LEGO Dragon of the East Palace (80049)

The build starts with straightforward floor planning across the first couple of bags, laying out the palace footprint, then it picks up fast. You do a good chunk of side-on building to create the pierced gold panels and the white marble staircase, which is always satisfying, and the sliding front doors ride on sturdy brick-built runners with proper flanges so they actually work. There is a clever trick where a side-built panel gets slotted in behind the throne and trapped with 2x3 C-shaped plates. The roof mixes curved and regular slopes alternating to fake a convincing tiled look, and the columns use friction cylinders. The dragon and the oversized staff round out the final stretch, by which point the thing has gotten big and a little heavy to handle.

For parts, the headline is color rather than brand-new molds. You get 33 pearlescent blue octagonal crystal plates, 49 curved blue bricks in various shapes, five large blue pearl helmet pieces, and a run of dark blue curved wedges that had not shown up since 2005. Pearl-gold appears on Unikitty cat-tail pieces and clip bars, and there are fresh recolors of the sea-creature pack in magenta plus grey and dark blue flames. New molds are basically limited to a couple of creature heads (a red lobster, an orange crab) and the minifig heads. So the value story here is really about scoring big quantities of those pearl-blue crystal and curved elements, which are brilliant for anyone building water, ice, or fantasy MOCs.