Closer look at LEGO Star Wars magazine Issue 119’s Qui-Gon Jinn minifigure

The latest issue of the LEGO Star Wars magazine on UK store shelves includes a Qui-Gon Jinn minifigure – but it isn’t the one we were hoping for…

Last year’s 75383 Darth Maul’s Sith Infiltrator appears to have repeated the mistakes of 2014’s 75053 The Ghost, which swapped out its initial black-haired Kanan Jarrus minifigure for a more accurate brown-haired version shortly after release. The rarer black-haired Kanan has since become one of the rarest and most valuable LEGO Star Wars minifigures around.

In that same vein, the Qui-Gon Jinn minifigure included in the 25th-anniversary Sith Infiltrator initially had a reddish-brown beard, but subsequent production runs swapped that out for dark brown printing instead. The few examples of Qui-Gons with reddish brown beards disappeared from BrickLink almost immediately after the change was noticed, and are now nowhere to be found.

LEGO Star Wars 75383 Darth Mauls Sith Infiltrator Qui Gon Jinn reddish brown vs dark brown hair 1024x576 — Reddish-brown variant on the left, dark brown variant on the right.

Our last hope of finding that rarer Qui-Gon Jinn in the wild was in Issue 119 of the LEGO Star Wars magazine, which includes a paper-bagged Jedi attached to its front cover. There was a chance, however slim, that these minifigures might have been allocated from that initial production run – but we’ve finally got our hands on the mag and its minifigure, and that hope has now been dashed against the rocks.

The good news is that this is still a convenient and relatively cheap way to add the Phantom Menace character to your collection if you don’t fancy picking up 75383 Darth Maul’s Sith Infiltrator. He’s missing the poncho included in the 640-piece set but otherwise matches it one-for-one, complete with his green lightsaber, printed legs, double-sided head and the same hairpiece Qui-Gon has been rocking since 1999.

Issue 119 (which now appears to be out of step with numbering in Europe, where Qui-Gon was included in Issue 118) retails for £5.50 in the UK, which is just about half the price of the cheapest Qui-Gon Jinn minifigure with dark brown beard on BrickLink in the UK. So while the magazine’s army-builders – like next month’s Imperial Commando – often pull focus, it’s really these named characters that offer the best bang for your buck.

If you’re reading this from a country where the LEGO Star Wars magazine is not easily accessible, or would just rather get your hands on Qui-Gon as part of a set, 75383 Darth Maul’s Sith Infiltrator is available now. Check out our review of the 2024 model here.

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