Despite the massive growth in Wizards of the Coast’s Secret Lair sub-brand, the growing pains that came with it are startlingly obvious. While drops are selling incredibly well, trying to participate in their more popular sales as a customer is not an enjoyable experience. Worse yet, many of Secret Lair’s most popular items sell out before a majority of players even get the chance to grab them, forcing them to pay massive scalper premiums.
The products themselves, however, are generally of decent quality. More often than not, these Secret Lairs deliver exactly what they promise, throwing in a little bit of gambling for good measure. Sadly, the latest Secret Lair product from Wizards of the Coast, while a conceptual success, has missed the mark. Players are complaining en masse regarding disappointing foil quality.
Alien Auroras Foil Quality Disappointment
Secret Lairs have a cursed history with foil quality. Thanks to past precedent, playing foil Secret Lair cards in a sanctioned tournament setting is largely frowned upon. Older SLDs have a bad track record for creating marked cards, causing disqualifications for players. This is true for all foils, but Secret Lairs, in particular, seem to cause problems.
While players don’t have to worry as much about Pringle-like foils anymore, the Alien Auroras Secret Lair has received a ton of complaints for a different reason. Intended to upgrade the World Shaper precon, Alien Auroras came in two different variants: non-foil and Galaxy foil.
These foils are a bit more special than traditional foil MTG cards, featuring a bunch of dots within the foiling that are beautiful in the right lighting. Of course, this also means that the Galaxy Foil upgrade is a bit more expensive than usual, costing $20 more than the non-foil variant instead of the $10 we usually see between foil and non-foil bundle choices.
Unfortunately, according to feedback from multiple players, the Galaxy Foiling on certain Alien Auroras Secret Lair cards is of very poor quality. While Crucible of Worlds, the chase card of the Lair, and Zuran Orb are appropriately sparkly, the other three cards seem to appear like traditional foil cards to the majority of players.
Redditor zorak_245 was one of the many to complain about this. To date, there are dozens of posts on various subreddits complaining about a lack of Galaxy Foiling on three of the Alien Auroras cards. Some even complain about the sister Featuring: Deathburger Secret Lair’s Galaxy Foil quality as well, but from what we’ve seen, Alien Auroras is far worse.
Very Difficult to See
While there are plenty of complaints in regards to the recent Chaos Vault Secret Lair foil quality, there are also a lot of posts demonstrating that all of these cards are, indeed, Galaxy Foil. This post showcases all of the Galaxy Foiling to the Alien Auroras and Featuring: Deathberger Secret Lair cards under a flashlight. That said, the same poster also mentions that “in ambient lighting it is barely visible in the background.”
This appears to be due to a printing issue pointed out in a different post. Redditor Neat-Veterinarian pointed out that the Galaxy Foiling has, basically, been applied to the card out of order. For the problematic cards, darker ink colors are covering a lot of the Galaxy Foiling. This makes it significantly harder to see without strong lighting, which is the major issue that players have with the product. To illustrate the point, one Redditor provided a comparison between the Alien Auroras Reprocess and a Galaxy Foil Sol Ring from a past Secret Lair. The results speak for themselves.
A lot of MTG players are asking for replacements for their lackluster Galaxy Foil cards, but the requests seem to be so widespread that they may be impossible to actually redeem. If posts discussing poor Galaxy Foil quality are overrunning subreddits, customer service is likely going to be a lot worse.
Hopefully, players’ complaints will cause Wizards of the Coast to take action on future products, making sure that the quality of the foiling is what players are expecting. Wizards of the Coast has had a poor track record with foil quality, but they’ve also shown very clear improvement when players complained loudly enough. Ironically, if Wizards of the Coast decided to release Alien Auroras as a traditional foil Secret Lair, there wouldn’t have been any problems.
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