Which set contains the most stickers?

Where does 10155 fall on this list? I know the other two Maersk ships are on here but this is a third distinct model

"Thanks to Huw for the photo of various sticker sheets. How many can you identify?"
The first one that stood out to me was 8561 The Boss (RoboRiders), which I own! I also recognize 6586 Polar Scout and the original ISS set 7467 from LEGO Discovery.

I see a sticker sheet from the original 2001 LEGO Soccer/Football but I don't recognize it, despite the flag emblems looking familiar. BrickLink says it's from 3416 Women's Team. Why was this not in my catalogs? I'd never heard of this until now.

I think the sticker sheet photo contains sheets for these sets, based on what I remember my parents having stashed away in the attic:
8516 - Super RoboRider
7467 - International Space Station (Discovery line)
6550 - Outback Racer
6462 - Ariel Recovery (or at least one of the RES-Q line, but I think that's the one)
6958 - Android Base (Exploriens), which I'm less sure of since I thought for sure there were more stickers, but maybe the rest really are prints!

There was a time in my life when stickers were an absolute nightmare. Well, still are lol

With the introduction of set 853921, things have changed a bit in my city. Brick built lettering can take up a lot of bricks, sometimes tiles, stickers will only cover 1 piece.

The amount of details and graphic designs are just2good to not be used.

I tend to avoid sets with lots of stickers, sets to be part of my long term collection, exception made to 21324, that would be impossible to recreate with printed items for a reasonable price!

@JukeLimited said:
"6958 - Android Base (Exploriens), which I'm less sure of since I thought for sure there were more stickers, but maybe the rest really are prints!"

It did come with several more stickers, however they were all on individual sheets, given that those same stickers also appeared in other sets. Off the top of my head, that set had:
A sheet for the reflective deltoid clips
A sheet for the magnetic stickers
A sheet for the holographic display monitor
A sheet for the round holographic sticker
And a sheet for the big exploriens logo.

@Dash_Justice said:
" @HandPositions said:
"Could we see most stickers relative to the price of the set?"
I think the stickers to number of pieces ratio would be more interesting!
"

Agree. That or a comparison of area covered by stickers applied to the finished model (which would weed out sets with several options of stickers, like the aforementioned train set with multiple liveries).

Average sticker size would be very interesting, but rather hard to measure.
Personally I'm not even that much against stickers. Yes prints are absolutely better, but it just doesn't bother me that much. As a scale modeler, I'm actually kinda used to applying huge amounts of decals, so stickers are a piece of cake for me. What bothers me far more, are big stickers or stickers, that go over an assembly.
(Also, at Lego's price point there absolutely is space for more prints, seriously)

The most from my collection I think would be 42025

Diagon alley and the firehouse if I had to take a guess guys!!

The highest of the sets are 8154, 8147, and then 8495 for me.

Well, there goes any chance of me getting 75978 Diagon Alley.
In all seriousness, this was a very interesting article and not something I could've come up with. Stickers have their ups and downs (I have a 1x4 tile on my desk that the dang thing won't stick to) but they clearly aren't going anywhere anytime soon. I'm not as big on actually buying LEGO as most people here (at least not the bigger sets), but I remember there being a lot of stickers in 70317 The Fortrex. They didn't feel like too much, though, maybe because they were balanced out by the building process.

I'm happy that I own ZERO sets on this list!

Would you like some Speed Champions with your stickers?

WRC Ford fiesta speed champions had an excessive amount on small parts and if applied badly made it look awful ,they were needed to give it the rally look, kids don't put stickers on so well and when I find dumped lego i blame kids for outofline stickers. Trying to realign them isn't easy either

@LegoSonicBoy said:
"The Boss (RoboRiders), which I own"
Uhhh that should've been 8516... typo there. But I own all the Bohrok too, so.

@FuddRuckus said:
"I expected the Maersk ship to top the list."

If you read the article, the trains in italics are ones that include various different train company logos e.g. Deutsche Bahn, soot all are applied at once. Discounting those, the Maersk ship does top the list.

