Featured image: The M:Tron fleet as seen in the 1990 LEGO catalogue.
Once Upon a Brick · Chapter 7
The story of how Infinite Brick came to be: the people, ideas, and moments that shaped it. Each chapter reveals another piece of the journey connecting LEGO creativity with the community around it.
Welcome! If you're new to the series, start with Chapter 1: Before the Beginning
I didn't put it on the list.
When my wife and I started house hunting again in 2013, we had a real list. A certain number of bedrooms and bathrooms. A more spacious garage. A nice yard. Enough space for two people who were moving five hours away to be closer to family… and room to hopefully start our own.
Nowhere on that list did the words “LEGO room” appear.
But I was always checking.
Every house we walked through, I'd do a quiet mental calculation. Back bedroom: would there be enough floor space? Basement corner: could I sufficiently control the natural light? The room off the hallway with the small window: would a table and some shelving fit without it becoming a permanent apology?
I didn't say any of this out loud. Not much, anyway (as far as I recall).
The spark had happened. Chapter 6 ended there, with me standing over an open bin of old space sets, the trans-neon-orange of Ice Planet 2002 catching the light.
But the spark wasn't the return. Not yet.
What followed was: packing up a house, selling it around the beginning of July 2013, moving everything we owned five hours north.
The LEGO came with us, still packed from the prior move.
The house we intended to buy fell through.
The one we actually moved into, August 2013, was different in a few ways. More closets. A layout I liked but wasn't immediately sure how to work with. And on the blueprints, one room had a label I noticed immediately:
“Craft room.“
Not huge. Not a finished studio. But it had a door, controlled daylight, and the right kind of quiet. The kind of room you can have a plan for before you've figured out what the plan is.
I didn't move the bins in right away. Didn't order shelving or start pulling anything out to display. I moved in, unpacked what needed unpacking, and let the idea settle.
But something was brewing.
The collection had a potential home. Not the storage space under the basement stairs. A room.
That change held promise.
“But something was brewing.”
The other thing that had changed — and I'd almost forgotten how much it mattered — was money.
Not a windfall. Just “adult money”. A pay cheque. A mortgage already accounted for. A budget with a little room in it for something I actually wanted.
The mental calculus of childhood LEGO ownership: allowance, birthday money, the argument made in advance for why this set was worth it… that was gone. That particular scarcity had been the backdrop of every LEGO decision I'd made from a very young age. You chose carefully because you had to.
Now the constraint was different.
The room was there. The budget was more accommodating. A childhood collection was sitting in bins, waiting to come out.
I just needed an excuse to start.
January 5, 2014.
In the years leading up to this date, my eBay purchase history was predominantly hobby grade R/C parts and tech. But that Sunday, I searched for something different. Something I already half-owned.
M:Tron.
If you've been reading along, you know how the space factions fit into this story. The themes of the late 80s and into the 90s — Blacktron, Ice Planet, M:Tron, Unitron, Spyrius — those were the ones that defined my collection, the ones I'd chosen one at a time under scarcity, with full appreciation for each because nothing else was coming anytime soon.
I had three M:Tron sets from my childhood. Pulsar Charger, Vector Detector, and my favourite of the bunch: the Particle Ionizer.
But I'd never had the complete wave.
I'd thought about it back then, the way you think about things that aren't going to happen. Catalogue pages, price-points, a mental list of what I still needed. Then the catalogue changed, the theme retired, and that was that.
Now it wasn't.
eBay's Order Confirmation for my first “collection” purchase: M:Tron – Complete Collection.
I bought the complete collection. Every set from the wave. Including the three I already owned.
Duplicates would just expand the recommissioned fleet.
The listing came from the US. The package took more than two weeks to arrive, which, given that I'd already been waiting twenty-plus years, probably should have felt trivial. It didn't. I checked the tracking more than I'd like to admit.
It landed. There were a few missing pieces… enough, as it turned out, to stall the building before it really got started.
Here's the part I haven't figured out how to explain: I still haven't built them all.
Not because I lost interest. If anything, it's the opposite; there's something about having the complete collection, reasonably intact, that I haven't quite been ready to break into. The wanting was part of it. Maybe the having is too.
That pattern — acquiring with full intention, then letting the build wait — turns out to have a name. I wouldn't understand what to call it, or what to do about it, for another decade or so.
“Duplicates would just expand the recommissioned fleet.”
Three days later, January 10th, I picked up some minifigs from the UFO theme. Small purchase. But the door was open.
The same week, I pretended I had a kid so I could get the LEGO magazine… no shame!
And four days after that, I found myself composing an email to a seller in Cornwall, UK.
I was asking what it would cost to ship the Blacktron II Alpha Centauri Outpost to Canada.
I still have that email.
Dare to dream: inquiring about my white whale: Alpha Centauri Outpost
The answer was: too much. I didn't pull the trigger.
But the fact that I was already tracking down international sellers two weeks in; already writing emails about shipping white whales across the Atlantic, tells you something about the trajectory.
The hunt was on.
Share Your Story
The return looks different for everyone.
For some, it's one purchase that opens a door. For others, it's a slow drift back — a set here, a bin reopened, a store visit that goes longer than planned. For some, the dark ages haven't ended yet.
If you came back to LEGO after a break, what started it? One moment, one purchase, or something harder to name?
↓ Tell Your Story ↓
I'd love to hear it.
Until the Next Chapter…
The M:Tron collection started something.
But the back-filling was only part of what was coming back. A few months later, my wife and I finally took the honeymoon we'd been saving for — New Zealand, the Shire, a trip unlike anything either of us had done before.
I came home wanting to mark it with something.
Chapter Eight is in the works.
— Tyler | Infinite Brick
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