Between The Hobbit prerelease, Star Trek spoilers, and Mystery Booster: Commander Edition reveals, this is an extraordinarily busy week for MTG. Despite players already feeling overloaded with new content, however, there’s somehow even more things to see. A new Hobbit Secret Lair was just revealed today, showcasing five new reprints with some particularly illegible artwork.
SLD x The Hobbit: Album Covers
Offering a strange fusion between The Hobbit and the metal band aesthetic, the Album Covers drop definitely has some striking visuals. It’s got some decent reprints, too, as Diabolic Intent sells for around $15.80 on average. Seeing play in roughly 372,000 different Commander decks, this card is a fantastic combo engine in cEDH and is well worth its strong price tag.
Past Diabolic Intent, secondary market values drop to the floor, but Mirkwood Bats and Dread Return do have some potential. As some of the best token and reanimator payoffs, respectively, existing premium printings for these cards hover around $6. Even though they’re strong cards, however, they remain poor reprints, offering a raw reprint value of $1.41 and $0.60, respectively.
Last, and unfortunately least, are Read the Bones and Defile, two black commons that really didn’t need a reprint. Offering some mediocre card advantage and selective removal, these cards are popular in Mono-Black Commander decks, but are quickly power-crept in other colors. Offering reprint values of $0.21 and $1.50, both of these cards already have Secret Lair printings that fetch $5.40 and $4.41.
Altogether, Album Covers’ total reprint value is $19.52, which is quite shy of the typical $29.99 asking price for nonfoil Secret Lairs. That puts the value of this Lair in its art, which, sadly, is being received rather poorly. The Dread Return, in particular, is extremely illegible, giving this Secret Lair a bad first impression. Throw in metal posters not feeling like The Hobbit, and many players may be staying away from this one.
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