SW and HP remain tied heading into the back half of the festive battle. Guest reviewer Andrew House is back with some HP reviews for the next few days. MCU is in dire need of scoring today. Read on!

Day 13 – MCU

Steve: On the thirteenth day of Christmas the Guardians gave to meeeeee….. some points to score finallyeeeee!

As we turn the corner and enter the back half of the calendars, the MCU is hurting. The juggernauts of Harry Potter and Star Wars have been battling and leaving scraps for the Guardians.

Day 13 is a turning point, I hope! We get a Mantis mini figure behind door 13. 

The print is solid, although no leg or arm prints. The hairpiece is the softer, flexible plastic (no doubt to prevent the thin antennae from snapping off). Dual sided head has a happy and an angry face, but I feel the eyes should be larger for this character.  Rounding out the fig she has a guitar accessory to tie into the musical Holiday special. The figure itself has only appeared in one other set – 76193-1 The Guardians’ Ship.  That’s an expensive set so getting a copy here is great value.

Great fig, much needed at this stage – let’s hope it’s a portent of things to come!

Day 13- SW

Pat: We’re continuing the Star Wars Beach Party with a cool little build of a sand castle seen being built by Finn in the Lego Star Wars Summer Vacation. It’s actually a sand castle build of Vader’s Castle seen on Mustafar, and comes with a bucket, a shovel, and a couple of blue plates to simulate the nearby ocean. This is a cool enough accompanying piece to yesterday’s Summer Vader, and the bucket and shovel are better accessories for him than the soccer ball (as the ball is too difficult for a minifig to hold), but overall this feels like a pretty weak get today, and arguably, the first miss of Star Wars’ calendar. The “mandibles” of the sand castle are too far apart, and there’s no great parts included, so unfortunately this build sticks out in the grand scheme of Lego Star Wars, and doesn’t provide a whole lot of usable parts if scrapped either. (A full-sized version of the set, 75251, better captures the angles. Maybe I’ll put it in the sand on set 75171?) 

Day 13- HP

Andrew: After a few figures and minifigure-scale builds, we find ourselves back in microbuild land with… a building facade. I will admit this one was lost on me as I built it, and I was guessing maybe it was a Ministry of Magic building or something, but Bricklink informs me this is a build for the Room of Requirement!

Once I read that, some of the details make a bit more sense to me—the microfigure on the roller skate base is a clever representation of the Mechanical Death Eater training dummy Dumbledore’s Army used as part of their practice. The rest of it does not convey much sense of a “room”, however. I guess the corner arch pieces are meant to try and represent the depth of the space.

There are some interesting parts here. I’m always a fan of getting microfigures or trans blue pieces, and the tan arch 2×2 corner pieces were new to me. The half-pyramid slope pieces are also nice for detail work.

There’s not much else I can say about this microbuild. Of the comparable days we’ve seen so far in this calendar, I’d rank think build around the middle, mostly on the strength of the interesting arch pieces and dummy build. It wasn’t obvious to me what it was trying to depict, so it keeps it from ranking too high; but likewise it wasn’t so poor I’d put it near the bottom. So overall this microbuild is just… okay. I think it would have to be up against some actively poor builds from the other contenders to take the top spot today.

Verdict

With a MCU minifig entry today, MCU takes a full two points, something we haven’t been able to say much this year. In second place, HP grads a point with its Room of Requirement build. Finishing off the scoreboard for only the first time this season, SW.

The scores are now:

HP- 16

SW-15

MCU- 8

To be continued…