Accio Lego

Given that the price point for the largest set is the same as the largest Mickey & Friends one currently available, I imagine we’ll be looking at something similar to that: some sort of brick built desk organizer, a brick built picture frame, and a few prefabricated bases (patches, bag tags, bracelets, etc.). We’ll also definitely see bracelets in some form. Whether that means a full set of red+blue+yellow+green or just a yellow+grey pair with the tiles to make them work for all four houses remains to be seen - and who knows whether they’ll be bundled in the larger set or the sole focus of one of the smaller sets. As for prints, I think you’re on the money with house crests, lightning bolts, and glasses, but I’ll add that the platform 9 3/4 logo is another obvious choice, and with how the DOTS theme has done repetitive patterns in the past I wouldn’t be surprised if they did some striped tiles to mimic house scarves. I’m also interested to see if the designers will take advantage of the timeturner print that was introduced in the Hospital Wing this year.

Okay, I can pass on the brickheadz and art sets, but I’m almost certainly going to need to grab these. I’ve spent the entire time since the introduction of DOTS telling myself I don’t need to get any, I’m never going to be able to hold out if they add Harry Potter to the mix.

I agree with you on Bathilda, since she technically only appears on screen as a corpse puppet for Nagini (yikes). But since we’re acknowledging the Accessory Packs, I think Burbage would do go in one, which it think I already brought up when we weren’t sure if this year’s Hogwarts Professors set was brickheadz or not. And I don’t think a professors pack would be a horrible idea for the future either - while the moments sets have made a decent number of professors available a low price points, there are still several members of Hogwarts staff who are locked behind a higher threshold, and PoA-onwards was only available for an extremely limited window.

I know that the house banners are supposed to be some sort of convertible playset type thing like the moments and trunk sets, but I’m wondering if they’ll somehow be able to hang on the wall - it would be pretty odd to market them as “banners” otherwise. Here’s also hoping that we’ll see the much speculated house ghosts to break up the monotony of student uniforms in the banner sets. It would only require one or two new molds - and frankly giving us the Grey Lady/Helena Ravenclaw in a setup like this would be a good way to give us a pivotal DH character without taking up a crucial minifig slot in a future Battle of Hogwarts set. The Battle of Hogwarts Room of Hidden Things and the long awaited Reboot of the Second Task are extremely exciting. And Blaise Zabini is already at least one completely new character for next year! And I can’t wait to see that Grindylow! Slightly disappointing that we won’t get Fluer and Cedric in their second task swimsuits at this time (see, this is what a 3rd CMF would be useful for). Hopefully, the designers will find some way to sneak them to us - if Harry Potter polybags ever included new prints I’d say that was a perfect place to give us one (say Fluer with a small water weed build and one of the new grindylows), and we also haven’t gotten any new minifig prints in the GWPs since Ollivander in 2018 so that’s unlikely too. Maybe the 2023 advent calendar?

Possibly, or maybe set names and piece counts for the half dozen sets we’re expecting to come in March. I’m inclined the think the latter since we haven’t gotten any 2HY news yet but the names/content of several Star Wars 1HY sets were recently leaked.

To be fair, last year’s Hooch minifig was specifically for the flying lesson, where she doesn’t have her goggles. Giving her an alternate face with the goggles works fine, but an molded hair piece with goggles for a scene where she doesn’t wear them wouldn’t make any sense. Now, a quidditch match based set (or perhaps a quidditch trunk like someone suggested several pages back) could use the hair+goggles mold for Hooch in her referee’s uniform, which is an entirely different outfit which does feature goggles (she even wears the on top of her head like that when she’s giving the teams her little lecture and releasing the balls).

I agree that you probably need two new molds for the oversized top hats with both long and short(er) hair, as well as an omnioculars mold, but the bowler hat with medium length hair already exists for the Riddler in Batman sets, so that’s just a recolor. A Krum in Bulgarian Quidditch robes would be fun to go with these too.

