Accio Lego

I could definitely see Cho coming in the advent calendar, although, with one Patil twin confirmed and the other strongly implied, I suppose that depends on how much of a budget for new prints they have (if nothing else, the Yule Ball easily has the highest number of potential exclusive variants, so I could see them revisiting it if the theme continues long enough).

I lived in central Virginia until a few years ago, and now So Cal (not LA), so both East and west coasts. Maybe if you’re living right next to the theme park you’d see more promo material for the day, but if there’s ever been a national marketing campaign for September 1st I’ve never seen it And I usually keep up to date on when stores like B&N are doing Harry Potter promos.

To be fair, I live in the US and I’ve never heard of it either I’ve never seen nation wide marketing campaign for Harry Potter centered around September 1st. There might be local events (and local events typically just take place whenever the organizers find most convenient - I know of one event that takes place in October for instance), and the various social media platforms definitely mention it, but no big merchandise releases like you see on May the Fourth or Force Fridays for Star Wars.

My biggest worry about the CMF is if the local Lego store will allow customers to feel the bags by the time it releases. When they reopened at the beginning of the month they weren’t even allowing customers to grab their own boxes off the shelves so hopefully things will have gotten better enough by September for them to relax their restrictions or I’ll have to rethink my CMF acquisition strategy.

There’s a decent chance that we’ll get Helena Ravenclaw/The Grey Lady in a DH2 set. But the Bloody Baron and Fat Frair really can’t show up anywhere but a CMF, although I suppose if they were still doing bricktober packs they could squeeze the Frair into one of those. At least those two have an advantage over Helena and Nick in that they’re both shown carrying items, which means ready made accessories for a CMF.

It’s possible the book covers the original run of the theme as well, which included the 2011 D2C and a few individual shops as sets too.

Yeah, but even though the Trolly Witch doesn’t appear on screen in every movie there’s still the implication that she’s always there (pretty sure getting sweets from the trolly is mentioned in every book), so it’s a little different than including student characters from different movies/books (especially since Lego started changing their heights depending on their ages).

A Battle of the Seven Potters set would probably end up being a battle pack type set, with more minifigures and smaller builds. The flying motorcycle and sidecar are an obvious choice for a build, of its more of a proper set then the tunnel the chase happens through in the movie is a possibility as well, and I seem to recall Voldemort getting caught up in some power lines at the end of the fight as well. A set based on the prologue scene in Privet Drive could include the motorbike, some street lamps and the low wall Professor McGonagall waits on - throw in Dumbledore, McGonagall, Hagrid, baby Harry, and McGonagall’s cat form and you’ve got a nice $20 set actually.

Really? That’s great. Do you remember what interview he said that in? It would be so cool to get the flying motorcycle, but I can definitely see why getting the handlebars in a shape Hagrid could hold would be tricky. You either have to figure out how to brick build something sturdy enough or mold an entirely new bike that’s only compatible with Hagrid.

My predictions list is rather similar to a lot of other people’s - which shouldn’t really be surprising since we’ve all been discussing this for ages and probably done a good job of cross contaminating each other’s ideas. Namely: 1. Harry Potter (polyjuiced as Goyle) 2. Ron Weasley (polyjuiced as Crabbe) 3. Hermione Granger (polyjuiced as cat) 4. Madame Pomfrey (w/ potions bottle) 5. Rita Skeeter (w/ green quill and parchment) 6. Tonks (OotP outfit w/ different colored hair pieces) 7. Gilderoy Lockhart I wouldn’t mind if number 7 actually turned out to be werewolf Lupin, but I suspect if Lockhart ends up coming in the D2C they’ll want to make him a new mold for his hair with the CMF budget. I’m also not going to complain if we get HBP variants of Ron and Hermione to match the Harry we already know about, and there’s no second Harry like we got in series 1. If that were the case I’d expect that spot to be taken by a Draco variation (since we’d be short on Slytherin characters/outfits without the polyjuiced trio). But the above list is still my first guess.

Well, we already know we’re getting Fawkes, so that’s one guaranteed already. I imagine we won’t get as many animals as series 1, because half the animals in that series came from the fact that they decided to make their matching trio in school robes with their pets as accessories, and that’s not really something they can do again. As far as possible animals in series 2 go, I’d love to get Werewolf Lupin as a minifigure with Padfoot as his accessory (both are in dire need of an update), I’ve also seen people speculating about the possibility of getting Ginny with a Pygmy Puff, and after being deprived of getting a proper Errol in the Burrow set I wouldn’t mind getting a member of the Weasley family with him as an accessory, and I think Lockhart with Cornish Pixies has been speculated about since 2018. For all we know Myrtle could come with Mrs. Noris as her accessory.

With that logic, we could also observe that both advent calendars have used repeat minifigures from the highest price point set of the year before. Therefore, next year’s advent calendar could be HBP themed and reuse minifigures from the Astronomy Tower or it could be OotP themed and, say, reuse Molly and Arthur from the Burrow.

As tempting as the prospect is, series 1 was released in August in Lego stores, while it looks like series 2 will be releasing in September. That could definitely throw comparisons off.

