meh and the dot codes proved useless, I initially bought six packs using the dots to at least get different ones, but still ended up with three samurais. Even when honing my bag feeling skills I just couldn't find the elf and gorilla (probably 'cause so many others wanted them too) and ended up having to bricklink them.

Then you had the elusive Olympic and (unfeelable) Football series (both of which I can do fine without anyway), before it really went downhill with the ridiculous but easily ignored Mr Gold* gimmick and the more annoying chase figures (Seriously, who thought that was a good idea, as if anyone ever said "I wish it was even harder to get a complete set"?).

*I'll bet that you (using DMLS 3D printing or just finding a cheap supplier) could get an actual 14K solid-gold version of this for less than what the original now costs on the secondary market.

Nowadays I usually only buy one or two figures from each series - occasionally more while skipping some series (like S16, S18 and Disney-2) entirely. The sheer number of figures (548 including S20?) combined with the ever-rising prices makes the cost of a complete collection pretty daunting - almost enough to cover ten modulars or two UCS Falcons. Even the cost of my ~120 figures is pretty staggering, at least I bought most of them while they still were reasonably cheap.

@Zordboy said:
"I've gotten a lot better, in the last few years, of feeling the packets to figure out which figure was inside each one. I used to be terrible at it, but all skills take time.

I do agree that the minifigs are particularly obnoxious, in terms of Lego and cash grabbiness, and they always have been, but most of the time -- most of the time -- the figures are interesting enough to make it worth it.

I find that the ones most skippable *are* the movie tie-ins. The Batman movie series, the Ninjago series and the HP range -- I avoided all of those, and I'm okay with it. "

at the lego store near me the staff pre-feel them and sort them out a little, and will help fell them out with you.

I pretty much lost interest in CMFs around the time Toys R Us closed up shop. At $2.50 each I was willing to spend time in the store hunting, but when Lego jacked up the prices I just can't do it any more. Now I just play the long game, waiting for them to show up at Savers.

@Zander:
That's...not quite what's going on. Fox bought the movie rights to X-Men and Fantastic Four from Marvel when Marvel was eating shoe-leather soup. Marvel had two clauses written into the contracts that affected this relationship going forward. One was that if Fox didn't make movies, the rights simply reverted back to Marvel for free, so Fox made a few FF movies just to retain the rights. The other is that Marvel got a percentage of all merchandising and final approval on all merchandise. This was done to make sure they were able to protect the comic book IP. Then Disney bought Marvel, Marvel started making movies, and Disney basically decided that they didn't really need the royalties from merchandising, so Marvel started rejecting _ALL_ merchandising proposals. Notice that there wasn't a single product released to tie in to Deadpool, Deadpool 2, Deadpool Ever After, or Logan. Notice also that Marvel heavily capitalized on the success of the Deadpool movies by releasing a bunch of Deadpool products that had nothing to do with the movies. Marvel tried to bait-and-switch X-Men fans with a different comic property (can't remember if it was Inhumans or Eternals), but the X-titles are simply too popular to mess with. Fantastic Four, on the other hand, had meager sales, so Disney forced them to stop publishing FF, refuse to promote FF, and continue to embargo any Fox merchandising attempts. The intention was to make the IP so toxic that Fox would simply stop making movies and the rights would revert back to Marvel. Now Disney owns Fox (and 40% of Hollywood), so the only issue is that Disney's plan worked. Nobody really cares about FF anymore.

@PixelTheDragon:
I actually started buying up any S4 Franks that I could find towards the end of the run, once I realized that if you scalped them, they made serviceable zombies.

@madforLEGO:
Blame TRU. Every store got one case to start out with, and the warehouses had enough extra that some (but not all) stores could get a second case if they sold really well. Probably every store burned through their initial case in a couple days, so TRU corporate sent out a notice that all stores were to raise the price to $2.99 immediately. S1 wasn't widely available anywhere else, so the price hike didn't do much to deter buyers.

@Brickmasterboy said:
"my biggest wish for CMF would a Ninjago Legacy series."

Couldn't agree more! So many great characters and costumes from the show and while we get the occasional ones in sets or the Bricktober packs a CMF series would be great!