First Impressions
I waited to get this xtra bundle when it initially came out because it didn't look great for what I wanted to use it for. The previous plant focused xtra came with a number of appealing bricks that I wanted more. I figured for the same money I would just buy more of those featuring a tall pine, short pine and a prickly bush and two sections of white fencing. On March 1st when the new Lego sets were introduced I did not see many I was that interested in from an AFOL perspective, but this pack was on sale and I bought enough to make it to free shipping with another city set.
Retail Cost is $ 3.99 and at time of this writing is on sale for $ 3.19. As the cost of everything is going up, I would classify this as a deal. I would expect the price of the xtra bags to go up to $ 4.99 in the next generation if they stay around.
Parts
Piece Count - 32.
On opening the pack up I was pleasantly surprised. With the exception of the lime green 1x2 plate, everything will be useful in some way or another. 31 of 32 parts is a phenomenal ratio for good colors compared to other sets I have reviewed. I especially like the brown picket fence. I have a lot of white picket fence sections and have used them, so a different color will be nice for another display. Two pine trees, although short, are always good to have and the broad leaf sections will be good for a tropical setting. The white plant leaf sections are a little out of place, but I would rather have those than more lime green. The stem sections will be good for wetlands. This pack came with 1 extra of each flower and stem section bringing the parts count up to 36.
Build
Despite the low piece count for this set it was surprisingly versatile to put together a number of different configurations to show off the parts. The bricks that came in this set can add some interesting elements to many builds and the brown fence sections can lend some depth to an overall build without being a bright pop of color.
Random Rant
I will take this first sentence of the Random Rant to apologize for giving a review of a tiny set yet again. I have stitches in my dominate arm which caused me to more or less not sleep last night for more than maybe half a hour at a time. I have a backlog of exciting AFOL leaning sets that I want to review and have saved until I could get this blog up and running. I know myself and projects, so I wanted to get at least a few posts up to take some time to make sure I can take at least passable pictures.
**Editors Note
I removed 2 paragraphs of ranting regarding lumps and the failures of the medical system.
You're welcome! -SO
Frustrations
The brick built tree is just awful. It gets to building botanical elements but without enough to really get it to the point where it can be considered a tree, especially in a size comparison with the pine trees included. It represents a tree that kind of grew sideways or got halfway cut down or blown over by some kind of natural disaster. If you buy 12 of these I'm sure the trunk parts will make for excellent mini figure scale tree parts which might be the intent, but if you found one in your stocking I can't see that making it into a build and staying intact.
Despite my claim above that all but one brick in the set are good colors for me, putting darker colors or different bright colors would be much more useful for AFOLs. I am hoping to complete a sizable build for each of the Far Cry games and I know I can use bright color plants for Far Cry: New Dawn which is about the only application I can see for having a lot of them.
Final Thoughts & Recommendations
Buy Several - Lego limits purchases of this pack to 50 on their website. While I did not max out, I did put 24 in my cart before reducing it to 12 because... money. This is a good pack to get several of because with the tree sections you really can't do much with two lime green plant sections and one trunk section. It never hurts to have extra pine trees, stems, flowers, and fence sections.
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