Box Break: Harry Potter Heroes and Villains

So I hit up my favorite LCS today while I was running around. He just moved to a new location that gives him a lot more room. He does a good job of keeping all sports in and also the non-sports as well. I saw he had the newest Artbox Harry Potter release, Heroes and Villains, in and decided to try a box. Looking a\on the bottom of the box I see I bought #181/3000. Your standard hobby box is 24 packs of 8 cards. The base set is 54 cards and 18 clear cards. There is a box topper inside as well as a 9 card foil puzzle to try to put together. The box also says to look for costume, prop and autograph cards.

The base cards look good with gold foil stamping on the front. The first 36 cards are characters and Artbox did a nice job covering characters from the first movie, the Sorcerer's Stone, to the latest, the Half-Blood Prince. The good guys have a blue border around them while the bad guys have red. The rest of the regular base set is comprised of scenes from the movies. These aren't quite as comprehensive and I wish they had added more of the scene cards to the set and made it a bit bigger. The backs of the character cards have a brief description of each person and also tell what organization they belong to if any. Such as: teacher, Order of the Phoenix, Death Eater, etc. The scene card backs give a very short synopsis of the picture on the front. I haven't gone through to make sure I got a complete base set but I'll go out on a bit of a limb here and say that I did. I saw a bunch of doubles and it wouldn't surprise me if I actually came close to two base sets when all is said and done.



The insert cards for this set are nice. As I mentioned before the end of the base set is actually comprised of 18 clear cards. These are good looking cards that have a major flaw...... they get scratched very easily. Most of mine have some scrapes on them straight out of the pack. Fortunately it doesn't really take away from the overall good look of the cards. I pulled 12 of these with no doubles! Guess this means I have a bit of E-bay scouring to actually finish the SP set. The other insert is the typical 9 card puzzle. The front of each card has different characters and when put together the back will create a picture. I have four of these cards and will hazard a guess that it will form the picture form the top of the box when completed.



Finally we get to the hits. There are 14 costume cards and 13 prop cards with several variants of each depending on what "piece" you get. My first hit is a costume card of Kingsley Shacklebolt from the Order of the Phoenix numbered 82/460. As you can see it's a nice three color swatch but I'm going to have to watch the movie again to figure out what it's an actual piece of.


My second hit came in a pack with only one other card. As in it's the thickness of seven base cards, I didn't even realize I had a hit in my hands until I opened the pack and saw it. It's a prop card and numbered 38/190. Actually it's a double prop card! I managed to get card containing a piece of a quaffle or bludger and bristles of broom from the Sorcerer's Stone.


I'm going to guess that between the quaffle and the bludger I got is actually a piece of bludger. It has a real leathery feel to it and appears to be darker then the quaffle is. No telling what broom the bristles come from, though I'll use some imagination and say they are from the broom that Harry flies to rescue Neville's remember-all (ha ha.) Now I didn't pull and autograph and was a little disappointed until I did some research. Seems that for this release autographs fall one per case, hmmm, don't feel quite so bad now but sure would have been nice. The costume cards are 10 per case or one per box and the prop cards are said to fall 4 per case. If those numbers are correct I don't think I did too bad overall. Final impressions have me thinking this was a fun box to open. Both hits are going to stay in my PC for now and I think I'll try to finish the SP and puzzle sets as well.