After one of the worst days across all calendars in recent memory, the competition is looking to get back on track and put that pain behind us. Also, we have a new special guest reviewer and fellow LUG member Andrew House who will be covering the HP reviews over the next few days! Hopefully a strong entry emerges from at least one calendar today. Let’s find out.

Day 5- MCU

Steve: On the fifth day of Christmas the Guardians have to meeee…. A raccoon who’s always angry.

The MCU needs a “W” to keep up with the others, and door #5 finally puts them back on the board with a Rocket Raccoon mini-figure!

He’s not unique, but this version has only been in one set before. The torso print is solid although no arm print. The tail piece looks great as well.

My only complaint is that there’s no weapon or accessory included a possible portent of a weapon rack to come I fear. 

Day 5- SW

Pat: Ah, so I was close. Day 5 gives us a classic Star Wars Battle Droid with a gun metal grey blaster. This is an almost-obligated inclusion in advent calendars (we didn’t get one in the Mando themed calendar), but as I mentioned yesterday, it’s a bit of a letdown get. It’s also strange the builds flipped factions there, like if day 3 was the Republic Assault Ship day 4 build, then there would be 3 Republic gifts forllowed by 2 or more Separatist gifts – Lego generally bunches the faction gifts in sets. Not a complaint or anything, just an observation. Either way, solid Battle Droid minifig, this makes his 50th inclusion in a set, and I hope to see 50 more.

Day 5- HP

Andrew House (Guest Reviewer): As a new participant in this process, I want to state up front that what I like most out of are little minifigure-scale builds that I can use to accessorize other larger sets and enhance the worldbuilding and storytelling of my collection. As such, this year’s Harry Potter Advent Calendar fully leaning into the buildable “game” experience is leaving me somewhat unsatisfied.

For day 5 we get a microbuild of the Chamber of Secrets, specifically the Slytherin statue’s face with the basilisk emerging from its mouth. It is… grey. With an accent colour of… grey. It has a small part count, with the only interesting pieces being the snake decoration representing the basilisk and the hinge plate being used to make the statue’s nose.

You may be getting the sense that I am underwhelmed, and you would be correct. After building an enjoyable minifigure-scale representation of this scene in the Hogwarts Chamber of Secrets set (76389), this microbuild is unimpressive. If it weren’t for the snake piece I wouldn’t even know what I was looking at. At least most of the pieces are pretty plain and will be easy to use for something else.

Verdict

With its Rocket Racoon figure, MCU grabs the top spot on Day 5, coming at the perfect time and keeping it in the running early on. In second place, SW grabs a single point with its Battle Droid. Finishing off the scoreboard is HP with its Statue of Slytherin microbuild.

The scores are now:

SW- 6

HP- 5

MCU- 4

To be continued…