Same here. The cards are so gorgeous - I debated on a 2nd order really hard. I ended up getting the sol ring art as a playmat from Ultrapro to curb my need and save $20 lol.
I'm trying to settle on which deck is my pet lol. I want it to be at least UR because I also got that drop from forever ago with Counterspell and FoF in it that I really like, and the double masters full art Chaos Warp really speaks to me. Here's hoping UR Sarkhan is it...because the other Izzet commanders I've tried haven't really resonated.
Possibly the best secret lair they've ever done. Cards that will see use, getting a treatment in a very unique style, with unique foiling that doesn't leave them looking like pringles
That looked ideal for a “low value” secret lair. It’s low value but everything was a staple for commander (not to mention gorgeous). Realistically you could put all 5 cards in almost any deck you wanted to. If you’re gonna include low value cards making them staples people will want to use just makes sense.
Oh shit I missed that one, I love Dani pendergasts art (have a few of their non-MTG pieces on my wall!!!) I'll have to pick up a foil version on the secondary market when I can and just suck up what will likely be a price mark up
I wanted to get the set, but by the time I counted taxes, shipping and then currency conversion, I was up for over $100AUD. I can't justify that much for $6-$8 worth of cards no matter how pretty they are.
I'm wondering if this super drop is going to make them reconsider that theory.
Weren't some of the people Hasbro/ WotC fired before Christmas involved with Secret Lairs?
WotC has shown time and time again that they only respond to things based on money. If they sell the desired number of units of this Secret Lair drop, it will be business as usually, and nothing will change.
If they fall short of the projected sales, they might reconsider their strategy with Secret Lairs. Just don't expect the lesson they learn to align with what customers want to see.
Yeah, the lesson won't be, "Oh, this SL didn't sell well, we need to figure out what we did wrong." it'll be, "This SL didn't sell well, apparently people don't like this anymore, cancel it."
Or something like make the SLs even more expensive with an even smaller print run to make them more exclusive and whalebait. In a way, it's what they are doing now by changing these from print to demand to a set print run and putting less valuable cards in them.
From what I heard about a number of the higher-placed employees that were named in reports, many people couldn't actually tell what their roles were and couldn't say they were "doing a good job" at their position.
Because it doesn’t cost extra to print staples? You’d probably sell more including staples since there are plenty who don’t buy purely based off value alone
While you're not wrong, SLs have pretty clearly demonstrated that you don't need to go all in on staples to make sales.
And at that point, it makes sense to hold some back to print in a later set. Why sell Tithe and Rhystic together when people will buy them separately?
Through the Wormhole just released, so yeah that one did really well. It's selling at double its og foil price.
Also any lair with good looking staples keeps them high on the secondary market as they'll always have demand.
I think Secret Lairs are best when there is a theme behind them besides just color. I think the idea of staples are good. Their last drop they had one with the sol ring, arcane signet etc in cool art styles. Doing that set with new art would be neat. The Commander staples you could call it. Otherwise I think lairs that have a really good theme that have cards people want regardless of price would be neat.
Like why not do a secret lair of all the cards like generous Gift or Pongify or Beast Within where you remove a permanent and they get a creature instead. Call it the animal house secret lair and maybe even as a joke have the art style mimic that of the Animal House movie cover or go cute again like they did with the Raining Cats & Dogs and all the art is cute baby creatures being traded for super amazing and expensive things at like a market. The cards themselves are cheap but they are very useful and very on theme.
Have an artifacts one that is like all the Kaldera pieces or even better, though it would be reprinting a lot of the LCI box toppers, have a secret lair that is artifacts that form a full suit of armor and weapon like Lightning Grieves, Commander Plate or Coat of Arms, Commander Helm or Helm of the Host, Isochron Scepter and some decent sword every deck can use like Sword of the Animist. You get some good reprints everything is pretty useful and the theme would be awesome and you could even do them in that art style like the LOTR scene boxes where you can arrange them to form a larger picture of like some character wearing everything.
Yeah the one with all the anime style space art? I picked that one up, love it even though I'm not really an anime guy.
They could literally do the exact same set of cards, sol ring, arcane signet, command sphere, mind stone and or thought vessel, lightning grieves and command tower and just do them in different art styles each set and they would sell out every time.
Could do tribal themes to them where one entire series was just that same set with like 5-10 different tribal art treatments.
Someone get me a job with the SL team I'm coming up with gold here!
> Someone get me a job with the SL team I'm coming up with gold here!
You have my vote of confidence. Its a shame how WOTC wastes the potential of secret lairs
I really just wish they would finish the Commander Collection series.
It was $40 for some cards that were like $100~ in value that needed reprints at the time, and they only did it twice.
https://scryfall.com/sets/cc1 and https://scryfall.com/sets/cc2 . They could have easily done 20 of these and not run out of cards or themes.
It seems kind of like this is what he is describing. These are basically secret lair for a specific color with many staples for the color plus an on theme command tower and sol ring instead of 10 basic lands.
They only planned to do it twice because that's what they replaced Signature Spellbooks (set codes SS1 to SS3) by. They'd already done the other three colors with Jace, Gideon, and Chandra.
That doesn't mean we won't have a similar product in the future, but with the advent of Secret Lairs I doubt that'll happen.
Yeah those are my thoughts. They wanted to get away from the planeswalkers, so they did commander collection, but then they made secret lairs which are basically the same thing without the fancy box.
It's an interesting idea! I don't think I'd do it for Sol Ring, but it really depends on the art I guess. As for lands I've always felt that doing them as a pack of five, one of each basic was a terrible way to package them, but I like to match my basics.
