REVIEW: Advent calendar 11 December 2022

Yesterday’s model was a bit of a (positive) surprise. Maybe this calendar is not all micro-scale after all (with the occasional minifigure). Would today’s model support this view? Read on to see what we got…

What is clear however from the symbol on today’s door is that we’re still doing models from Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

11 December model

Behind door number 11 was a smallish bag of parts, though not as small as the one from yesterday. And the instruction on the back of the door quickly revealed this was another minifigure scale model – as we got yesterday. Or maybe bigger than minifigure scale actually – we’ll get back to that.

Being a lazy sunday morning, I took up the challenge to build it while in the bag. As seen, we got the Tri-wizard Tournament trophy.

Opening the bag, I did a count of the pieces. Today’s score of 15 pieces (three were spares) was better than yesterday, but still in the lower end overall, and without any particular interesting parts.

Below, you can see how the model is built in a few simple steps. Click of any of the pictures if you want to view the photo in larger scale.

As such, the trophy looks quite good. We’ve seen several other versions of the trophy over the years, with the photo below comparing some of those. To the left is the trophy from the Hungarian Horntail Tri-wizard Challege set from 2019 while the one in the middle is from the 2020 advent calendar (24 December).

Of the three models, the left is probably the closest to the actual scale in the movie, which can be seen below. The other two are way too large – almost the size of a minifigure.

While it does look bluish in the photo above, the trophy was actually colourless transparent, and the blue shine is from the lighting in the movie. So both the bluish and normal transparent versions are fine.

Summary

So another “minifigure” scale build today – or close. It was actually too large to be realistic. Surely both the goblet and the trophy are important to the fourth movie, but I had hoped for something more exiting, like a micro-scale Hungarian Horntail dragon. And with relatively low piece count, and no particularly interesting parts, I’ll only give it 2.5 out of 5 house points. Maybe I had my expectations set too high.

So that was the two normal models – will be be up for another surprise tomorrow, or will we as “normal” get a minifigure from the fourth movie? Could that figure be from the Yule Ball? Still hoping for at least one model to be Christmas related this year. Another cool character to get would be Rita Skeeter, one of the few rather iconic characters yet to be made into minifigure form (though you can see my version of her here). She would be a great pick for the Goblet of Fire actually. Check back on the 2022 Advent Calendar page tomorrow to see what we got…

Till then, Build the Magic!