Sticker to part ratio would be interesting. I bet a lot more older sets would feature higher up on that list.

I don't mind stickers, but with the 10241 I just left of the stickers for the containers.

Nice article, I can't imagine to put that much stickers on my LEGO. I find it hard to put stickers on small parts, 1x2 tile for instance. I prefer printed parts of course, but I don't mind stickers though.

I see stickers for:
1254: Shell Convenience Store
6550: Outback Racer
10022: Santa Fe Cars - Set II

How is it not a speed champions set!? (Looking at you, 76898)

Ninjago City an Ninjago City Docks have a lot of stickers.

@M8 said:
"Is it really the legendary 5956 - Expedition Balloon?"

It is! That was one of my childhood favourite sets, and one I still have a huge soft spot for, so I was very happy to see that show up in the picture :D

Even better, that one was, I feel, justified in using stickers, since they all went on the big single-piece balloon: which I suspect, given its large size, would have been impractical to print on effectively at the time. The set had a second sticker sheet too, with the rest of the balloon details - the face, the patches, the tail branding - but the Adventurers logos were so big as to get a separate sheet to themselves.

For myself... after looking through my collection, I think the most stickered set I've ever built was 6210 Jabba's Sail Barge, and even that wasn't anywhere close to making this list, with less than thirty stickers total... though it DID include a few of the dreaded STAMPS: 2 x 3-size stickers, each across 1 x 2 and 2 x 2 tiles. Not a big issue when building the set, but more difficult when it came to taking it apart again!

(To be fair, the main reason for the relative lack of sticker presence in my collection is mostly due to never having had the budget for big sets; so I've missed pretty much all of the ones here by virtue of them being out of my price range.)

That said, I don't mind stickers much, personally; I don't enjoy applying them, but they don't ruin a model for me. I think the most annoying use of stickers to me is when they're on a small part that you would expect to easily have been printed... the 2 x 2 round tile for the clock face in 75954 immediately springs to mind. 2 x 2 rounds have been printed since, well, as long as I've been into Lego, so finding that there was suddenly one that required a sticker was an unpleasant surprise. (I still don't think I got it one dead-on centred on the piece, either, which adds to my annoyance with that one in particular!)

Great article! I remember many large Technic sets like BWE having many stickers and sometimes more than one sticker sheet. From memory, Ninjago City 70620 has the most stickers in my collection with I think around 60 (but Extreme Adventure 42069 may come close), though translating the phrases on them compensated for having so many. Aligning them just right can take an age, and the UCS plaque stickers, well...

I've never not applied stickers as Huw does in the reviews for some Technic sets, but one day I'll try.

Where did you get the data from? I don't see a sticker count in the set details...

Kind of funny to see an Exo-Force set on there only a couple slots behind Diagon Alley...

@HandPositions:
I would go with 6276885, which, while classified as "gear", is exclusively a replacement roll of stickers for 70830, and has a sticker to piece ratio that's incalculable (there are a ton of stickers, but no parts at all).

@AgentR2:
Stickers are still cheaper to produce, and they've refined their rules on what does and does not get print over the years. Sets for little kids tend towards being exclusively printed because they're not as capable of applying stickers as whingy adults who moan about how their expensive sets should merit tons of exclusive prints that will drive the price through the stratosphere. It's also been noted that play-essential deco is sometimes printed while less critical stuff is stickered in the same set (see the Legend Beasts from Chima, where the only non-minifig prints were facial features).

@Duq said:
"Where did you get the data from? I don't see a sticker count in the set details..."

Sets from 2016 have a sticker number to let you know where it goes. (like 60113 for example) Some have more than one of the same sticker as well. (60118 is one of them)

I don't mind stickers. Sometimes I apply them, sometimes I leave them off. Any unused ones get saved for possible use on something else. But sometimes they're terrible: look at 41256 Rainbow Caterbus. The big yellow and green stickers are too small to look right.

