LEGO Ninjago Magazine Issue 131: The Spectral Dragonian Warrior Nobody Was Chasing Yet
The bag comes off the cover with a bit of resistance, the way these always do — a strip of tape, a small tear in the corner of the paper, and then five or six elements tip out into your palm. Black armour. Sand green print. A horned helmet that doesn't look like anything the ninja wear. This is the moment that makes the UK magazine line worth the trouble of importing it, and on this particular issue the payoff is a villain most collectors overlooked at the time.
Cover art for LEGO NINJAGO Magazine Issue 131. Image via Mags Direct / Immediate Media, under licence from the LEGO Group.
Opening the Issue
Strip away the covermount and LEGO Ninjago magazine issue 131 runs the format Immediate Media has kept steady across the whole line. There's a self-contained NINJAGO comic strip — this one following Kai and the team through a suitably muddy stretch of the Dragons Rising saga — plus a double-sided pull-out poster, a sticker sheet, and a run of puzzles, code-breakers, competitions and character activities pitched at the current cast.
The comic is the part people throw away and later wish they hadn't. These strips aren't collected into graphic novels, aren't reprinted, and don't get posted anywhere official. If you want to read this one in five years, the physical copy is the only route. It's a decent argument against the widespread habit of pulling the bag off the front and recycling the rest of the magazine.
The Figure in the Bag
The Spectral Dragonian Warrior comes out of Dragons Rising Season 3, part of the ghostly Dragonian faction the ninja spend that arc fighting. Two variants are catalogued: njo0973, the base version, and njo0989, the one carrying a moulded dragon backpack element — the same figure that turned up as paper-bag release 892509. The magazine covermount lines up with that paper-bag release rather than the plain retail version, which matters if you're cross-referencing your collection.
Design-wise, the interest is in the moulding as much as the printing. The horned helmet changes the silhouette completely, so the figure reads as a creature rather than a person in armour from across a room. Translucent leg elements do the spectral work without any printing at all. And the black-and-sand-green torso print is dense enough to survive the scale — this is not one of those covermount figures that looks like a simplified version of the retail one, because it essentially isn't.
The same character appears in retail sets 71839, 71843 and 71845, which is the useful part of the story for army-builders: the Dragonians are a faction, and factions look wrong on a shelf in ones. A magazine covermount is a route to a second or third body without buying a second or third box.
Where This Sits on the Availability Curve
Issue 131 reached UK shelves in the summer of 2025, which puts it firmly in back-issue territory now rather than anywhere near a newsstand. Mags Direct lists it as sold out, and that's the normal end state — unsold newsstand copies get pulped rather than warehoused, so the entire surviving supply of any issue is whatever collectors and specialist stockists deliberately held back during its on-sale window.
What makes this one quietly interesting is that it was never the issue people were racing to buy. The Draconus Form ninja covermounts from the 138–141 stretch drew all the attention. A Season 3 villain in an issue a year older attracted far less, which means fewer copies were set aside — and back-issue scarcity tends to track how many people cared at the time, not how good the figure turned out to be.
One Thing to Check Before You Buy
Decide first whether you want the figure or the issue, because on the second-hand market they are two genuinely different objects. A loose Spectral Dragonian Warrior circulates on its own and is easy to identify from a photo. A complete copy — magazine intact, bag sealed, still fixed to the cover — is meaningfully harder to find.
The recurring trap is that sellers photograph the minifigure and describe the magazine. Before committing to a complete copy, ask for one image showing the bag still attached to the front cover. And for this figure specifically, check whether the dragon backpack element is present, since the two variants are easy to confuse in a small listing photo. Both take a single message and both save a return.
Closing the Gap
Have a look through our LEGO Ninjago collection for what's currently on the shelf, then work back through the wider LEGO magazines archive for other UK-exclusive issues worth closing gaps on. If importing these is new to you, our LEGO Ninjago Magazine guide covers how the line works and what actually turns up in the post. And if a copy of LEGO Ninjago magazine issue 131 crosses your path, it's worth a longer look than its issue number suggests.