One of the most recent additions to Magic: The Gathering is Secret Lairs, a sub-brand of reprinted premium cards. Magic players with some disposable income can purchase a drop of three to seven cards from Wizards of the Coast's web store. Unlike a booster of Magic cards, the drops' cards are pre-determined, so you have a guarantee on what cards that you will receive with a Secret Lair drop.
Like most premium extensions of a major brand, there are positives and negatives to Secret Lairs. This article will look at the five good things Secret Lairs does to Magic: The Gathering and the five things it does not so well.
10 Best: Drops Have Interesting And Unique Themes
One of the neat aspects of Secret Lairs is it's theming. Each Drop's Card is based around a single theme. For example, the most recent drop, Ornithological Studies reimagines the art of various bird-like creature cards as more realistic birds. This theming is often based on holidays, seasons, art styles, or a unifying concept.
Some are even based on main Magic sets releases. For example, the recent Ikoira: Lair Of Behemoths booster boxes came with a unique card inspired by a monster from the Godzilla franchise. To celebrate this crossover, Secret Lair released a drop that reimages the five base elemental land cards to include the monsters from the Godzilla franchise.
9 Worst: Inconvenient Buying Process
A major issue with Secret Lair is the process of buying a drop. Instead of making the drops premium through price or supply, the drops are only available for 24 hour period before becoming unavailable. While there are sometimes "Superdrops" that lasted up to two weeks, drops are usually only available on the day of release.
This is inconvenient because these drops happened with little warning and regularity. The timing between drops has ranged from twice a month to every two months making it hard for any potential buyer to set aside cash for these sets.
8 Best: Work With Unusual Artists
Another unique aspect for Secret Lairs is that the cards' arts are done by artists who never worked with the Magic: the Gathering franchise before. Most of these artists come from fields that the franchise rarely hires from to do artwork for its cards like street artists, comic book artists, and album cover designers. These lead to all the Secret Lairs cards having a distinctive appearance compared to the average Magic card.
For example, one drop from the recent Summer Super drop is called Full Sleeves: The Tatoo Pack. This drop features five cards whose art is done by tattoo artist Josh Howard and this art is done in the style of a tattoo.
7 Worst: Pricing Problem With The Ultimate Edition
One of the most obvious problems with Secret Lair is the issue with the price of its recently released Ultimate Edition. The Ultimate Edition is an alternately distributed release of cards done similarly to the regular Secret Lair drops. The main differences being that they would be exclusively sold at game stores and come with a nice carrying case.
The controversy is that the Ultimate Edition came at a price way higher than originally announced. When announced the set was supposed to be priced around 165 US dollars, the price usually seen for deck collections. When the set was released the price skyrocket to between 275 to 500 dollars due to game stores having a rather limited supply of sets.
6 Best: Reprints Of Older Cards
One decision with the Secret Lair that made it less controversial than a premium set of cards for a trading card game could be, was the decision to make all the cards be reprints of previously available cards. All of the cards in Secret Lair are a reprint of cards that comes with nearly all Magic release or haven't seen a release in several years.
This decision deals with a potential problem of premium cards in they can purposely be made overpower to entice buyers. Wizard of the Coast avoided this problem by making all the card reprint, meaning that they would be as powerful as your average Magic The Gathering.
5 Worst: Not Much Appeal Beyond Collectors
These issues combine with the inconvenient way to acquire the drops mean that Secret Lair would have little appeal beyond those either wanting to collect them or fell in love with the art used for the drops. Overall these card drops would have little appeal to the causal Magic player.
4 Best: Somewhat Tournament-Legal
Due to all the cards being reprint of previously available cards, Secret Lairs cards are legal in all Magic tournaments except for Standard and Block Limited. This is due to the Vintage format allowing all Magic cards that have been released since the Alpha set in 1993, except for cards that easily can break the game. The cards are also legal in Modren format due to them including all cards released since 2003, which means Secret Lair cards are legal due to them all being based on cards released after 2003.
Certain Secret Lair cards are illegal in the Standard format due to the tournament only allowing cards from the most recent core set and two most recent block releases. Similarly, they're banned from the Block Constructed format due to their not being enough Secret Lair cards to construct a deck out of.
3 Worst: Not The Best Investment At The Moment
While Secret Lair is targeted towards card collectors, it's not the best investment at the moment. For collectors who buy cards in the hope that they will be hundreds of dollars in a decade or two, these cards are not the best investment. For one, their worth currently is at most nine dollars more than the card that they are reprints of.
This combine with it is historically proven that valuable collectible is more based on chance things, like Magic cards that are banned for their content, than from any effort by Wizard of the Coast. So Secret Lair might not be the best option for those wanting to make it rich from selling premium Magic cards.
2 Best: Compatible With Magic: The Gathering Arena
One of the biggest Magic video games in the last couple of year is Magic: The Gathering Arena that recreates the entire modern game in a browser like setting. One notable feature is the ability to transfer copies of physical cards to the game itself. Secret Lair cards can be transferred too.
Due to Arena only having cards from 2018, most of the non-land cards are transferred through granting the player a sleeve that can change a card's art. Which given that card art is Secret Lair's main appeal is not a bad trade-off for not being to transfer the card gameplay-wise.
1 Worst: No Rereleases At The Moment
While this issue might be solved shortly, currently the biggest problem with Secret Lair is the lack of rerelease for previous drops. This means that every card released through Secret Lair drops are only released once. This means that anyone who gets into Magic after a Secret Lair drop is released won't be able to acquire the card through means other than the secondary market.
This issue might be solved in the future as the line is relatively new, only starting in late 2019. So in the future, there might be a rerelease of previously released drops.