I seem to remember sports sets coming with a lot of stickers-- just looking quickly, I noticed that 3405-1 (Blue Bus) has in the ballpark of 100+ stickers for the torsos of the figures for variations on teams. And the 10121-1 NBA Teams set seems to have in the ballpark of 300 stickers?

DaveE

I feel like too much of a big deal is made over stickers. As an adult I kind of enjoy putting them on, and did when I was younger, too. Younger than a certain age, though, and I can see how they might be frustrating. I can also appreciate that some single-use images make more sense as a sticker than for Lego to spend extra printing them. The only stickers that ever truly bothered me were the UCS X-Wing canopy stickers and the ones that disintegrated from the early 2000's like the Sopwith Camel.

Stickers, the bane of my existence!

Mute point now that the line is over, but I always wished the Overwatch theme used re-appliable stickers like in the TLM2 set 70830: Sweet Mayhem's Systar Starship so you could rearrange the "sprays" like in-game.

@HandPositions said:
"Could we see most stickers relative to the price of the set?"

Some of the Speed Champions sets would probably qualify, especially the ones modelled after racing cars.

I got the Black widow chopper in December and that has a sticker sheet but I didn't put any on the set and it looks better without them tbh..

How many stickers does 42125 Ferrari 488 GTE 'AF Corse 51' have then?

Makes one wonder if it would have been worth doing a run of printed maersk container bricks - given that it's one design on one brick and the volume generated...

I have both Maersk ships, thought for sure they were 1 and 2, I was surprised to see that High-Speed City Express Passenger Train topped them!

Honestly, I'm surprised that Speed Champions didn't have a greater presence on the list, but I guess they'll come through on density. Much as I love the theme, I've spent a lot of time with tweezers when building those cars, if not outright considering how to minimise the number of stickers I have to use. Which is fun by itself, figuring out how to make a sponsorless 'road' version that looks good is like an extension of the build and makes each car feel more special to my shelf.

@ra226 said:
"and the ones that disintegrated from the early 2000's"

Uhm... They still do that. You should see my 2017 UCS Snowspeeder.

I would not consider the train as the 1 , it's not even in the top 20 when it's using the most stickers of DB.

The 12V train sticker sheets were massive, but only a small fraction of them were used in the actual build.

From this list, I only have 12 8161 Grand Prix Race 89 (Speed Racer). I just got it last Summer and haven't built it yet, but it does have two sticker sheets.

Hardest sticker I think was the canopy on the UCS X-Wing. I started then ended up not doing it. So lame an expensive set with a sticker like that. I think it came with two if I remember correctly. It looks fine without it, but wish they just would have printed it. I don't like stickers that go across multiple angles like that...especially a clear sticker on a clear part. Maybe just me but seems difficult to apply.

@PurpleDave said:
[whingy adults who moan about how their expensive sets should merit tons of exclusive prints that will drive the price through the stratosphere.]

That is EXACTLY what I want when paying hundreds of dollars for a model/display (NOT a children's toy). Looking at YOU 1989 Batmobile (bought since the majority of the stickers are inside) and Jurassic Park: T. rex Rampage (refuse to buy since the gate has two large stickers).

If the justification is that stickers limit reuse and stifle kids imagination, then provide a printed AND stickered copy of the part. LEGO already gives us extra pieces in every set. Why not make them useful? Or, give us the option to buy the printed version as an add-on. Keeps the initial cost of the set down and gives adults/teens the ability to make their models appearance remain steadfast.

They tested out light kits last year and have developed an entirely new road system this year. I'm confident there is enough consumer interest to garner the needed attention. The Chinese Traditional Festival sets are all printed pieces. I'm sure it can be accommodated for adult-centric sets too without hurting overall profitability.

Also, regarding the price being driven by printed parts, why wouldn't LEGO want their products to continuously be sought after discontinuation based on high quality production values? It strengthens their brand positioning in the market. This would also solidify the connection between them and their loyal customers. A perception of good products being delivered as a gesture of appreciation to those spending their hard earned money would be easy to correlate.