While it’s arguable that any missing characters/variants could fit in sets, the fact of the matter is that budgeting, set size, or merely balancing out what the higher ups want means they don’t alway do so. After all, we’re talking about two character variants that would only have ever fit into a collector’s edition Hogwarts Express that the designers ultimately decided they couldn’t include. And just look at what we got in previous CMFs. Ginny in her Slug Club party outfit technically would have fit in the Astronomy Tower set, but there simply wasn’t room for her, and the extra mold budget of a CMF definitely worked in her favor. Speaking of new molds, I get that a lot of people are ambivalent about the Moaning Myrtle in this year’s advent calendar, but that never would have happened if she hadn’t appeared in a CMF first, since advent calendars don’t introduce new molds. Maybe we won’t see any more Harry Potter CMFs, but I think the format still has the potential to give a lot to the theme that we might never get otherwise.

Agreed. I think a series 3 CMF is our best chance of getting the missing epilogue characters at this point, or at the very least Ron and Hermione. As for the Harry variant to round off the requisite trio - personally my choice would be a battle of the seven Potters outfit, since even if they made a set of that scene they’d never fit all the Harry’s in it - probably one of the few army builders you could do for the theme.

I don’t have the Buckbeak set yet either, so I haven’t settled on anything specific yet. I think the biggest issue will be the weird angles it all creates and arranging it all so that it will still fit on the shelf.

Ugh, probably too many to count, although none written by me. Although I am surprised that they went full display mode on this instead of giving us a train with power functions. Maybe lego becoming more mainstream popular among adults during the pandemic is finally coming back to bite us - there’s a distinct lack of playability in a lot of the recent 18+ sets.

That’s supposed to be Ollivander’s?!? I thought it was the Ministry atrium, it was right next to the hall of prophecies and the baseplate colors for OotP and SS/PS are similar enough to be hard to tell apart at the size of photo I’m looking at. That actually makes so much more sense. And to be fair, they didn’t skip the Battle of Hogwarts completely - we’ve got Neville! Probably a little more recognizable as being battle specific than any mini builds they could try to pull off tbh.

There’s only so many ways you can build a working spinning top out of a square block shaped system, and quite frankly last year’s wasn’t quite up to the task. Seriously, did anyone else actually try spinning that thing? I couldn’t get it to go for any length of time, it was more like a very oddly shaped dice. Hopefully the new version being more dreidel shaped (a style of top that has been working ages) will mean it’s better at, y’know, spinning.

I’ll semi forgive them the inclusion of Snape instead of a new Minifigure. I get that budgets are tight, although I wish we’d gotten repeats previously confined to a single high priced set like the last three advent calendars. What’s confusing is that it would’ve been pretty easy to make Snape the DH1 figure and switch Hedwig out to a sand baseplate to make her a PS/SS ‘build’ (and therefore representing her and Harry meeting as opposed to her death). The first movie is currently underrepresented with only Harry and the Quidditch hoops, so you wouldn’t have to reshuffle anything else, HBP would just switch to the movie with less rep (OotP has 3 builds in addition to its minifig while most of the others only have 2). Literally all it would take is a couple of baseplate color changes to make things feel more evenly distributed (and a whole lot less morbid).

According to the plate colors, Hedwig is the DH1 ‘Minifigure’ - which is a bit morbid when you think about it. I too wondered why they used the perched version of Hedwig instead of the flying one, the only thing I can think of is that the dimensions made it difficult for whatever packing machines they use to place it in the advent calendar consistently, or there where problems with it getting wedged in there and difficult to get out. The wingspan on the flying owl mold is pretty decent, that could cause any number of complications with an advent calendar format. And while flying Hedwig hasn’t appeared in a set since 2020, lego isn’t ignoring the mold. Remember, we got a recolored version in two of this year’s winter sets, and a couple of other recolors have appeared outside the theme this year as well (not to mention the unprinted gold version used for Dumbledore’s lectern last year).

I agree. And I think it might be a good idea for us to spam the product reviews with comments along the lines of ‘the board game doesn’t work, stop trying to force it on us and just give us a regular calendar like the other themes get’, but at the end of the day that’s the explanation for the weird format this year.

