How to find out which set contains a higher plate percentage?

Question

I want to gather various types/colors of plates to do some mini model MOCs. How can I find out which set has the best plate percentage or price per plate pieces?

I know there are a lot of ways to find out which set has what kind of parts, and brickset.com also has a statistic for each kind of part including plate percentage of every single set. For a single type of plate there are also a lot of ways (bricklink, rebrickable, brickset, etc.) to find out how many of them are available in which sets.

But I wonder if there is there a quick way to get a list of the plate number/percentage for all the recent years' sets? To check out each set for this information is really painful.

Or if there is no quick way, which sets could be the best candidate to gather various plates? I know a few sets have many plates (e.g. 10230), but their current prices are also very expensive thus potentially making them poor candidates.

Answer 1

Almost any set I can think of will have many many non-plate parts, even if it also has lots of plates in it. Plus you run into the problem of determining what constitutes a "plate". Does this count? or this? or this? If I were you I'd just go down the list of sets you can purchase on shop.lego.com, visually inspect the set to see if it looks like it has lots of plates, then check the inventory on rebrickable.com or bricklink.com. The architecture, Minecraft, and creator sets are probably your best bet.

You might be better off buying plates individually from Bricklink or the Lego website. You can also visit a Lego retail store that has a pick-a-brick wall; they usually have plates available in a few sizes and colours and you can get as many as you want. Otherwise, most sets will have lots of pieces you won't need.

Answer 2

The best set from 2014 is Furry Creatures (31021) at $0.20 per plate.

Here's one possible way to do this:

1. Download the listing of all parts in all sets from Rebrickable.
2. Join this data up with pricing data (perhaps from the Brickset API) to get yourself some pricing information for each set.
3. Define which parts count as plates.
4. Write yourself a little program to count the number of plates in each set and divide by the price.

If I use the plates in the plates service pack from 1999 as my plate list, here's what I get for the best price per plate for sets containing at least 150 parts released in 2014:

 id          price_per_plate  plates           us_price
 31021-1     0.201919         99               19.99
 21020-1     0.235802         212              49.99
 31020-1     0.246438         73               17.99
 40182-1     0.249875         80               19.99
 40090-1     0.262895         38               9.99
 40183-1     0.277639         72               19.99
 21107-1     0.286803         122              34.99
 31025-1     0.302955         132              39.99
 40180-1     0.307538         65               19.99
 31024-1     0.319043         94               29.99
 10243-1     0.323866         494              159.99
 31023-1     0.336966         89               29.99
 10242-1     0.352077         284              99.99
 31026-1     0.354291         254              89.99
 60058-1     0.356964         56               19.99
 31019-1     0.356964         56               19.99
 79116-1     0.372287         188              69.99
 75038-1     0.384462         65               24.99
 21117-1     0.402241         174              69.99
 41056-1     0.403065         62               24.99

This is quite expensive if you aren't interested in the other parts as well. You'd be better off buying these on a secondary market like Bricklink or perhaps even directly from Pick-a-Brick.