Results of the Best LEGO Set of 2020, as voted by YOU!

January 1, 2021 | 20

After 5 rounds of voting, I can finally reveal the winner of the first fully democratic, reader-voted set of the year!

It’s been a blast, and I hope you’ve enjoyed voting and participating in each round. I’ve really enjoyed reading the comments and discussions from everyone, on the blog, on Facebook and Instagram as well.

As this was the first reader-vote tournament, I’ve learned a ton about how to better organise and plan the brackets, which will come in handy when we do this again next year.

One quirk especially, in hindsight would’ve been helpful given the winner! That said, we’ll also do a deep dive of the data, including voting totals, and how the bracket seeds were generated, which yielded some really interesting data.

To recap, here was the Grand Final bracket, where we had two Ideas sets go head to head – 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay, and 21318 Tree House!

Surprisingly, the results were a lot closer than I had anticipated… with the winner edging out the loser by only FIVE votes.

*drumroll please*.

Massive congratulations to 21318 Ideas Tree House for beating Pirates of Barracuda Bay to emerge the overall winner of the Best LEGO Set of 2020 vote!

Ultimately, I think it’s well deserved, as the Ideas Tree House has proved to be an extremely popular set in 2020, with it being constantly out of stock throughout the year.

Here’s how the final bracket looked like. Did anyone’s bracket end up looking like this?

But hang on! The Ideas Tree House was launched in 2019! How did it even compete, let alone win!

The Format & Data

As this was a fully democratic reader-voted survey, I had devised a 16-set bracket, where I’d pit LEGO set against LEGO set in a Tournament Bracket to find out which set reigned supreme.

To arrive at the 16 sets, I had invited readers to cast their vote for favourite set of 2020 and seed the sets accordingly.

The seeding round received over 200 individual respondents, and as I didn’t really specify that you had to vote for a set released in 2020, the Ideas Tree House managed to sneak into the votes, securing the 15th seed.

In hindsight, I could see how this could’ve been confusing, so for next year, I might specify that the set had to be launched in 2021 to qualify, and filter out sets that weren’t.

But in the spirit of democracy and openness, I decided to allow the Tree House to make it into the bracket to respect all the people that voted for it in the seeding round.

Voting Breakdown Round by Round

Here’s the full spreadsheet with voting totals across both Instagram and Facebook for transparency.

There were some really surprising upsets, personally, the Lamborghini Sian getting dumped in the first round (more on this later), the Razor Crest’s surprising run through the brackets, knocking out the Batwing and the LEGO NES was fantastic to follow – I definitely think it got buoyed by the sensational Season 2 of The Mandalorian.

Seeding Round Votes

The most interesting (and possibly contentious) bit of data comes from the seeding round vote, which was an open question asking readers to name what they thought was the best LEGO set of 2020.

No prompts at all.

There was one standout set that completely dominated every other set in that round, by an enormous margin.

And here are the seeding vote totals!

As you can see, 21322 Pirates of Barracuda Bay completely wiped the floor, taking 60 votes, more than 3x the closest competitor, which was 42115 Lamborghini Sian.

Here are the positions of the seeds, which I think can also be used as an indicator of which was the most well-received set of 2020.

In all honesty, I did expect Pirates of Barracuda Bay to win, so I was extremely surprised to see not only a close contest, but the Tree House to win, mostly off the back of a particularly strong vote from Facebook which gave it a slight edge.

This was an interesting experiment, and why I love tournament brackets so much as results and upsets can occur when you put sets head to head against one another.

I hope you enjoyed the vote and the results! Thanks to everyone for voting, and congratulations again to the Ideas Tree House for winning the bracket, but also special mention to Pirates of Barracuda Bay for so thoroughly being the first set people think of when you ask them “what is the best LEGO set of 2020”.

Lastly, be sure to check out all the new 2021 LEGO releases which are available from 1 January 2021!