Just because they haven’t announced another delay for FB3 yet doesn’t mean it’s still on track for next year, so we might not have Fantastic Beasts sets taking up potential Harry Potter slots. Even if the movie does still come out I doubt it will take away Harry Potter slots now that the rebooted theme has more than proven its staying power outside of movie hype. I do agree that we’ll probably get at least one throwback set next year, since it will be the 20th anniversary of the first movie/first Harry Potter Lego wave. They might not oversell it like they did the Star Wars anniversary sets, but they'd be foolish not to take advantage of the nostalgia trip by recreating Fluffy (Harry Potter also has the advantage in that the original sets came out at the same time as the movies, so Lego and Warner Bros. would be promoting anniversary stuff at the same time, as opposed to last year’s Star Wars thing). As for advent calendars - I realize kingnono was wrong about getting an OotP advent calendar this year, but I see no reason why we shouldn’t get one next year. OotP comes after GoF chronologically after all.

I don’t think the Carrows are CMF material. They barely feature in the books and people who’d only seen the movies could probably be forgiven for not recognizing them immediately. Plus they wear plain black robes. I think if we get them it’s much more likely to be in a Battle of Hogwarts set or a Death Eater battle pack (gotta give our heroes some evil hordes to fight). Save the potential CMF budget for characters and variations that actually need the extra printing and mold budget.

I know... I expect the three remaining advent calendars will all be revealed together and that should happen any time now because the Star Wars one was just put up on the Shop at Home website, but the wait is a drag. I want to see those exclusive figures.

The Lego store gift card I’ve got from my birthday is a big incentive. And the spotty quality of the local delivery services is a bit of a deterrent for mail ordering anything particularly large. After you’ve gotten two broken shelving units in a row and decided to cobble together the unbroken pieces into the shelves you wanted instead of calling the supplier to send out another unit to be broken, you learn to pick up anything you really care about from the store.

Not everyone can afford to pay the extra money to have the sets shipped overseas. I’ve also got a gift card that will cover most of the sets, which means I just have to exercise patience until they’re released in the US. I’ve always thought her the perfect candidate for a CMF as well. Tonks is a character whose design begs to be done with all the bells and whistles - alternate faces, multiple hairpieces in different colors, and dual molded legs with printing to look like her long coats like we saw multiple examples of back in series 1.

Just because kingnono took popular speculation (quite possibly from this very thread) and tried to pass it off as fact doesn’t mean that that speculation doesn’t still hold weight in a discussion. I’d still be discussing potential CMF characters even if kingnono had never said anything, and I’m not going to let his trolling spoil my preferred pastime while waiting for the sets to release in my area.

There’s only a handful of characters left from the first theme that haven’t been remade yet (I don’t think it even gets up into the double digits). Personally what I’d love is a proper Werewolf Lupin and Padfoot. The figure I’d like to see for the first time is definitely OotP Tonks. Kingnono actually never said we’d get OotP Tonks. He claimed we’d get at least 2 characters from each house in the CMF, and Tonks was just the most popular choice for a second Hufflepuff alongside Professor Sprout. And the two from each house thing isn’t a bad guess, since Lego made sure each house had at least two representatives in series 1.

Hard to say, I personally haven’t seen much in the way of physical leaks since the pandemic started. I’m just waiting for the full images of the advent calendar to drop, now that the Star Wars one has been revealed.

I don’t have an encyclopedic knowledge of GWPs, but the first example that comes to mind is the London Bus. There was a microscale version put out as a GWP a year or so before the large Creator one came out. I remember because I was searching for leaked images and all I could find were pics of the GWP.

There’s a difference between a single gwp and multiple full sized sets. And there’s a precedent for Lego doing a subject as a microscale gwp and then a few years later doing it as a large scale D2C.

Basing predictions for this year’s Diagon Alley off the composition of the 2011 one is a flawed plan in my opinion. The 2010-11 waves were not nearly as devoted to screen accuracy as the current theme (just look at the 2011 Ollivander’s for proof). They also used the same Harry design for all his years in Hogwarts back then, as opposed to the gradual aging up they’ve done with the students in the current theme, which means you can’t use the same minifigure for first year and sixth year scenes like they did back then. I know some people are loath to accept it, but there is precedent for including more than one version of a character in a D2C, and there’s a distinct possibility that will happen with Diagon Alley.

I think multiple versions of Harry are pretty much inevitable if we get Weasleys Wizarding Wheezes like we want. After all, Ollivander’s is basically guaranteed, and with the current theme’s use of different sized legs depending on the age of the characters it’s impossible to recreate both first year and sixth year scenes with the same minifigure. Sure, us collectors don’t really need more Harrys, but at the same time if someone drops $400 on a set that comes with, say, Ollivander, Lockhart, the Weasley Twins, and only HBP Harry, they’re going to be pretty steamed when they find out they’ve got to separately buy a short legged version of Harry to properly recreate the SS/PS and CoS scenes. It’s a balance, so I’m expecting two versions on the main trio, but not anybody else (except maybe Ginny and Draco).