The long-awaited SpongeBob SquarePants Secret Lair drops finally went on sale this past Monday, as part of the ‘Our Boss is on Vacation’ Superdrop. As we’ve come to expect in the age of limited print run Lairs, some players have got their hands on the goods already. By extension, we now know what some of the SpongeBob SquarePants Secret Lair Bonus Cards are, too.
While there are almost certainly more to come, the two we’ve seen so far are definitely noteworthy. One is an all-time Commander staple with lovely new art, and the other is a Vintage-playable removal spell decked out like a meme. The financial value of these drops was never really in doubt. With these new Bonus Cards in mind, they seem like safer investments still.
Command Tower
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Land
- Card Text: Tap: Add one mana of any color in your Commander’s color identity.
First up among the SpongeBob Secret Lair Bonus Cards is Command Tower. You all know this one by now. Thanks to the perfect fixing it offers, the card is an auto-include in any Commander deck running two colors or more. It’s a super-staple, in other words, which makes fancy editions like this particularly desirable.
This version uses SpongeBob’s iconic pineapple house for the art, which makes a ton of sense lore-wise. It also features an appearance from Gary the Snail, continuing a trend set by the Lands Under the Sea drop. The artist for that drop, Jon Vermilyea, also provided the illustration here. Notably, this art takes up the entire card, as this is a textless take on Command Tower. This isn’t something we see every day, but not something we haven’t seen before, either.
There are actually multiple textless Command Tower variants out there. There’s a pixel art one, a Princess Bride castle one, and a Hatsune Miku one. All three of these are from Secret Lair drops, and in fact, all three are Bonus Cards. This means the current prices on these variants should be a good indication as to how much the SpongeBob one will be worth.
Right now, the textless pixel art Command Tower goes for around $38. The Princess Bride and Hatsune Miku variants are worth considerably less, at $23 and $20, respectively. Based on this, I’d expect the SpongeBob Command Tower to be worth somewhere between $20 and $40. Given the popularity of the IP and the drop, somewhere on the higher end of that range seems more likely.
Dismember
- Mana Value: 1 B/P B/P
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Instant
- Card Text: Target creature gets -5/-5 until end of turn.
The second of the SpongeBob Secret Lair Bonus Cards we saw today was Dismember. Like Command Tower above, they picked a very playable card here. As a powerful instant-speed removal spell that can be cast for only colorless mana, Dismember has found its way into countless decks across multiple formats.
Whether it’s Amulet Titan in Modern, Eldrazi in Legacy, or Shops in Vintage, there’s no shortage of players sleeving up Dismember. As a result, it has managed to maintain a consistent price of $2.50 or higher despite multiple reprints.
While the card is certainly popular, the demand for blinged-out versions clearly isn’t as high here as it is for Command Tower. The jazzy borderless versions of the card, from the Modern Horizons 3 Special Guests and the Monster Movie Marathon Secret Lair only sell for around $8.50 apiece right now.
That said, this new version has something special on its side: meme value. The art and flavor here reference the “My leg!” running joke from SpongeBob, which appears constantly across all of the show’s seasons. It’s an extremely quotable soundbite, and the art is pretty funny too. As we saw with the Internet Sensation drop in general, there are plenty of players willing to pay extra to stuff their deck with memes like this. As a result, this Bonus Card could be the priciest Dismember variant yet.
One thing we don’t really know yet is how these Bonus cards are being distributed. The original images appear to show the cards next to the Internet Sensation drop, so they could be tied to that. Alternatively, there could be a random pool that all the SpongeBob Lairs draw from. Until we know for sure, it’s hard to accurately predict their value.