I knew 75978 Diagon Alley was going to be high up on the list

I own three of the 20 mentioned. Not surprisingly two are from the Speed Champions line. I actually initially built these without stickers some which looked okay without but others really need the stickers.

@Graupensuppe said:
" @ra226 said:
"and the ones that disintegrated from the early 2000's"

Uhm... They still do that. You should see my 2017 UCS Snowspeeder."

Well, just buy a new sticker sheet on Bricklink! (I’m kidding, it’s insanely expensive.)

I agree LEGO should either sell sticker sheets, make a couple available per box or give us access to good quality PDF files.

I personally buy extra sticker sheets for my sets on Bricklink, except when they’re crazy expensive like the UCS snowspeeder above.

I think it would be interesting to see a list of sets with the highest number of *unique* stickers used in the set. The Maersk ships have so many stickers that are duplicates due to the cargo containers.

@GSR_MataNui said:
"Stickers, the bane of my existence!

Mute point now that the line is over, but I always wished the Overwatch theme used re-appliable stickers like in the TLM2 set 70830: Sweet Mayhem's Systar Starship so you could rearrange the "sprays" like in-game. "

About TLM2, I have the 70828 set, quite fun to build! But the large stickers to place on the 1x6x5 panels are trurly the worst for me. There's a really small margin error, and often you place it wrong. I sometimes have nightmares about them
Edit: I remember that I got a small Speed Champions Mustang set. Another big pain to place all the stickers (but the result is soooo good)

Great article about controversial stickers.

@Slithus_Venom said:
"How many stickers does 42125 Ferrari 488 GTE 'AF Corse 51' have then?"

I thought that was a glaring omission too. The review says "about 60".

@Duq said:
" @CapnRex101 said:
"I counted the stickers myself, covering about 1500 sheets in total. That is nowhere near the entire LEGO range because there are only about twenty themes where sets include enough stickers for consideration, if one places that barrier at perhaps forty stickers. For example, I only counted a few Star Wars sets because I knew that there were only very few candidates for inclusion."
Wow, that's a lot of work!
@huw: worth adding to the database? "

If you don't have the sticker sheets available brickowl is a good place to start counting with just under 3000 sheets https://www.brickowl.com/catalog/lego-stickers
To save you going mad, you could just look at the instructions for the largest sets first starting from the back page until you find the last sticker that is used and record the corresponding number. If you have the talent and technology you could do this automatically.

I have the two Speed Champions sets (13 and 16 in the list).

The hardest stickers by far, for me anyway, are the 1x1 stickers that invariably go on to a 1x1 cheese wedge.

Here is the sticker sheet for 7745: https://www.brickfactory.info/scans/0007000/7745/033.jpg

@erithromycin said:
"Makes one wonder if it would have been worth doing a run of printed maersk container bricks - given that it's one design on one brick and the volume generated..."
I thought that too. Given how long the LEGO/Maersk relationship lasted it certainly seems a viable idea. I have yet to build my Triple-E. One thing that kept me from it so far was the prospect of having to apply all these stickers.

@ambr said:
"...you could just look at the instructions for the largest sets first starting from the back page until you find the last sticker that is used and record the corresponding number"
That won't work, though, because there are often multiple stickers for a single number.

I'd also like to see the most stickers on a stickers-per-part ratio.
I was expecting Exo-force to feature quite highly. Sets like 7700 Stealth Hunter (the white mech) had a lot of stickers, coming across more like a model kit with loads of decals that a regular LEGO set. The only downside to that was a lot of the stickers were applied to rough sloping surfaces rather than smooth, which isn't good for their longevity.

I also appreciate that stickers (or the lack thereof) allow the option of leaving bricks "blank" for reuse in MOCs, and you can use the stickers themselves as creative additions to MOCs. Although, IMHO, most models look better without them. I just built 71738 yesterday and didn't use a single sticker. As a general rule, I leave most of them on their sheets, and like @Huw, I have a whole box of them.

