What could LEGO Icons 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle’s retirement mean for 2026 and beyond?

LEGO 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle is retiring by the end of 2025, and it could have significant reverberations in 2026 and beyond – and not just for Icons, either…

2022’s 90th-anniversary 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle is slated to leave shelves for good by the end of this year, so the clock is ticking on the biggest and arguably best medieval fortress the LEGO Group has ever released. But given the perennial popularity of this theme among adult audiences – easily evidenced by the BrickLink Designer Program and Collectible Minifigures – its absence will leave a major gap in the product portfolio.

That leaves us with one question: what could fill that gap in 2026 and beyond? A new Creator 3-in-1 castle is rumoured to be on the cards for summer 2025, replacing the just-retired 31120 Medieval Castle, so a corresponding replacement for the larger 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle could well be on the table too. Here are just a few ideas for possible directions the LEGO Group could take…

A new nostalgic LEGO Icons castle

The most obvious answer is another nostalgia-fuelled large-scale castle to follow up 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle, perhaps hooked to another faction such as the Black Falcons, Forestmen or Wolfpack; another returning Classic Castle faction like the Black Knights or Dragon Knights; or the potential new fan-voted faction that’s due to arrive in LEGO Ideas’ Minifigure Prize Machine.

While a future £350 castle could struggle to live up to the legacy of 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle, it would make perfect sense to retire that model and give us a new one: not only would a second castle still cater to new audiences who would have bought the 2022 set had that still been on shelves, but the LEGO Group would get to sell another castle to those of us who already own the first one.

It might be low-hanging fruit from a concept perspective, but we definitely wouldn’t say no to another LEGO castle on the scale and scope of 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle.

Minas Tirith or Helm’s Deep

You don’t need to have a degree in marketing to realise that the LEGO Group is probably hesitant to have two huge grey castles on shelves at the same time, particularly when one is spun from homegrown themes and the other is licensed. That’s presumably why the first couple of resurgent LEGO The Lord of the Rings sets have focused on Rivendell and Barad-dûr, and why this year’s follow-up is said to be Bag End: they’re all very different from the slab of white or grey that Minas Tirith or Helm’s Deep would deliver.

But those are both such iconic locations from Middle-earth that the LEGO Icons team can’t avoid them forever, which means that eventually 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle is going to need to give way. And when it does so at the end of 2025, it will open the door for LEGO The Lord of the Rings to finally revisit Helm’s Deep or bring us our first-ever Minas Tirith (which was noticeably absent from the original 2012 theme).

Of those two we’re pinning our hopes on Helm’s Deep first, simply because Minas Tirith is so big that it would probably need to be microscale to capture properly. 

An entire LEGO Castle theme

Between the popularity of 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle, the pace with which the BrickLink Designer Program’s castles sell out every single round, and how impossible it is to find Series 27’s Wolfpack Beastmaster on shelves, the message to the LEGO Group should be pretty clear by now: there’s a pretty big audience out there for LEGO Castle, even if it’s only among adults.

It sure would be sweet to see a full LEGO Castle theme on shelves for the first time in well over a decade come 2026, but even with all those clear signs that there’s an appetite for a new medieval theme, this still feels the least likely of all the prospects considered here – if only because the LEGO Group would need to pin its hopes on adults picking up a theme that would have 7+ and 9+ labels all over its boxes.

It’s also worth noting that 10305 Lion Knights’ Castle wouldn’t necessarily stand in the way of a full LEGO castle theme, instead acting as a companion to it – and that if rumours of a new Creator 3-in-1 castle are true, that set is actually more of a deterrent for a full theme given it’s said to come in at a cheaper and more accessible price point, like 31120 Medieval Castle before it.

But let’s ignore all that for a moment and dream of an 18+ theme that caters to castle fans across a variety of different price points. You could have your flagship castle, a small blacksmith shop, a jousting tournament, a drawbridge or outpost tower, and so on – a full and developed world of LEGO castle sets intended for the people who would buy them. Hey, we said we were dreaming…

Click here to check out the full list of LEGO sets retiring in 2025, which also includes 10332 Medieval Town Square at the time of writing.

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