This is a great idea. Supposedly the LEGO factory is set up to produce anything - let me order some nostalgia set from 1983! Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable.

"Like how the Magic: The Gathering people have undermined "rare" cards by just printing so many they can never be valuable."

I don't believe that that is the case ... Alpha/Beta/ArabianNights versions of currently printed cards are quite a bit more valuable ...

There's always something rare, but they have consciously undermined collectability by re-printing things and banning cards from tournament play.

The value of Magic cards on the secondary market does very little for the manufacturer. Why shouldn't they maximize their profit by selling as many as they can? People who want to speculate can just buy something else.

Wait what? The secondary market value is why people are willing to buy new cards, it lets people justify spending a lot of money on new cards.

The overwhelming majority of Magic cards are bought by people to play the game.

Lego tried for a very short while to deliver sets 'to order', any set, even stuff you designed yourself.

Yeah they gave up on that which is too bad. I recall being able to upload an image, refining the output with a browser applet and getting a grayscale version of the image. All the parts were packed in neat little baggies like it was a real set.

Mass customization is hard.

As a kid, I always wanted the Galactic Mediator [0] set. It was $60 at the time, which my parents could never afford. It'd be cool to see a reissue of that.

[0] https://lego.fandom.com/wiki/6984_Galactic_Mediator

Same with me with the Black Seas Barracuda (the huge pirate ship from the nineties) – they kept it generally available for a long time, far longer than most sets, but right as I was making enough in my first job to be able to really spare the money (and was actually toying with the idea of buying it) they discontinued the set for good and prices rose into the sky pretty much overnight.

Both your comments make me want to dive into the storage space where I have all the bricks from the sorter project to see if I can come up with those sets. Bookmarked for when I have more time.