Okay, so not only did the European market get the TOA and KANOHI packs about four months earlier, and get the fourteen KAUKAU, RURU, and MATATU errors (from which we’ve only seen the black RURU hit US shores), AND get six different packaging variations for the KANOHI pack which match the eyes of the six TOA, but now MoD reader David Miller tells me that the eye-piece included in the bag will match the color of the eyes used in the packaging design. So, if you need a few more KOPAKA eye-pieces, you buy a few KANOHI 2-packs with blue eyes on the front. I’ve bought a little over 100 of the 8525 boxes and ended up with a severe glut of ONUA eye-pieces while I had to trade for LEWA and KOPAKA eye-pieces to finish my display collection. To me, it would be worth dropping the $2 to go buy a single KANOHI pack for a specific eye-piece that I might need if I could be guaranteed to know which eye-piece I’d be getting. Since it’s random and I’ve completed my basic MASK collection, it’s much more worthwhile to do a simple trade for any eye-pieces I might need than it is to drop $12 on KANOHI packs just to have decent odds of pulling the one I want.

And on top of this all, I’ve yet to receive a report about how people keep finding the 8530 bags popped open so someone could peek at the contents, but I’m constantly finding 8525 boxes that have had that done to them, and I’ve seen a lot of griping about this trend on the Net as well.

So I guess my big question here is why are there two different packaging designs for such a simple little LEGO® ‘sets’?

UPDATE: MoD readers James and Mike wrote in to say that there is no correllation between the colors on the European KANOHI baggies and the colors of the included eye-pieces. Still, it’s much more visually interesting to have the six different eye-colors represented.