Which set contains the most stickers, relative to its size?
Posted by CapnRex101,
Following our previous article that discussed sets containing the most stickers outright, now our interest moves to products that include the most stickers relative to their size.
Certain sets accordingly return from our earlier leaderboard, although numerous smaller items which include considerable numbers of stickers are new entrants.
Find out which sets contain the highest ratios of stickers after the break...
Finding which sets contain the most stickers relative to their size requires a quick calculation. Dividing the number of pieces by the number of stickers yields a figure which we have named 'parts per sticker'. The lower that number is, the more stickers the set contains in relation to its respective size.
Before discussing the list, various sets have been omitted from consideration. These include products that contain stickers intended for other sets, such as 5002145 Rocket Raccoon and 5003084 The Hulk, or any which feature optional stickers. Trains and Sports sets occupy that category, sometimes including stickers for multiple railway companies or sports teams.
Also, any products which are classified as gear have been excluded, along with 853921 Brick Stickers. However, since that pack contains 213 stickers and nineteen elements, its 'parts per sticker' score would be an incredible 0.09!
| Ranking | Set | Piece Count | Sticker Count | Parts per Sticker |
| #1 | 1650 Maersk Line Container Ship | 220 | 155 | 1.42 |
| #2 | 8193 Blue Bullet | 50 | 20 | 2.50 |
| #3 | 8896 Snake Canyon | 57 | 20 | 2.85 |
| #4 | 7802 Le Mans Racer | 29 | 10 | 2.90 |
| #5 | 8199 Security Smash | 135 | 44 | 3.07 |
| #6 | 8389 M. Schumacher and R. Barrichello | 34 | 11 | 3.09 |
| #7 | 8198 Ramp Crash | 145 | 45 | 3.22 |
| #8 | 8125 Thunder Raceway | 160 | 48 | 3.33 |
| #9 | 8196 Chopper Jump | 141 | 42 | 3.36 |
| #10 | 8132 Night Driver | 41 | 12 | 3.42 |
| #11 | 8119 Thunder Racer | 48 | 14 | 3.43 |
| #12 | 8149 Midnight Streak | 43 | 12 | 3.58 |
| #13 | 8131 Raceway Rider | 51 | 14 | 3.64 |
| #14 | 8123 Ferrari F1 Racers | 139 | 37 | 3.76 |
| #15 | 8124 Ice Rally | 170 | 45 | 3.78 |
| #16 | 8194 Nitro Muscle | 47 | 12 | 3.92 |
| #17 | 8197 Highway Chaos | 142 | 36 | 3.94 |
| #18 | 7970 Hero | 68 | 17 | 4.00 |
| #19 | 8302 Rod Rider | 48 | 12 | 4.00 |
| #20 | 8120 Rally Sprinter | 47 | 11 | 4.27 |
Once again, 1650 Maersk Line Container Ship has proven unassailable! Identical stickers are applied on both sides of each shipping container and these account for the vast majority of the 155 stickers included. Combining that with the use of large prefabricated hull elements yields a set which contains an enormous quantity of stickers but relatively few parts.
However, I think the ultimate victor from this list is undoubtedly the Racers theme, especially Tiny Turbos! Racing cars are frequently decorated with decals in reality so that is inevitably imitated throughout the LEGO range. Furthermore, the majority of Racers sets were produced within the period after LEGO had largely abandoned placing stickers across multiple elements but before the modern selection of slopes and tiles had been introduced.
Racers sets therefore frequently contain copious tiny stickers which adorn 1x1 slopes or 1x2 tiles. Modern versions of such models would almost certainly comprise larger tiles and slopes which could accommodate larger stickers, thereby necessitating fewer. The stickers which decorate the folding roads which accompanied various Tiny Turbos were also influential, including the likes of 8199 Security Smash.
Finally, the theme which is most commonly associated with stickers today is probably Speed Champions. Surprisingly, no Speed Champions sets appear in the top twenty sets containing the most stickers relative to their size. In fact, the leaderboard would need to continue to 29th place to feature 75872 Audi R18 e-tron quattro, including 166 pieces and 32 stickers to give a score of 5.19.
