If you look at every Secret Lair drop card in Magic: The Gathering, lined up in order of collector number, you’ll notice a couple of remarkable things. Firstly, there are now over 2,000 Secret Lair cards in total. That’s an impressive collection, even for a six-year-old initiative. Secondly, there’s actually a gap in the lineup. Cards 0168-0172 are, strangely enough, unaccounted for, and have been since 2020. Today, thanks to a new MTG leak including Crypt Ghast, that gap may just have been filled.
Thanks to a series of leaks on Facebook, it appears that these numbers have been allocated to a new Secret Lair drop called Inked. Featuring the work of tattoo artist Virginia Elwood, this is a five-card drop featuring the usual mix of playable cards and bulk-bin filler. While the source is certainly worthy of skepticism, and the collector number issue is strange, signs point towards this being a legitimate upcoming drop.
Crypt Ghast And Deathrite Shaman
We’ll look further into the legitimacy of the Inked drop later, but for now, let’s check out the cards. Crypt Ghast is the card that kicked everything off, receiving a leak in a post by Alex Santiago on the Magic The Gathering MTG Facebook group. It’s also, coincidentally, the most valuable card in the drop.
Crypt Ghast is a very solid card in Commander. For four mana, it’s a 2/2 Spirit that gives you an extra black mana from each of your Swamps. In most scenarios, this simply doubles your mana, which is fantastic. It can also fix it, too, however, since tapping something like a Blood Crypt for red will get you a black as well. Alongside cards like Torment of Hailfire, this can allow for some sneaky instant wins. It’s also, famously, playable in Mono-Black decks despite the hybrid black/white in Extort. The card goes for around $8 right now, making it a very solid start to the drop.
The next-best card in Inked, financially at least, is Deathrite Shaman. This is the definition of a multi-format all-star, seeing a ton of play in Commander and Vintage. It’s also banned in Modern and Legacy, to give you an idea of its sheer power. Since its original release, players have referred to Deathrite Shaman as a “one-mana planeswalker,” and that title is more than earned. Not only is it a well-statted mana dork that can fix your colors perfectly, but it’s also graveyard hate, burn, and lifegain as well.
Despite its obvious high power, Deathrite Shaman is actually very reasonably priced right now. You can get copies for around $4-5, which is great for players but bad for the value of Inked.
The Inked Secret Lair
The rest of the cards in the Inked Secret Lair drop are, unfortunately, far less exciting. Most drops contain one or two bulk cards, but in this case, there are three: Ice-Fang Coatl, Mulldrifter, and Burnished Hart.
Coatl is the most valuable of the three, but not by much. It’s actually a very playable Snow creature, showing up in Commander, Modern, and even Legacy. In Modern, it’s a staple in the Simic Midrange decks built around cheating out Abhorrent Oculus via Neoform. Despite this, however, the card is only around $0.40 currently, thanks to reprints on The List and in Mystery Booster 2.
Mulldrifter is a bit of a Magic: The Gathering icon. This is a card that has shown up in all manner of decks over the years, as a draw spell with a body attached that enables all sorts of shenanigans. Unfortunately, the card has also been reprinted around 30 times, and always at a low rarity. As a result, you can get copies for around $0.20, which is deeply unexciting. Even past Secret Lair printings of the card only got for $2-3.
Finally, Burnished Hart is the absolute bottom of the Inked barrel. For a time, it was a decent colorless ramp piece for non-green Commander decks, but power has crept a long way since its release in 2013. Now, every color has better options than this, and the format is too fast even for some of those. This is a $0.10 card, and it very much deserves that price tag.
In total, there’s only around $13.20 in value in this drop. That puts it firmly on the lower end for Secret Lair, assuming the usual $29.99 price point.
Mystery Solved?
So there you have it: what started as a Crypt Ghast leak turned out to be an entire MTG Secret Lair drop, presumably set to release soon. That said, the legitimacy of the Inked drop is still very much in question. Right now, the only source we have for the full drop is a comment from James Parrinello on Alex Santiago’s post. They also attached an image of the typical Secret Lair envelope bearing the drop name Inked.
This, along with the card images above, strongly suggests that this is a real drop. Someone might have gone to the trouble of proxying a Secret Lair Crypt Ghast, but an entire artist-specific drop seems much less likely. Parrinello notes that he got the image from “a friend who runs a store,” as part of their last Secret Lair shipment. It’s totally possible that this was a mistake, and that Wizards sent the drop out ahead of its intended release date later this year.
On the other hand, there are some strange details here. The fact that the drop uses a set of five-year-old collector numbers is odd, for one. Inked could’ve originally been intended for release in 2020, when the drops around there were released. The cards, however, are all marked with “2025” in the bottom-right. The recent Alexander Khabbazi basic land Bonus Cards were clearly holdovers from last year, and they came with a 2024 label. There’s an inconsistency here that makes things a bit uncertain.
In any case, we’ll likely find out if the drop is real or not fairly soon.
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