It’s been an interesting few weeks for Magic: The Gathering’s Secret Lair initiative. After being promised two weeks ago, the Everyone’s Invited Secret Lair Commander deck has only just dropped today. On top of that, in a move nobody expected, a whole extra Superdrop has landed too. The Ultimate Pencil Superdrop has a typically nonsensical name, and a not-so-typical pricing structure. While it doesn’t have $60 foils like the Little Witch Secret Lair drop, it does have new Raised Foils at a whopping $100 a pop.
This is a pretty bold move for Wizards, and one that may well indicate a new direction for Secret Lair overall. It’s always been a premium product by virtue of secondary market scarcity, but now the price is edging upwards for first-hand sales as well. With Universes Beyond sets like Final fantasy climbing in price too, we could well be looking over the edge into an affordability abyss for MTG.
$100 Raised Foil Treatment In Secret Lair?!
This new Raised Foil treatment is a first for a Magic: The Gathering Secret Lair drop. We have seen Raised Foiling before in other products, such as the Phyrexian Oilslick cards, a few Big Score cards, and the anime alternate art cards from Bloomburrow. This is the first time, however, that it’s been an option for a Secret Lair.
The official announcement article for this Superdrop doesn’t give a ton of details on the new treatment. We know that it’s an option for the Everything Is On Fire and Vroooooommmmmm! drops (more on those later), but not much else. For Everything Is On Fire, the Raised Foil cards appear to have a golden hue to their text boxes. This isn’t a million miles away from Aetherdrift’s First-Place foils, just focused elsewhere on the card. Vroooooommmmmm!‘s cards look pretty much the same in Raised Foil, however, so it’s not a universal style choice.
Visuals aside, the most pertinent aspect of this new treatment is the price. Both drops where it’s an option are available for $29.99 normally, or $39.99 in foil. If you want the Raised Foil version, however, you’ll need to spend $100 per drop. Even by Secret Lair standards, $100 for five cards is pushing things quite a lot. It’s rare for a drop to be worth the money at $30, never mind more than three times that.
The Raised Foil multiplier, at least the few times we’ve seen it in the past, is quite powerful, mind you. The Big Score Raised Foils are the only real fair comparison right now, and each goes for at least twice as much as the regular Vault Frame version, with some going for a lot more than that.
Baffling Choices
The Raised Foil treatment could well make these Secret Lair drops worth it financially in the long run. That said, Wizards made some very strange choices when deciding which drops should use it.
Both Everything Is On Fire and Vroooooommmmmm! are competitively-focused drops first and foremost. The former, fully pictured in the above section, is packed full of Mono-Red Burn staples. Chain Lightning, Lava Spike, Skewer the Critics and Rift Bolt are all ways of dealing three damage for one mana. Dragon’s Rage Channeler is also excellent in such decks, cracking in for three in the air and filtering your draws. The total base financial value for all of these cards combined is just over $3. That doesn’t even touch the base $30 value, let alone $100. That Raised Foiling has a lot of work to do.
Vroooooommmmmm!, pictured above, isn’t much better. It actually feels like an extension of Everything Is On Fire, in a way, with its mix of aggressive red staples. Underworld Breach saves the drop with its still-respectable post-ban pricetag, but we’re still talking just over $10 of value overall. By normal Secret Lair metrics, both of these drops are complete failures. Anyone buying them is banking heavily on the Raised Foiling being popular enough to drive high demand.
On top of the obvious pricing issues, these drops are also weird choices because they’re competitively-focused. These cards are played most often in tournament formats, like Modern, Legacy, etc. Players who engage with these formats regularly tend to avoid foils, especially fancy foils like these, because they have the chance of ‘marking’ the cards due to weight or curling. There’s an argument that competitive staples will generate a higher Raised Foil markup, but the practical side of things could actually have the opposite effect.
A Dangerous Precedent
However things pan out, the fact that Wizards is charging $100 for a single Secret Lair drop at all is pretty worrying. In isolation it looks like just another experiment from a very experimental product line. In the full context of the time, however, it appears to be another step down a very predatory road.
Basically, the subtle creep of Magic: The Gathering prices over time is getting less and less subtle. The Little Witch Secret Lair drop is the best recent example, raising the price of a foil drop from $40 to $60 in one fell swoop. This new Superdrop appears to have reset foil prices to normal, but that might not have been the case if players hadn’t been so vocal about the change last week.
Even more worrying is the pricing of the upcoming Final Fantasy set. As soon as pre-orders went up, players were quick to criticize the jacked-up prices on all of the products. Play Boosters got a significant hike, and Commander precons/Collector Boosters were hit even harder. While Final Fantasy is a big name, this really shouldn’t be a premium set, given that it’s part of Standard.
That hasn’t stopped pre-orders from selling out pretty much everywhere, mind you, which is really the heart of the issue. Some players and collectors are clearly willing to pay those rates, which means they’re likely here to stay. The same goes for these new Raised Foils. If they sell out quickly, then they’ll probably become a regular Secret Lair fixture. The potential for a trend like this to raise prices across the board is concerning, even for those uninterested in Secret Lair.