As promised during the set’s debut, Magic: The Gathering’s Spider-Man is getting a full Secret Lair Superdrop to celebrate its release. We saw the first drop, Daily Bugle, just over a week ago. Now the rest are here, and we have a bunch of shiny new cards to pore over. Two of these Secret Lair drops celebrate the heroes and villains of the Spider-Man universe, while the other two, weirdly enough, are dedicated entirely to Venom.
While he’s certainly a popular character, it’s strange to see so much Venom representation here. Thankfully, the drops themselves are fairly interesting outside of this. The first offers solid reprint value and an optional, highly nostalgic, alternate treatment. The other offers 10 basic lands for $60, which is a tall order even for the dedicated.
The Spider-Man ‘Venom Unleashed’ Secret Lair Drop
The first Spider-Man Secret Lair drop we’ll look at today is Venom Unleashed. This brings us five classic black cards, reskinned with borderless Venom-themed artwork.
The headliner here is clearly Damnation. At around $19 a copy on the low end, it’s the priciest card in the drop by far. It’s also one of the most useful. A ton of black decks in Commander run the card to clear the board, especially if they don’t have access to white for cheaper alternatives. The card also sees scattered play in Modern, as a sideboard option in Dimir Murktide and Mill lists. This is a card that desperately needs more reprints, so it’s great to see it here. Not that a printing like this will bring the price down much, mind you.
There’s a pretty staggering drop-off in value after Damnation. That’s not to say that the rest of the cards here are bad, just that they lack financial heft. Dark Ritual, for example, is an absolute classic. It sees play in Legacy, Vintage, Pauper, and Commander, as the best ritual spell Magic has ever seen. The early game plays this card enables are insane, but it’s also been reprinted over 40 times, so the value is only around $2.60 currently.
Peer into the Abyss is next up, and it’s in a similar boat to Dark Ritual. It’s a tried-and-tested win condition for black decks in cEDH, and it sees light play in Legacy to boot. Despite this, the card is only around $2.60 a copy right now. This isn’t down to reprints, as Peer has had a complete lack of them since its Core Set 2021 debut. Peer is just a niche card with low demand, but solid utility in specific lists.
A Blast From The Past
The value in Venom Unleashed drops off yet again for its final two cards. Surgical Extraction is a solid sideboard player in Modern and Legacy, yet it remains a $0.70 card. Granted that’s the price for the poorly-received Breaking News version: if you want a more traditional printing, things jump up to $2.40. Tendrils of Agony is a common win condition in Legacy Storm, but thanks to several reprints you can pick it up for around $0.30.
Altogether, that brings the value of Venom Unleashed to around $27. Considering the drop’s $30-40 price tag, this isn’t a great rate. It’s better than plenty of other drops we’ve seen, mind you, and much better than Daily Bugle’s paltry $10 total.
Perhaps the most interesting thing about Venom Unleashed is that it’s available in two different styles. You can get the regular version, with full-color art, or a black and white version, styled after classic comic books past. It appears that both versions come in non-foil or rainbow foil, so there are actually four choices total.
Whether the black and white version will have greater financial potential than the regular one is hard to call. Magic hasn’t really dabbled much in treatments like this in the past, outside of the disastrous Innistrad: Double Feature. While they’re certainly stylish, they also clash a lot with regular Magic cards, so they may be something of a niche product.
Even if it’s not a financial success, it’s cool to see Wizards experimenting more with alternate Secret Lair styles. The golden raised foil treatment we saw in The Ultimate Pencil Superdrop was cool, but held back by its ridiculous $100 price tag. The black and white Venom cards are a chance for players to branch out for a more reasonable fee.
$60 For 10 Basic Lands?!
Turns out Venom Unleashed isn’t the only appearance from everyone’s favorite anti-hero in the Spider-Man Secret Lair Superdrop. He also gets a cycle of full-art basic lands in the Mana Symbiote drop.
We’ve seen plenty of basic land drops like this before, most recently for the KEXP drop. The value of these fluctuates a lot depending on the subject matter and player mood. The Kozyndan Secret Lair Island sells for $27, for example, while the KEXP Island is only worth $2.40. This means it’s hard to call right now just how valuable these new lands will be. Venom is obviously a hugely popular character, mind you, so that’s a good mark in its favor right away.
Another advantage these lands might have is their unique pricing structure. Rather than coming with one copy of each land for $30, as past basic land drops have done, this one comes with two of each for $60. It’s only available in rainbow foil, too, so in a way, this is actually a discount on Wizards’ usual rates for products like this.
That said, as good a deal as it is on paper, $60 is a hell of a lot for 10 basic lands. It’s likely that a lot of players will be turned off by that right out of the gate, which could result in the drop being bought up by collectors instead. If this happens, the secondary market values on these lands will be steep indeed.
While Spider-Man doesn’t have Commander decks, there are still plenty of players who’ll want to build Venom decks, and these lands are perfect for that, so demand will almost certainly be there. In that sense, this drop could be a great long-term hold, but $60 stings in the short-term.
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