Over the past week, spoilers for the new Secret Lair Commander precon deck have been slowly trickling out. Titled ’20 Ways To Win,’ this deck is all about alternate win conditions; an interesting theme to be sure, but one unlikely to have much competitive success. Following a similar theme, the spoilers for the deck so far have been intriguing but ultimately low-value cards. Today certainly hasn’t been any more encouraging in that regard. Now that Maze’s End is confirmed for this Secret Lair deck, we may not get the safety net of a juicy five-color mana base to salvage the drop’s value.
Maze’s End
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Card Text: This land enters tapped.
T: Add C.
3, Tap, Return this land to its owner’s hand: Search your library for a Gate card, put it onto the battlefield, then shuffle. If you control ten or more Gates with different names, you win the game.
Maze’s End was revealed today via the official Secret Lair website, as win con #18 – Gatecrasher. It’s one of the cards in the deck to receive new borderless artwork, which is admittedly very cute. In terms of value Maze’s End isn’t anything crazy, but it’s no slouch either. Copies currently go for around $5, and could easily climb higher with the card seeing testing in Standard. As always, the Secret Lair markup should apply to this version as well.
This solid price is down to the card’s fairly regular use in Commander. In the right deck, it’s one of the easier alternate win cons in Magic to fulfill. The fact that it occupies a land slot essentially makes it a ‘free’ addition to a lot of decks too. Of course, actually winning with the card requires a critical mass of Gates, which introduces some concerns about the quality of this deck’s mana base.
With this being a five-color deck, there was a real chance that the mana base could be stacked with valuable duals. Even mid-tier options like the Check Lands would be nice to have. Based on the inclusion of Maze’s End, however, it looks like Wizards is going down the budget route for this Secret Lair drop.
In order to actually enable Maze’s End, the deck will likely contain all 10 original Guildgates. These are all common, and incredibly cheap, cards. It’s possible that Wizards will choose to include spicier Gates like Talon Gates of Madara or Thran Portal instead, but I wouldn’t bet on it. Instead, this spoiler effectively serves as confirmation, if any were needed, that Wizards is planning to skimp on the mana base for yet another Commander precon here.
Mechanized Production
- Mana Value: 2UU
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Card Text: Enchant artifact you control.
At the beginning of your upkeep, create a token that’s a copy of enchanted artifact. Then if you control eight or more artifacts with the same name as one another, you win the game.
Bad news aside, the other spoiler we got for the ’20 Ways To Win’ deck today was a bit more interesting. Mechanized Production is a card that feels quite underpriced to me. It’s one of the more explosive and powerful alternate win cons in the game, and yet it costs less than $2 a copy. The secondary market is truly one of Magic’s great mysteries.
The reason Mechanized Production is so good in modern Magic is the proliferation of artifact tokens. Whether it’s Treasure, Food, or Blood, every set brings multiple new ways to create these tokens en masse. Because of this, it’s not difficult at all to set up an early win with Production in most pods. Sure it’s often telegraphed a full turn cycle in advance, but you can get around that by giving the card Flash. Both Vedalken Orrery and High Fae Trickster can help you out in that regard.
Even played fairly, Production can be a devastating value engine. Just slapping it onto a Karnstruct token will get you a terrifying, ever-scaling army turn after turn. You can also toss it on an Ichor Wellspring for a constant flow of card advantage. The potential here is basically endless and goes far beyond just winning the game in a single turn.
With this amount of utility, you can see why I think Production is currently underpriced. Granted it is very slow to get going, but it still seems like a slam dunk in any artifact deck running blue. This is a classic case of a good mechanical reprint, but not a good financial one. You’ll get a lot of use out of a Mechanized Production in your collection, but not nearly as much if you’re looking to flip or resell.
