LEGO Star Wars: 5 lightsaber hilts given away in 6 years — the pace has doubled

A GWP ("gift with purchase") isn't for sale: you get it by buying something else, during a limited window. LEGO has given away five of these on the lightsaber theme since 2020. Taken one by one, each is just a small promotional item. Lined up, they trace a trajectory — in release pace, and in how you get one.

The full series

Average inventory across the series: 182 pieces. The first item, the 2020 Yoda's Lightsaber, has no documented redemption window in the sources consulted — a reminder that even a series tracked in detail has archive gaps on its very first items.

Two trends accelerating

Over six years, LEGO took between one and three years to release the next lightsaber hilt — until 2026, which saw two. And the pace doesn't tell the whole story: the window length followed the same trajectory. 36 days in 2021 (40483), 90 days in 2024 (40730, an outlier on the downside), then 31 days in 2026 (40917) — the shortest of the entire series.

The surprising detail: it's not the smallest item in the series that carries the shortest window, it's the largest. The 40917 The Darksaber, 278 pieces — the biggest inventory of the five — was only available for 31 days. You'd expect the opposite: the bigger the item, the longer its promotional window. Here, it's the exact reverse.

The fifth item changes the access rules

The first four lightsaber hilts came through a classic spending threshold — spend a certain amount on the LEGO Shop, any sets you like. The 40897 Darth Vader's Lightsaber, available from October 1, 2026, breaks that pattern: it's obtainable only by buying the 75457 UCS Executor Super Star Destroyer, at €749.99. One path, one set, one price. The strictest access condition in the whole series.

Two trends, one direction?

The window shortens. The access condition tightens. The two trends pull in different directions — more frequent on one side, harder to access on the other — and that's exactly what makes the series hard to sum up in one sentence. You can't say these items have "become common": the pace doubled, but access to the latest one has never been more restricted.

What this article doesn't say

This article measures a release pace and an availability window — two catalog facts. It says nothing about what these items are or will be worth on the used market: the only valuation data available at the time of writing couldn't be confirmed as currency-reliable, so it's left out of this article rather than approximated.

My take

I'm wary of the word "exclusive" applied to a GWP that comes back five times in six years — but I'm just as wary of concluding too quickly that these items "aren't worth anything anymore" because they come back often. The 40897 shows LEGO can tighten access at the very moment it speeds up the release pace. Both can be true at once, and that's what I take away from this series.

How I'd track this with Cault

A GWP obtained for €0 isn't a €0 item in an inventory — Cault adds it with an up-to-date catalog price, no manual re-entry, so its value stays legible alongside the rest of the collection.

The takeaway

Five LEGO lightsaber hilts given away in six years, two of them in 2026 alone. The shortest redemption window (31 days) carries the largest item (278 pieces). The latest one in the series no longer comes through a classic spending threshold, but through a single €749.99 set purchase. The pace is speeding up, access is tightening — both at once.