Surely you saw last month’s post about end-of-year LEGO MOC collages. We featured a variety not only of building styles and themes but of collage formats as well. It was mentioned in passing that people had been creating these virtual postcards for years, but I didn’t really know for how long.

Luckily Nannan Z had some free time between shifts at the hospital, did a little digging, and came up with a nifty collection from way back in 2010.

Let’s kick it off with a builder we’re quite familiar with here at BrickNerd: Ochre Jelly (aka Iain Heath). Although his style is instantly recognizable, it might take you a minute to place some of the builds. It’s from a time when the Tron reboot was new, Conan the Barbarian was governor of California, and some guy named Jay was on late-night TV. (Yes, 2010 was actually 12 years ago.)

After all this time, you’d think that we’d be seeing an entirely different kind of building style altogether. But it turns out that, in spite of all the new pieces and colors LEGO keeps producing, there are plenty of MOCs in these collages that are still just as impressive today. (Click through to each builder’s Flickr page to see all these builds close up.)

This just goes to show that the traditions we participate in today within the LEGO hobby might have originated a while ago. So get to it! You still have ten and a half months left to fill out your 2022 MOC collage (unless you are participating in the Iron Forge/Builder/Maiden contest — in that case, your collage is already full and you’ll probably stop building for a few months to a year to recuperate). (Iron Builder, good for the community or menace to society? Next time on BrickNerd!)

What do think about some of these old builds? Do you enjoy Airplane! references? Leave your thoughts in the comments below.

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