Do you have any other questions relating to stickers? Our research might allow us to answer some so please let us know in the comments.
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36 comments on this article
It is amazing how many stickers they managed to put on those small Racers sets!
Since Racers dominated the top 20, would it be possible to do an addendum to this article that gives the top 20 that excludes that theme? I would be interested in reading that.
8389 is the only one that didn't come out during my Dark Ages or before I was born and I therefore remember seeing in my catalog, heh.
You could make a pretty graph out of this!
@Huw @CapnRex101 There is an error in the article, the Racers cars are not Mighty Micros (Super Heroes line) but Tiny Turbos!
Mighty micros? Didn’t they have like, two stickers per set?
The 1650 must have been interesting to assemble, with so few parts and so many stickers. I think you've mixed up Tiny Turbos with Mighty Micros.
Parts per sticker yields anomalies of sets with large pieces like the Maersk ship.
You should ideally do it as area covered by stickers as a proportion of total exposed surface area that could have a sticker, i.e. excluding areas with fine protrusions that couldn’t be stickered and areas that are ordinarily out of sight.
I realise that that would be much harder to do. You would need some sophisticated 3D modelling software as well as an algorithm to identify and disregard protrusions and obscured surfaces.
Really surprised there's not more speed champions sets on the list. I have a feeling the racing ones have a lot of stickers (branding / logos / headlights etc) and not that many parts 250-300.
Please do the set with more printed parts.
People complaining about Speed Champions stickers today have no idea how bad Tiny Turbos was.
After building numerous Speed Champions sets I am certainly surprised that none make it higher than 29th. Thanks for the further research into this fun topic.
Think about how many small pieces comprise the Speed Champions series. That will skew the piece to sticker ratio.
Wow, I have the 2nd place set. The tiny stickers on the cheese slopes seemed over the top but my son loved that car.
Never seen Tiny Turbos before and now, there's so many of them!
I don't think having the full updated part selection to work with would have changed Tiny Turbos' standing much. Most of the parts that have been developed for themes like Speed Champions would overwhelm the build of the average Tiny Turbos car. In the first example photo, there's event four instances of two stickers being applied to the same part, because the tile/fender element that was developed specifically for Tiny Turbos has a crease in the top surface that would make it very difficult to apply a single sticker across the entire length.
I'd like to see Tiny Turbos return someday with stickers that don't peel as easily.
This list kinda makes me miss tiny turbos. Imagine getting 4 cars in one set in any current theme.
Tiny turbos were one of my favorite lego themes as a kid. They were so over the top cool with their crazy colors, decals, and names. I never minded the stickers, I enjoy the challenge of aligning them perfectly.
I'd love to see a stickers per piece per year, mostly to address the topic of people who say "it was better x-number of years ago".
So, eliminate sets with no stickers, as well as the sets you've already eliminated for this article, and then graph them across the years to see how many stickers per piece there were in each year.
I just knew Tiny Turbos would top this list. And I knew I'd have at least one. During my late KFOL years and into my TFOL years, Tiny Turbos dominated what LEGO I bought in a year. Number two in the list, 8193 , was a PITA when I built it as a TFOL, and I'm still having nightmares to this date from all those stickers. The small size (often less than two millimeters) gave me the real headache. I don't think I got hardly any of them straight.
Given we're seeing at least one Speed Champions Tiny Turbo-scale car as a a year now in polybag form, I'm hoping it becomes a regular thing as a subtheme and boxed sets.
@STUNT said:
"Can you guys imagine Lego someday doing with stickers as they do now with the instructions? Give freelly digital sticker designs and cutting patterns for plotters so each can make reproductions for their old sets in their home, office or at least some near by sticker making store...
