LEGO Ninjago Magazine Issue 137: Kur Completes the Forbidden Five
Pull three consecutive Ninjago issues off a collector's shelf and they tend to blur together: a foil pack, a comic, a poster, a puzzle spread. So what actually separates LEGO Ninjago magazine issue 137 from the ones either side of it? Issue 136 gave you a spectral variant of a character you'd already seen. Issue 135 gave you a ninja debut. Issue 137 does something neither managed — it hands over the figure that closes out a named villain team, and it does it alongside an extra that almost never gets mentioned in listings.
Cover art for LEGO NINJAGO Magazine Issue 137. Image via Mags Direct / Immediate Media, under licence from the LEGO Group.
Kur Up Close: Decay Rendered in Plastic
The foil pack contains Kur — the Elemental Master of Decay and a member of the Forbidden Five, the villain group that drove the back half of NINJAGO: Dragons Rising Season 3. Catalogued as njo0978, she arrives complete with her weapon, which matters more than it sounds: magazine foil packs routinely drop the accessory to keep the piece count down, and this one doesn't.
The design work is where she earns the shelf space. The torso print leans hard into the decay theme — black splotches and creased, rotting texturing across the front, breaking into an olive-green stomach that reads as sickly rather than simply dark. There's arm printing too, subtle enough that it barely registers until you have the figure in hand, which is unusual for a covermount figure at this scale. Set her next to Nokt, Zarkt, Rox and Drix and the group finally reads as a coherent five rather than four figures and a gap.
The honest caveat: this isn't a magazine-exclusive print. The identical Kur, weapon included, also appears in 71845 Lloyd's Jet Mech. But that's a large transforming flagship build, and buying it for a single villain minifigure is not a sensible route unless you wanted the mech anyway. The foil pack is the compact alternative, and for most collectors that's the entire argument.
The Extra That Rarely Makes the Listing
Issue 137 also shipped with a limited-edition trading card — a genuinely distinguishing detail, because it isn't a standing feature of the line. Most issues don't carry one, and secondary sellers frequently either don't know it was there or quietly omit it from photos. If you're buying to complete a run rather than to fill a display case, this is the thing to ask about before you commit, since a copy missing the card is not the same object as a complete one.
Everything Else Between the Covers
Beyond the covermount, issue 137 runs the format Immediate Media has held steady across the line's UK run: a self-contained NINJAGO comic set inside the Dragons Rising timeline, a double-sided pull-out poster, stickers, and a block of puzzles, code-breaking pages and activities built around the current cast, plus the usual competitions. None of it assumes you read the previous issue — every instalment stands alone.
The comic is the part that quietly gains value with age. These strips are never collected into graphic novels or reposted online, so an intact issue is the only practical way to read them a few years from now. Issue 137 also teased Dragon Jay as the following month's gift, which is a useful thread to pull if you're hunting issue 138 in the same search.
Should Issue 137 Take a Slot on Your Shelf?
This one is easier to answer than most. If you're building the Forbidden Five as a set, Kur is a required box to tick and this is the cheapest-effort route to her. If you're building a complete run of the UK LEGO Ninjago magazine, the issue number is the collectible and the card makes a complete copy meaningfully harder to source than a loose figure.
Where it's less compelling: if you already own 71845, you have Kur, and the foil pack adds nothing to your minifigure shelf. Buy issue 137 for the magazine, the card and the run — not for a second copy of a figure already in your collection.
On scarcity, the mechanics are worth understanding. This was a UK newsstand exclusive published by Immediate Media, on sale from late January 2026, never sold through LEGO retail channels and never reprinted. Newsstand distribution pulps unsold copies rather than warehousing them, so the surviving supply is whatever collectors and specialist stockists deliberately held back. It has already sold through at the major UK sellers.
Where to Look for a Copy
Start with our LEGO Ninjago collection to see what's currently in stock, then work through the wider LEGO magazines archive for other UK-exclusive issues worth closing gaps on. If importing these is new territory, our LEGO Ninjago Magazine guide covers how it works and what to expect. And when you find a listing for LEGO Ninjago magazine issue 137, ask for a photo showing the foil pack still attached to the cover and the trading card present — that's the version worth having.