The recent MTG X Marvel Secret Lair sale was just as ridiculous as everyone was expecting. Between site crashes, wait times for multiple hours, a five-hour sellout, and many MTG players being left out of receiving the Secret Lairs that they wanted, a lot of hurt feelings can be felt. While the sale was an astounding success, many MTG players aren’t even remotely happy.
Unfortunately, the biggest problem with this Secret Lair sale, aside from the under-printed product, was that some bad actors discovered a way to jump the two-to-three-hour line. Able to purchase their Secret Lairs immediately, many MTG players who honestly lined up for the process may have had a product that was rightfully theirs stolen away.
The Line-Jumping Exploit
Revealed in the Reddit post above are multiple methods that many may have used to jump the multi-hour line to purchase MTG X Marvel products immediately. Being able to jump the line while others waited for hours is incredibly unfair, but not just because some bad actors were able to save some time.
On top of insanely long lineups, the MTG X Marvel Secret Lair also sold out incredibly quickly. It only took 4.5 hours for the entire thing to sell out completely, and many of the more popular Secret Lairs sold out before this. Add on the insanely long three-hour wait times for some MTG players who entered the queue minutes after the sale went live, and many players did not even have the items of their choice in their carts by the time they could make their purchases.
This, alone, really frustrated some players. Despite claiming an order for a specific product and joining the queue, players would get to checkout only to discover that everything had disappeared. When talking with Facebook user James Ness, just one example of many players who were affected by this, he had this to say:
“What bothers me more than anything is getting to the end of the line only to have nothing in my cart. What this tells me is I’ve taken my items off the shelf and then was moved into a line to cash out. I wasn’t allowed to look at my basket while waiting but they sold the items from my basket to someone ahead of me and don’t tell me. The presentation of that page in combination with them going to great lengths to assure the public they printed tons of product, really made it seem that as long as you got it I to your cart, you’d be able to cash out. That stings.”
Sadly, it is made clear by the Secret Lair site during the sales process that no one has any claim to product until they have cashed out for the cards of their choice. While this is an understandable decision, bad actors who found ways to jump the line really messed things up.
Now, any products that you’ve lined up with to check out can, essentially, be grabbed by someone who’s cutting the line. The very Secret Lair that you may have been waiting for could have been yours if people who used these exploits to cut the line hadn’t claimed them first.
Exploit Confirmation
While there are some claims from Reddit commenters that this line-jumping exploit worked, we talked with one player who decided to try the exploit for themselves. Dustin Lessak tried the exploit while waiting in the hours-long queue for a Storm Secret Lair on a separate computer. He confirmed to us that the exploit does indeed work, but he did not use it to actually purchase any product since he was already in queue:
“I can confirm it worked, I tried it on a separate computer while I was waiting on another, it skipped right past the queue, I didn’t use it after confirm as I felt it was dishonest”
Notably, there were two different methods for skipping the queue included in the Reddit thread above, and one of them was patched during the sale. This may have been related to the crash that occurred just minutes into the MTG X Marvel sale. Those technical difficulties froze the queue for about a half hour.
We do not support anyone attempting this line-jumping exploit. As of writing this article, the MTG X Marvel Secret Lairs have been long gone, and Wizards of the Coast is, hopefully, aware of what was going on. While the damage has likely already been done, all we can ask is that the Secret Lair team fixes this glitch so scalpers cannot take advantage of it during the Spongebob Secret Lair sale.
