Since its introduction, Wizards’ Chaos Vault program has very much lived up to its name. We’ve seen drops for $1, weirdly erotic lands, and even a fair few non-MTG products. Now, Wizards has embarked on its latest experiment by selling one drop at seven different price points. Unsurprisingly, the cheapest variant of this drop has already sold out, and others aren’t hanging around either.
MTG Prints Charming
As far as Secret Lair drops go, the Printing Charming drop is fairly run-of-the-mill. Containing four cards, in either foil or non-foil, there’s nothing weird at first glance. This drop even continues the running trend of having gorgeous art but truly awful reprint value. At best, the raw reprint value of this entire Chaos Vault drop is just $5.
While this drop is another in a long line of value duds, it does at least contain some powerful cards. Dryad Arbor, for instance, is a staple in Commander that sees play in almost 140,000 decks. This card is also fairly popular in Modern, too, although playing Secret Lair cards is dubious there.
Selling For $1.42 on average, Dryad Arbor is the second most expensive card in this drop behind Nature’s Lore. This classic ramp spell is similarly a staple in Commander, seeing play in over 1.14 million Commander decks. Despite this remarkable play rate, frequent reprints have pushed the price of Nature’s Lore down to just $2.50.
After these two cards, values fall off considerably, as Skyshroud Claim is the next most expensive card at $0.78. Offering a decent ramp for four mana, this card is yet another green-aligned Commander staple. The same is also true for Wood Elves, which sells for around $0.25 on average.
Notably, while the individual card values are poor for this entire drop, since each card is a staple, there could be strong secondary market demand. While it’s impossible to predict just how expensive each card might be, there’s definitely potential here.
Pay Almost What You Want
The big twist with this new Secret Lair Chaos Vault Drop is that you can pick your price point. Or at least you could do, when this drop first went live. Before things started selling out, Wizards offered this drop at seven different price points. Ranging between $9.99 and $49.99, this is certainly an interesting, frustrating experiment.
Sadly, unlike many other “pay what you want” distribution models, this Chaos Vault drop is a limited-run release. Thanks to this, the $9.99 non-foil variant sold out almost instantly. The same also happened to the cheapest foil version, which was priced at $19.99.
Since then, four other price points have also sold out, including the most expensive foil and non-foil versions. Priced at $49.99 and $39.99, respectively, it’s bizarre that these versions have sold out so quickly, since spending more means nothing.
When announcing this Chaos Vault drop, Wizards made it clear that every version of this drop is identical. With no extra cards or bonus cards available for spending more money, there’s seemingly no incentive to pay more. Usually, paying more through a company like Humble Bundle would at least mean you’re supporting charities or developers more, but here it’s just lining Wizards’ pockets.
Currently, the cheapest available version of the Prints Charming Chaos Vault drop is priced at $29.99. Alternatively, the cheapest foil version of this drop is selling for $39.99. Notably, these prices are the usual price for a Secret Lair drop when released normally.
“Professional Curiosity”
In the blurb of this Chaos Vault drop, Wizards explains that this unusual pricing strategy is “very much on purpose.” Stating it’s something that Wizards is “exploring here” sounds like this is specifically testing how much people will pay for a drop. To say this is concerning would be putting it lightly, as it definitely makes another price hike seem inevitable.
Hopefully, Wizards won’t just push prices up with no change to the current Secret Lair system. At long last, it finally felt like Wizards cracked the code with the Secret Lair x Fallout Superdrop, as it wasn’t needlessly scarce. That said, there’s still room for improvement as we don’t yet have the hybrid printing model.
Ideally, this test could show Wizards that players don’t mind paying a little bit more to buy a drop after the initial sales rush. Having pre-printed limited-run drops available for $30 at launch, and then $35 as print-to-demand, doesn’t feel unreasonable. Whether or not this is what Wizards is experimenting with here, however, is unclear.
Ultimately, since there’s no telling what Wizards is up to, we just have to hope that things won’t suddenly get more expensive. Unfortunately, considering many foil drops are already selling for significantly more than they used to, I’m not optimistic about this. The fact that the most expensive drops were some of the first to sell out definitely doesn’t help things.
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