They’re made to work as part of whatever weird board game feature they’ve got going on this year, and while I’ll admit it irked me that last year’s calendar had a board game feature but didn’t really incorporate it into anything, the solution to that problem would have preferably been to just ditch the board game feature altogether. incidentally, anyone else notice that we’ve technically got 25 builds here? They spinner top must come bundled with one of the characters (Hedwig maybe? She’s pretty anemic looking as a door prize all on her lonesome)

Personally, I’m going to wait to formulate my opinion on the full advent calendar until we see just what’s going on with the board game feature this year. It’s clearly rather different from the candyland like setup from last year, where the Minifigures moved along a path and none of the builds other than the spinner top did anything. This year’s seems to be penseive themed and doesn’t have any sort of path (plus A LOT more instructions), so the gameplay might actually be interesting enough to entertain more than the smallest of children this time. The spinner design has also changed, hopefully that means it’s a little better at actually spinning.

Sweet Merlin you’re right! No wonder none of us could figure out where it was from - the dang thing is only ever shown in grayscale with a placard covering most of it, but if you look closely you actually can see the zigzag print on his shirt in the mugshot. I was also going to quibble about the fact that every other character is a variant from the movie corresponding with their baseplate color, but casual clothes Sirius doesn’t fit with PoA - but he’s actually wearing his only casual outfit from that movie.

Pretty sure that’s it. The dark grey micro figure is meant to represent the training dummy. And they used trans blue in the walls of the DA patronus set in 2020 to vaguely represent some of the more intangible aspects of the room, and that micro build has it too. What I want to know is what is Sirius holding? Harry, Voldemort, Tonks and Snape all clearly have wands, Myrtle doesn’t have anything and Neville has the sword, but Sirius seems to be holding a black Or dark brown tile of some sort. You can only see the edge of it in the full set image and it’s at an oblique angle in the one lifestyle photo Sirius is actually in, so it’s hard to tell what it’s supposed to be.

I can’t help but think we’re seeing a larger number of unlicensed series right around when there’s a switch in packaging might be because they weren’t 100% sure when the change would happen when they were designating which series would be released when, and the issue of writing up licensing contracts when you aren’t certain whether the product is going to be blind bags or blind boxes would probably be painfully complicated. Easier to just schedule a bunch of unlicensed series in a row so you can switch over whenever without having to worry about if you’ll be violating a massive contract because you said they’d be sold in boxes but the boxes weren’t ready yet so you ended up putting them in the old bags.

Can’t remember, but with rumors suggesting an August 16th announcement it wouldn’t be shocking to get leaks anytime in the near future. That said, I also wouldn’t be surprised if lego staves off leaks until a couple days beforehand or even entirely. There have been several D2Cs (especially licensed ones) lately where no actual pictures have leaked, and the latest big licensed set leaks (Avatar) came through a third party retailer’s website, which isn’t something that can happen with D2Cs.

…not sure the scene where Ron ingests deadly poison is one lego is going to want to touch. Particularly since that scene also comes close to depicting the underage consumption of alcohol.

That was also around when the new rat mold was introduced. It first appeared in a city summer set and a couple of Harry Potter sets before the cmf, but I have no doubt it was made with the Harry Potter theme in mind so who knows where the budget for that was ultimately taken from. And the snake that came with Voldemort appeared a few months later as a microscale basilisk in the D2C Hogwarts, so yeah, the designers the designers definitely leveraged the CMF mold budget to its full extent to really reboot the theme properly. But they kept doing it in series 2 as well. The most obvious example being Ginny Weasley. The cmf variant of her is in her Slug Club Christmas party outfit, which is the scene depicted in the Astronomy Tower set released the same year. She also came with a new ice cream dish mold, which then showed up recolored in that year’s Diagon Alley D2C.

That tends to be more noticeable in the licensed themes. I could give you a long list of characters from the two Harry Potter series that we clearly made with sets released at the same time or the next year in mind. It’s harder to tell in unlicensed themes where the archetypes are more broad.