Harry Potter Advent Calendar - Day 24
Posted by CapnRex101,
While the pattern of 76404 Harry Potter Advent Calendar has been clear, predicting the contents of the final day is often tricky. Nevertheless, I am expecting to find a minifigure.
Let's open door number 24, before summarising the fourth Harry Potter Advent Calendar...
Neville Longbottom joins the minifigure selection today, featuring his jumper from the climactic Battle of Hogwarts. This is definitely an important version of the character and suits the current Northern Hemisphere season, although it feels strange to conclude the Advent Calendar without anything specifically Christmassy.
Nevertheless, Neville's jumper includes lovely detail and corresponds with his costume from the film. The double-sided head looks reasonable too, although misses an opportunity to include an exclusive courageous expression, which would have been ideal for the scene. Looking through the contents of this Advent Calendar, perhaps Tonks' updated torso could have been omitted to accommodate a new double-sided head for Neville.
This minifigure brandishes the prized Sword of Gryffindor, launched with Griphook in the second series of Harry Potter Collectable Minifigures. The sword includes elaborate carvings around the hilt and is dual-moulded with trans-red plastic, forming the inset rubies. Neville stands on a dark orange 2x4 plate, so matches the two models from The Deathly Hallows Part II.
Overall - This is perhaps Neville's most memorable attire from the Harry Potter series and the minifigure looks superb, particularly with the Sword of Gryffindor.
Summary
Harry Potter Advent Calendars commonly possess a couple of advantages over other licensed calendars, as the source material actively features Christmas and these sets usually contain a wider selection of unique parts. 76404 Harry Potter Advent Calendar impresses in that regard, including eleven new printed elements and a recoloured hair component for Moaning Myrtle.
The resultant exclusive minifigures are excellent and I have enjoyed the chronological ordering of items too. Moreover, I like microscale models in Advent Calendars, although they sometimes divide opinion, so might not have appealed to everybody. The gameplay aspect is also quite fun, with full instructions available on LEGO.com.
Personally, I still consider the 2019 and 2020 Harry Potter Advent Calendars my favourites, but the 2022 edition has been impressive as well.
How do you think this Harry Potter Advent Calendar compares with others and which items are your favourites? Let us know in the comments.
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19 comments on this article
My opinion on this is pretty straightforward: it certainly isn't bad, and it has some good, even great builds! It isn't as good as the 2020 calendar, but after making 3 Harry Potter Advents, obviously the 4th will begin running out of ideas. Still, this is certainly a great set!
I think having the bases included for all the builds was a fantastic idea by the designer.
Would love to see a non canonical, Christmas themes one. Something fun like they have done with Star Wars the last couple of years.
@ryanameek said:
"Would love to see a non canonical, Christmas themes one. Something fun like they have done with Star Wars the last couple of years. "
Yule and Christmas are incorporated into Harry Potter enough that it's fairly easy for them to get Christmas-themed, as they did with the first two.
Although a Santa Voldemort could be fun.
@ResIpsaLoquitur said:
"Although a Santa Voldemort could be fun."
They should definitely include him at some point in the future.
@ResIpsaLoquitur said:
" Although a Santa Voldemort could be fun."
Or a Dumbledore or Hagrid. I would love a fun Christmas calendar.
But I've loved so many of the builds this year and am looking forward to incorporating them into my wider HP lego universal... A younger Ron is getting a Hogwarts Express fir Christmas
Really a dip in quality from the last three. Hardly any prints or interesting, usable builds to decorate sets.
Statistics for this calendar are pretty good. Of the 24 days, less than half, at 11, were spoiled on the box art. That's a remarkably low incidence of spoilers. Neville Longbottom on the final day was the last day that was still a surprise, and Day 5's Chamber of Secrets was the first.