@AustinPowers said:
"I thought that too. Given how long the LEGO/Maersk relationship lasted it certainly seems a viable idea. I have yet to build my Triple-E. One thing that kept me from it so far was the prospect of having to apply all these stickers. "

Stickers always fill me with dread, but ones that are meant to be aligned to bricks directly and (worse!) have to be parallel to each other are the absolute worst. I'd have thought a printed Maersk container brick would see enough use as you say. Shell have/had a fair few printed parts.

My first thought was Tiny Turbos, so I was thrilled to see some of those Racer sets up there. Otherwise, absolutely not surprised to see Sentai Fortress up there. One of my absolutely favorite sets in my childhood, but I recall all the little bullet-hole sticks applied to everything. Spent an entire evening trying to match them up with how they are on the box.

I generally have no issues with most stickers and they do a pretty good job of matching the background colour of stickers to the colour of the bricks they apply them on, but I always find that stickers on black bricks doesn't look great. The white of the adhesive side seems to always be more prominent on the edges of the sticker when it is stuck on black bricks, than any other colour. Obviously it would drive prices if printed bricks replaced all stickers, but I wouldn't paying a bit extra for black printed bricks. I look at the printed plate included in 76171: Miles Morales Mech Armor compared to the stickers in 75893: 2018 Dodge Challenger SRT Demon and 1970 Dodge Charger R/T, and it looks vastly superior

My guess would be Speed Champions. Lots of stickers on a smaller sized set. The ratio of pieces that get a sticker is quite high. From the list, I own 75889 and 75876, so based on sets I own, Speed Champions do have the most. They are appropriate & needed, but still a lot. I also own 71043 and 70840 from the list, but since they are very large sets, the amount of stickers doesn't seem quite as out of proportion to me, since they are such big sets.

After my dark ages, I never applied a sticker on any of my models. I would however consider it if they where coming with duplicate sheet of stickers. I also truly believe that Lego parts and stickers sheets should be available for much longer than what they are currently. Of course, Lego does not care one bit what I believe should be the right thing to do but maybe this view is shared by others in the community.

@HOBBES:
Sure, it'd be great if they were available _forever_, but from a business perspective that's untenable. Eventually they'd be devoting more production capacity to keeping up with orders for legacy parts than trying to get new product out the doors.

The other major problem that keeps them from doing this is storage space. Every retired set has parts that are no longer being produced for current sets, and those take up a lot of warehouse space that could be devoted to parts that are needed for current and upcoming sets.

They used to hold on to parts that were no longer being produced for quite a while, in case anyone needed a replacement. I don't know how long they used to do this early on, but at some point I think the cutoff got pegged at five years. If it got pulled back into production, the old stock would be ready to go, and there wouldn't be any gap in availability for replacement parts. More recently, that window has narrowed, and I think Bricklink is largely to blame for that. Once the world started managing the back-inventory for them, it really started to ease the burden on their end.

I suspect that's a large part of the reason they ended up buying Bricklink. The fear was they were going to buy it and shut it down, but they've been using whispered voices over the phone to send people there for years now, when they get a request to replace a legacy element. Instead of shutting them down, this gave them a degree of control over what they saw as a valuable resource. Before, they had zero authority over Bricklink, so they had to trust that nothing that happened there would run counter to their own stated values. Imagine how bad the blowback would be if they were sending parents there only to find out their orders were arriving with a stack of pamphlets endorsing Satanism...and that Bricklink management was perfectly fine with that (no, this is a hypothetical situation, and did not really happen). Now, as the new owners, they can kick that seller off the marketplace if they violate any rules, and they can make sure the rules reflect their values.

And with that, the chances that they'll ever increase the shelf life of their back inventory of parts is pretty much gone.

@PurpleDave said:
" @HOBBES:
Sure, it'd be great if they were available _forever_, but from a business perspective that's untenable. Eventually they'd be devoting more production capacity to keeping up with orders for legacy parts than trying to get new product out the doors.

