As of today, we’re only one week out from the official debut stream for Tarkir: Dragonstorm, the next mainline Magic: The Gathering set. To help pass the time between now and then, it seems Wizards has decided to stuff this week with Secret Lair goodness. Yesterday saw a trio of Spongebob Squarepants Secret Lairs revealed. Today, a new Secret Lair tease hints at some very spicy MTG reprints.
This tease comes in the form of a new banner image on the Secret Lair website. Labeled ‘Our Boss is on Vacation,’ this image includes snippets from a number of different cards. These cards, presumably, will be in drops in the upcoming Superdrop that the Spongebob Lairs will be part of. In addition, some more subtle hints imply big reprints are on the horizon.
Deadeye Navigator
- Mana Value: 4UU
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Creature – Spirit
- Stats: 5/5
- Card Text: Soulbond (You may pair this creature with another unpaired creature when either enters. They remain paired for as long as you control both of them.)
As long as Deadeye Navigator is paired with another creature, each of those creatures has “1U: Exile this creature, then return it to the battlefield under your control.”
Kicking things off we have Deadeye Navigator. This card can be seen in the top-left corner of the Secret Lair teaser on the website. The whole card isn’t visible, but we can see enough to discern quite a lot about it. The card uses a colorful neon art style and reimagines the Navigator as a kind of ghostly pirate, complete with a bird familiar. Presumably, this is one card in a wider neon-colored drop, perhaps with a secondary pirate theme.
As a reprint, Deadeye Navigator isn’t super exciting. While older printings go for $5-7, which is respectable, the recent reprint in Innistrad Remastered can be had for as little as $2. It’s still a great Commander card, mind you, enabling all manner of blink shenanigans and even some infinite combo loops. It’s not a card you’ll mind having a blinged-out version of, in other words, but it’s also not going to carry a drop value-wise. Hopefully, the rest of the neon art drop steps things up a bit.
Aesi, Tyrant Of Gyre Strait
- Mana Value: 4GU
- Rarity: Mythic Rare
- Type: Legendary Creature – Serpent
- Stats: 5/5
- Card Text: You may play an additional land on each of your turns.
Landfall — Whenever a land you control enters, you may draw a card.
The second MTG card revealed in the new Secret Lair teaser is Aesi, Tyrant of Gyre Strait. The art on this one looks to lean more towards the experimental side of Secret Lair design. The fragment of the card we can see shows a white-bordered photo with “Most likely to become” written under it. This implies a kind of yearbook theme for the drop, which is an interesting direction to take. The photo itself also seems to use a cartoony art style, so the drop could be all about taking fearsome Magic: The Gathering monsters and showing us their old yearbook photos. There’s a lot of comedic potential there, to be sure.
Value-wise Aesi is a much better hit than Deadeye Navigator. The card goes for $9-11 right now depending on printing, which is solid for one card in a (presumably) four-to-five-card drop. This price is well-deserved, too: Aesi is an amazing Landfall Commander, and one of the better generically good Simic Commanders in general. It lets you play extra lands and rewards you with extra cards for doing so, what’s not to love? Some criticize Aesi’s design for encouraging boring deck construction and gameplay, but it’s undeniably a very powerful card.
Slime Against Humanity?
- Mana Value: 2G
- Rarity: Common
- Type: Sorcery
- Card Text: Create a 0/0 green Ooze creature token with trample. Put X +1/+1 counters on it, where X is two plus the total number of cards you own in exile and in your graveyard that are Oozes or are named Slime Against Humanity.
A deck can have any number of cards named Slime Against Humanity.
From here, things get a bit more speculative. The last two cards we’ll be looking at aren’t confirmed in the same way that those above are. That said, there are strong hints that we’ll be seeing them in the upcoming Superdrop.
We’ll start with Slime Against Humanity. This MTG card is clearly visible to the right of the central post-it note in the new Secret Lair teaser. What’s interesting is that it appears to be the original Murders at Karlov Manor printing of the card, rather than a new Secret Lair variant. The original set symbol is clearly visible, and the card doesn’t appear to feature any kind of Borderless art.
There are a few possibilities about what this may mean. This could just be a mistake, and the image should’ve featured a new printing of Slime but didn’t. It could be teasing an unusual drop with a large number of original-print copies of Slime included, which would be a departure from the Secret Lair norm but also a product many players would buy. It’s a popular card, after all, selling for around $2 right now despite being a mere common.
Alternatively, this could just be a bit of background dressing. The image is set up to show a messy desk, and this card could just be a bit of clutter used to build things up. Only time will tell.
Sensei’s Divining Top?!
- Mana Value: 1
- Rarity: Rare
- Type: Artifact
- Card Text: 1: Look at the top three cards of your library, then put them back in any order.
Tap: Draw a card, then put this artifact on top of its owner’s library.
Last but certainly not least, this Secret Lair teaser also hints at the return of a true MTG icon. In the lower-right corner, a post-it note with ‘Reprint Sensei’s Divining Top’ written on it is clearly visible. If this is a serious part of the teaser, then it’s seriously exciting.
Sensei’s Divining Top is a legendarily powerful artifact, so much so that it’s actually banned in both Modern and Legacy. The card selection and deck manipulation it offers are simply that good. It’s also notorious for slowing games down to a crawl, which has a negative impact on tournament play. You can still make great use of the card in Commander, though your pod won’t thank you if you spend half the game rearranging your top three.
If Top is coming back in a Secret Lair drop, that’s great news. The card is currently sitting in the $20-30 range despite multiple reprints, so this could help make the card more accessible. While a reprint is welcome, there’s no guarantee it will happen. Much like Slime Against Humanity, we’ll just have to see what gets revealed in the coming days.
For now, all we have to go on is the post-it note, with no card image or anything else. While it would certainly fit with the flavor of ‘Our Boss is on Vacation,’ since that would allow for pricey reprints flavor-wise, it’s impossible to say whether this is a serious hint or just a small joke at the moment. Based on past Secret Lair reveal schedules, we’ll likely find out at some point this week.
