2012 has been an excellent year for custom minifigures and LEGO compatible producers so we thought it would be a great idea to catch up with Ryan from BrickWarriors to find out how their year had been and see what their plans for this year are.

How was 2012 for BrickWarriors, and what were your highlights?

2012 was an awesome year for BrickWarriors…our best year yet! When we started back in September of 2011 I had no idea we would have grown this much by the end of 2012. Thanks to all our great fans, we were able to expand our product line much more rapidly than we had originally thought possible. We were also able to move into a greatly improved office space. It seemed impossible a few months ago when we made the move, but at this rate soon we’re going to have to move to an even bigger space!

There were probably three big highlights for me:

1. Going to all the conventions to meet our fans. The great thing about this is that we get to go back to all the conventions in 2013!

2. Opening the BrickWarriors cart at Christiana Mall. I had always shopped there when I was a kid, so it was so fun to set up our cart and see our products being sold at the mall. It’s even more fun to see how excited kids get as they walk by the cart and check out our products.

3. During the month of November we had our second annual Toys for Tots promotion. I thought we might be able to double or maybe even triple our donation from last year. It was definitely one of the highlights of the year when we calculated and realized we had quintupled our donation from 2011!

What were your favourite pieces you released in 2012?

The two-headed Ogre Armor is probably my favorite of all the pieces we released this year, but it was a hard decision between that and the Demon Armor/Dragon Wings/Dragon Tail all combined. I always wanted to have two headed minifigures when I was a kid, but there simply wasn’t any combination of bricks that you could put on top of a torso that would allow the minifigure to have two heads without looking entirely ridiculous. The whole point of BrickWarriors is to expand what you can do with a minifigure, and I think the two-headed Ogre Armor accomplishes that.

What are your favourite 2013 LEGO sets?

2013 or 2012? I guess I can answer both:

My favorite 2012 sets were easily all the Lord of the Rings and Hobbit sets. I guess that’s one or two whole themes though, depending on how you look at it. So let me narrow it down to one set from each:

The Mines of Moria: LEGO did a great job with the big blue cave troll, and the green orcs in this set were a big selling point for me as well. I admit, after I built it I had a lot of fun knocking the cave troll out by dropping the pillars on him.

Attack of the Wargs: The wargs are awesome, the tree is more organic than any other tree LEGO has done, and the slanted rock is also quite impressive. After building it I wanted to go out and buy about 5 more so I could have a whole army of Warg Riders. The only place that this set fell short was by including Yazneg rather than Azog, but I suppose that’s forgivable since the rest of the set was so awesome.

I haven’t gotten that great of a look at the 2013 sets, but given my answer about 2012 I think it’s pretty obvious that I’m most excited about more LotR and Hobbit sets! I wasn’t terribly impressed by the Chima sets based on the initial pictures, but last night I was looking through the new Lego Shop at Home catalog and decided that the sets are actually pretty awesome. The magazine included a poster that showed all the different minifigs in the series. Naturally I feel the need to collect all of them now.

I don’t know if it counts as sets, but I’m always excited for more collectible minifigs too!

What can we expect to see from BrickWarriors this year, any sneak previews?

We have tons of new items planned. I think that fans of all different themes will be very pleased with our line-up this year.

Yesterday I actually received some samples from my manufacturer of two new molds we’ve been working on. They aren’t quite finished yet so I wasn’t going to post any pictures, but since you asked nicely I guess I can give you a sneak peak…

You don’t get to see any new armour or armaments yet, but there is one new piece in the picture. In addition to being a neat new accessory, the new piece was crucial to a new project we’ve been working on. I can’t give any more details about that just yet though!