The other major problem that keeps them from doing this is storage space. Every retired set has parts that are no longer being produced for current sets, and those take up a lot of warehouse space that could be devoted to parts that are needed for current and upcoming sets.

They used to hold on to parts that were no longer being produced for quite a while, in case anyone needed a replacement. I don't know how long they used to do this early on, but at some point I think the cutoff got pegged at five years. If it got pulled back into production, the old stock would be ready to go, and there wouldn't be any gap in availability for replacement parts. More recently, that window has narrowed, and I think Bricklink is largely to blame for that. Once the world started managing the back-inventory for them, it really started to ease the burden on their end.

I suspect that's a large part of the reason they ended up buying Bricklink. The fear was they were going to buy it and shut it down, but they've been using whispered voices over the phone to send people there for years now, when they get a request to replace a legacy element. Instead of shutting them down, this gave them a degree of control over what they saw as a valuable resource. Before, they had zero authority over Bricklink, so they had to trust that nothing that happened there would run counter to their own stated values. Imagine how bad the blowback would be if they were sending parents there only to find out their orders were arriving with a stack of pamphlets endorsing Satanism...and that Bricklink management was perfectly fine with that (no, this is a hypothetical situation, and did not really happen). Now, as the new owners, they can kick that seller off the marketplace if they violate any rules, and they can make sure the rules reflect their values.

And with that, the chances that they'll ever increase the shelf life of their back inventory of parts is pretty much gone."

All your responses have been wonderfully insightful.
Where do you get some of your information from? I've been curious about LEGO's internal design considerations for a while now.

Also, I've never been overly bothered by stickers on LEGO sets.
After misapplying one, I decided there had to be something I was doing wrong, and researched online for a bit.
Found a link to a Reddit thread where professional LEGO builders gave tips for professional displays, and it's been smooth sailing ever since.
The secret? Tweezers, patience, and ammonia-free Windex to act as a surfactant.
I've built over 100+ sets in the last 2 years, and not a single damaged or peeling sticker.

@DigitalDevourer:
Some of it I picked up in my three trips to New York Toy Fair nearly 20 years ago, a lot of it comes from reading interviews, and the rest of it's mostly divided between calls to Consumer Affairs, having worked in the plastics industry, and some educated guesses (sometimes my own, but also from others).

@brickengineeringdude said:
"That train doesn't look like it has a lot of stickers.

"

That's one of the WAY early train sets, which included stickers for just about EVERY prototypical (i.e. real-life) rail line in existence in Europe at the time (about the early-mid '80s or so). Naturally, you would only apply the stickers from one rail line at a time to each locomotive/rail car, otherwise your locomotive/rail car would end up looking like a BNSF heritage unit from midern-day USA. On that note, it's a good thing that they did not include stickers for prototypical rail lines from around the world, because the Class-1 railroads that existed in North America at the time (like Santa Fe, Union Pacific, Conrail, D&RGW, Southern Railway, Norfolk & Western, CP, CN, etc. etc. etc.) would add more than enough stickers to those sets to make them rival the more contemporary Maersk Line Triple-E set!

Let's see, AquaRaiders (the one that really WAS a sub-theme of Aquazone [at least as far as I'm concerned]), Divers (circa '97), RES-Q and Extreme Team (circa 2000 or so [I believe]), Arctic (circa 2001), Adventurers' Airship, one of the Soccer busses (circa the late '90s/early 2000s), one of the more modern Maersk-Sealand container ships, the rally car set from the Outback theme of the mid '90s, a Robo-Raiders set from the same time-frame, a Police set from the mid-late 2000s or so (the ones that came with black Police stickers and optional green Polizei stickers), a modern-day NASA-licensed set, the Space Port fuel truck (circa 2001), and the Exploriens' Android Base! That's about all that I recognize.

I read it as 3425 "Grandmother Championship Cup"
I kinda want to see a moc with Old ladies instead of generic Football players. ;)