LEGO produces magnets designed for display purposes, where a standard LEGO brick or minifigure is permanently attached to a magnet to stick to metal surfaces. There are also third-party, LEGO-compatible magnetic bricks available for creative building.
Official LEGO Magnet Products
Official LEGO magnet products are primarily intended as decorative items for fridges, lockers, or other magnetic surfaces. The magnets are securely embedded within or attached to the bricks/figures for safety and durability.
Classic Brick Magnets: LEGO offers sets of 4x4 brick magnets in classic colors like yellow, red, green, and blue. These function purely as magnets for holding notes and photos.
Minifigure Magnets: Various magnet sets feature minifigures, sometimes with specific themes like Harry Potter or Ninjago. Due to licensing agreements and safety requirements, most modern minifigure magnets have the figure permanently attached to the magnetic base.
Build-on Magnets: Some magnet sets, like the London Magnet Build (854012), include a magnetic 4x4 base that you can build onto with the included small LEGO elements, allowing for micro-scale customization.
Third-Party & Vintage Options for Building
For actual construction that utilizes magnets as connection points between bricks, you must look at non-official sources or vintage parts.
Vintage LEGO Magnets: In the past, LEGO offered specific Magnet Holder Bricks (part 30159) that fit into standard bricks, which are now rare and expensive to find in quantity on secondary markets.
Third-Party Magnetic Bricks: Companies like Mbriks produce multi-directionally magnetic blocks that are compatible with standard LEGO bricks. These are designed for building and displaying creations on any metal surface, offering a new way to explore S.T.E.A.M. concepts (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, and Math) by balancing forces.
Custom Solutions: Builders can also purchase small, strong cylinder magnets separately and insert them into the existing holes of Technic bricks for custom magnetic connections in their models.