The odd thing about the 2003 introductory release was that the larger Advanced Designer series had vehicle themes from air, land, and sea. The smaller basic Designer series had vehicle themes from air, land, and…more land. This year sees that gap filled with Sea Machines, tied for least expensive set with last year’s Little Creations. Featuring a wide range of designs, from sailboats to speedboats to seaplanes, I think my two favorite models are the teeny jet ski and the exploration sub.

Given that two of the introductory sets featured robots, I’m a tiny bit surprised that we’d see a third so soon, but, as the most expensive basic Designer set, the flagship model for this one absolutely dwarfs the largest robot offered last year. Unfortunately, all we’ve seen so far is the flagship model. Even the box in the showroom offered no images of alternate models. The color scheme needs some work, though, as orange looks way out of place on something comprised primarily of sand blue and gunmetal grey. Red might have worked better, but I think green or purple would have been the best choice for an accent color.

Probably the first use of grey that works better with the new shades than it would have with the old, the Deep Sea Predators line features a lot of articulated bodies (apparently through use of the same pieces used at the core of the limbs for the Knights’ Kingdom large figures) and two primary color schemes (shades of blue and red/dark-red). One of the coolest things about this set is the addition of a brand-new glow-in-the-dark tooth piece for extra jaw-gnashing action.

The last set in this batch is Prehistoric, which runs the same price as the most expensive set in last year’s batch (Wild Collection). The flagship T-Rex model was MIA for a photo shoot when I hit the showroom, but the rest of the stuff featured the same level of articulation and bone-colored versions of the teeth seen in the other creature-themed set. The showroom book shows the stegasaurus in green with orange spine-plates, but the showroom model is done in the same color as the T-Rex. The sheer variety of dark-red pieces should make this a popular set amongst certain groups of MOC builders.