It'd be so great to replace damaged stickers, particularly the ones that were printed in paper and those transparent ones that sometimes get permanent fingerprint patterns on the glue xD but also cool to have a cheap and quick way of making extra stickers for city builders and, of course, any moc designers."
It's an interesting idea, but the quality and durability is likely going to be much lower than the ones produced by TLG.
I used to dabble in custom decals for model kits and the quality isn't there on a home or even office printer. You need a commercial printer and that gets you dealing with minimum runs or expensive setup charges for one-offs. Then, there's the issue with stickers containing commercial brand names.
If you're lucky, there are some quality second-run stickers being sold on eBay. I picked up some there for my 7747 whose original stickers were peeling horribly.
@cody6268:
I bought at least a handful of copies of 8193, and didn't have any problems with the stickers. I left them in the pods with all of the other parts that weren't orange cheese wedges, and built my first orange 6-wide car.
"Dividing the number of pieces by the number of stickers yields a figure which we have named 'parts per sticker'. The lower that number is, the more stickers the set contains in relation to its respective size."
Calculating the opposite, 'stickers per part' (dividing the number of stickers by the number of parts and then arrange from high to low), feels more logical. But, obviously, the result will be the same.
Would be interesting to see a version of this with printed parts
I know stickers are not popular among AFOLs but as a young lad I quite enjoyed having stickers. Little girls and boys like them.
Sadly my Maersk Line Container Ship lost all its stickers when I tried to make it float in my bathtub :-(
Probably a dumb question, but is there a way to store stickers so they last longer? I don't like to apply them, but I'm sure one day when me / my kids sell the sets, it would be nice to not lose their adhesive.
@The_Toniboeh said:
"Would be interesting to see a version of this with printed parts"
Ironically, the one time LEGO had to represent an actual sticker, it used a print. You couldn't make this up!
@fulcrumbop said:
"Probably a dumb question, but is there a way to store stickers so they last longer? I don't like to apply them, but I'm sure one day when me / my kids sell the sets, it would be nice to not lose their adhesive."
Keep them in a cool, moderately dry place out of sunlight. Heat will eventually dry the adhesive even if they haven't been removed from their sheet as will extreme dryness such as a desert environment (e.g. parts of Nevada and Arizona). Sunlight can cause them to fade. As a rule of thumb, follow guidance for (non-LEGO) sticker collectors except that you don't need to store them flat.
It would be nice to know this with just current themes.
@The_Sly_Fox said:
"I know stickers are not popular among AFOLs but as a young lad I quite enjoyed having stickers. Little girls and boys like them. "
What I didn't like about stickers as a kid was when they had to be applied across multiple pieces. Such a nuisance when I wanted to take the set apart again.
I wonder what the list would be like if you used only sets from the last 5 years?
I'd also be interested in the stickers per part trend over time. I'm guessing that it would make recent years look quite favourable, with the very large sets they're doing now that use relatively few or no stickers.
@Zander said:
Ironically, the one time LEGO had to represent an actual sticker, it used a print. You couldn't make this up!
What time? Do you mean the 1x1 yellow Post-It note tile? The stickiness is on the back, and it would be weird to sticker the text on. It would more be using a brick (with a print) to represent the sticky note. And I'm pretty sure decals on race cars count as "actual stickers" so most of the time Lego has used stickers to represent stickers.
@Norikins
https://brickset.com/minifigs/col258
a lot of the stickers in those tiny turbo sets are so useful for signs in a city layout like the honest Bobs warehousing sticker in set 8199!
@jhuntin1 said:
"Since Racers dominated the top 20, would it be possible to do an addendum to this article that gives the top 20 that excludes that theme? I would be interested in reading that."
Yeah, i dont think we need a complete breakdown by theme, but with apparently 27 out of the top 29 being the same theme, not super interesting besides as a Racers retrospective. Obvs Speed Champions will be the next section of the list, but the whole list with some other highlights would be nice. Most stickered Star Wars set ever, most stickered City set ever, LEAST stickered Speed Champsions set, etc. And any trends like licensed sets having more or less stickers than other themes.