@imemine98:
The bases would have worked better if they were _all_ 2x4 plates. Some of these are a bit fragile at the bottom because they chose to use a pair of 2x2 plates instead. At least the 1x4 plates remain stable. Every minifig day used a full 2x4 plate, so no instance of 2x2 or 1x4 plates was done out of pure necessity, but rather because the set designer chose to introduce more part variety.
Now that all the doors are open, has anyone had a crack at the game you’re supposed to be able to play with them?
@gatorbug6:
I had some thoughts on that. HPAC's strong points have always been unique printed parts and exclusive canon variants of minifigs that aren't easy to fit into any other sets besides a CMF wave. This year, we only got two tiles, but we picked up a seventh printed minifig. Previously, only 2019 had seven minifigs, and one of those was just an unprinted gold Architect. Of these seven minifigs, three came with new heads (Moaning Myrtle, Voldemort, and Tonks), five came with new torsos (Moaning Myrtle, Sirius Black, Voldemort, Tonks, and Neville Longbottom), and Moaning Myrtle even came with a unique hair. This may not be the specific mix people were looking for, but I feel that, in terms of the overall calendar, plenty of value is still there, even if it leans very heavily in favor of minifigs.
Pretty good calender. Not particularly christmassy, but it's great to see representation of all the films.
He could have used a battle damaged side to his head.
@Binnekamp said:
"Pretty good calender. Not particularly christmassy, but it's great to see representation of all the films."
Agreed. Not one shred of Christmas theme at all, however this was definitely my favorite HP calendar. It is quirky with some odd builds but creative with the microbuilds of various scenes. I loved the 3 x 8 movie-themed builds with one "minifigure" for each movie (Hedwig excluded). Just about each microbuild was unique and fairly intricate for its size (I'm excluding the two cup builds for GoF). Don't know if I agreed with Neville as the Christmas Eve minifigure but then again he was sort of the surprise hero at the end of the Deathly Hallows story.
Next year, the AC should definitely be more off the wall with some ugly minifigure sweater action.
I think the exclusion of anything Christmas related was a real misfire for this calendar. I think the chronological approach would have worked better if they included minifigs and microbuilds from the Christmas scenes for all the films. Could have ended with a snow covered Hog's Head and Aberforth for DH2. Hope they do a more classical Hogsmeade calendar for PoA or OotP next year.
@J0rgen:
The problem is that only three of the movies really have any significant Christmas scenes, and we already got HPACs dedicated to them in 2019 and 2020. The only one remaining is the Slug Club party.
Fantastic advent calendar with a break from the Christmas themes of the past keeping long term collectors interested and coming back for more (IMHO). The micro builds were excellent as some were head scratches that felt very satisfying once they had been puzzled out. My favourite so far, well done to the designer, Lego and Cap for your reviews. Happy Christmas everyone!
That is still my one big regret when I visited Wizarding World was me not buying Neville's sweater. They had it for sale and I couldn't justify the price at the time. Now here I am 5 years later and still bemoaning my decision. Oh well...
Did anyone else get two Neville's? Instead of one with a double sided head, I got two separate Neville's to build, with two heads featuring one of each of the faces. Everything else is an exact duplicate.
@CancunaMikeD:
Nnnooo? That’s the only instance I’ve heard of. Now, when I built my 1st Edition 10179, I ended up with a giant bag of L/R wedge plates that I didn’t need to open until the very end, and I only removed one pair to complete the model. Turns out it contained the entire required quantity of both L and R light-bley 2x4 wedge plates, while the other 79 bags contained one less than the required amounts. What I believe happened is they messed up their convoluted sortation, discovered this when checking copies to make sure they were packed right, and overcorrected by adding a bag with _all_ of them, rather than just what they were short of. If each of these has single-sided heads, I’d guess they ran out of double-sided ones and had to sub in replacements, or they misprinted them by running half through one print, and the other half through the second. Whatever the cause, they must have figured it out and overcompensated, not by packing two heads in each Neville, but by packing two Nevilles in each box.