HP and SW are still locked in a dead heat, while MCU clings on for dear life. Can MCU keep the momemntum going? We’re in the back half of the Battle, and every day matters!

Day 14 – MCU

Steve: On the fourteenth day of Christmas the Guardians gave to meeeee….

A mini-spaceship flying freeeee

The MCU comes off a win on lucky day 13, can we gain some momentum?

Day 14 is a micro build of the Guardians Ship. This is a tough ship to capture well at this scale, and I think they do well. The orange parts make the build really pop. 

My main criticism is that the main wing shape isn’t captured all that well, but I’m not sure I could have done it any better. 

A good recognizable build feels great to see after some misses in the early days. It’s also lovely to see a build that feels important and relevant to the film canon. 

Day 14- SW

Pat: Star Wars rebounds from a rough build yesterday with, what I believe to be, one of the best micro ship builds of the calendar so far; it’s the Rebel B-Wing Starfighter! This bulky starfighter is definitely one of the least recognized of the traditional Rebel alphabet roster, and as a result, this is its first time appearing in a Star Wars advent calendar! We’ve seen the ship in some scale in 7 sets across 22 years, including a UCS scale set and larger magazine polybag and larger planet series micro-scale sets. However, it’s been a solid 8 years now since a quality, system scale B-Wing dropped, which was 75050 in 2014 (or even arguably 16 years since a good one, 6208 in 2006), but the ship is really due a rerelease in some capacity in a new set. I would personally like to see a new episode 6 B-wing, maybe with an updated General Madine or Admiral Ackbar, but I would also like to see the Prototype Blade-Wing from Rebels in a set, it would be a super unique colour for Lego Star Wars, and they already have the Quarrie minifig, who designed the ship (and seems to have gone up in value..?!)

This chunky, 19 piece build isn’t perfect, but it captures the angles well enough and has some hinges where the wings can fold, as the in-universe ship does. In the movie, the cockpit is gyroscopic and therefore always upright, but that portion of the lego build doesn’t really rotate unfortunately. For displaying, you can balance it upright in attack position:

Or, you can collapse the wings down, and lay it flat for landing positon.

In its landing position, the body and cockpit of the build is too topheavy for the ship to lay flat and therefore tilts upwards. An unfortunate problem with the physics of the ship design I think, being so long and thin on one side by bulky on the other. Oh well, I prefer its attack position anyway. Overall, very solid first run at an advent b-wing!

Day 14- HP

Andrew: After an okay microbuild yesterday, we get… an arch. A black and trans-light blue arch. After much guesswork from various family members, I finally caved and consulted Bricklink which informed me this is the Hall of Prophecies. This did bring back vague memories of a chase scene in the Order of the Phoenix movie in a black warehouse full of glowing orbs, which I guess this is supposed to represent a portion of, but I am thoroughly underwhelmed.

Even though this is a microbuild with very few pieces I was still bored putting this one together, since it is just stacking of plates and studs and capping them with some arches. For such a pivotal location to the story, I would have liked to see something a bit more interesting—maybe an intersection of corridors, or some microfigures, or something. This build doesn’t even have any interesting pieces to redeem it.

I’ve got nothing else to say on this one. I’m having a hard time imagining something worse from our competing calendars today, and fully expect this least favourite of the HP calendar to be today’s loser.

Verdict

Today was a toss up between MCU and SW in a mini battle of microchips. Ultimately it was determined that SW had the more screen-accurate model, and takes top marks. In second, MCU with its Guardians ship. In 3rd, HP, with a poor design that will make its way to most bulk bins post-calendar.

The scores are now:

SW- 17

HP- 16

MCU- 9

To be continued…