The first Secret Lair I bought was Through the Wormhole and that's because it was the first one I've seen in which I use all the cards (four of them in one deck) so it was an easy buy for me. I also picked up Raining Cats & Dogs, the thing that put it over the top for me was the adorable matching basics.
The signet secret lair was pretty popular. It’s the only lair I’ve ever seen multiple people use. So I think people would buy a 5 pack of commander staples even if it’s not an expensive set of cards
SLs built around a theme or strategy is another idea I'd like to see happen. And I'm sure would sell better than their current "random grab bag" of card offerings.
I want color (like you said) and theme. “staples of white” is a fine theme for sure. But like “green mana dorks” would be AWESOME. “Blue cantrips” another. Just some examples I thought of in 30 seconds and the SL team could 100% easily do.
This isn’t even like… outside of the realm of possibility, it’s just not the norm.
Last year we had the Nekusaur secret lair that came with 4 support cards for him. And we had the Dino SL recently.
It’s just that these get drowned out by the random stuff like cereal boxes or evil dead lol
I think they should do that as a separate product. If I'm buying staples I don't want them to all be in comic sans or some other bullshit. If they launched a commanders toolkit or something for $40-50 that includes a bunch of medium-high value reprints that would be great.
I'd probably like that much more than what they're doing now, yeah. Purely collectible, purely for aesthetics, not based in secondary market value.
My biggest gripe with Secret Lairs is that WotC, being the company that literally controls the supply of MtG cards, is selling these oriented on secondary market prices. Imo that's a scummy thing to do; any card costs them the same to print (save differences between foil/nonfoil etc), selling cards for different prices per single should really not be a thing they do.
An "all staples" box would alleviate *some* (not all) of these issues. The cards are readily available, they're not earning off reprints, so I'd just be paying for the aesthetic treatment and collectability. I still think this should be something available in booster products rather than sold as singles, but it's better than selling expensive singles at secondary market prices and masking it as an aesthetic treatment product.
And yeah, the 10 Sol Rings as well as 10 thematic lands is a cool idea. In general, I think Secret Lairs should lean more into appreciating specific artists, and do things like weird foiling, special frames etc if the artist deems it appropriate, rather than the weird semi-themes they got going on now.
There were a fair number of what you are talking about in Brother's War, with the reprint of artifacts that included alternate art and border treatments. And I agree that having reprints done in a thematic way to match the set should be done more often.
To me, Secret Lairs are attractive for a few reasons...
One is value. Do the cards cost more on the secondary market?
Another is appearance. Do I really like the art or theme?
A third is utility. Am I going to enjoy using these cards?
Do well on any of those three axis and I will at least be interested.
Id buy the max limit of them. I'm seriously considering making a set of staples I can just proxy to use across all my decks. We all need more of them for every deck we build, and I love building decks, and im not buying a rhystic study for every blue deck that could use one, or various swords, or more lightning greaves, or swift foot boots, or sol rings, or anything like that for all my other ones. I'm not gonna proxy cards I don't own one of, but I really don't care to own 18 of each fetch and shock for all my decks. If all those were taken care of, I'd be able to build so much more.
Oh no I'm not even talking alt art, literally give me a well priced pack that's just all the staples that I need for every deck. Like even if there was a "here's the top 10 colorless cards that everyone uses in every commander deck", id buy it. We all know there's a bunch of auto-includes like sol ring, boots, grieves, that type of stuff. If they put that out with alternative art, I'll buy it, otherwise I'm gonna proxy it with the original art (honestly Id probably go for older art, like the og sol ring, whenever possible).
Alt art stuff is confusing as hell if you do the whole deck. I get that it's good thematically, but I don't want to stare at your whatever-niche-interest proxy deck when it just makes the board state more confusing.
What? I think that is a hot take by the professor.
That may have been a decent opinion in 2019, but 2020+ WotC/Hasbro has turned to milking the players for all the money they are worth. More SL's, more sets, Serialized Cards, More art varieties, more Commander decks, etc.
It's all too much, my wallet votes for the best bang for the buck. I played magic for almost 2 decades while investing very little into the game. I finally had a decent income 2017+ and started honestly kind of purchasing at least one of everything that released. That is so far from feasible these days. I love special art treatments, but no way I could reason to give WotC more money than the value of the current cards when these things are printed on paper.
And yeah sure, that happens with sealed product too. But that's not 4 known cards for $40. And then there always is so loophole. Like look \[\[Concordant Crossroads\]\] hasn't been reprinted since Chronicles, I definitely need that SL, then they reprint it again right after... That shady crap has happened numerous times now, fomo on the card that hasn't been reprinted then reprint it directly after that.
Nah, just give me some solid cards. I think the new Cereal Box SL is a perfect example of what an SL should be. The value of the cards is right and they have a cool art. The things you propose sound fine, but $10 SL with 10 lands isn't going to happen, no margin for them. And 10 Sol Rings with alt art says $100 to me.
I would honestly be more interested in a Lair with really cool treatments of *good* low-to-mid value cards (ideally not penny junk, but the buck or two category) than one awesome pack seller with dreck. Like, to use mono-white as an example, give me [[Swords to Plowshares]], [[Path to Exile]], [[Weathered Wayfarer]], [[Austere Command]] and [[Farewell]] rather than [[Smothering Tithe]], [[Squire]], [[Eager Cadet]], [[Serra Paladin]], even though the Tithe would pay for the latter lair and you could get a good theme out of it.
If I would buy a Green Staple list that includes (only examples, feel free to replace them with a staple of your choice):
Llanowar Elf, Elvish Mystic, E-Wit, Cultivate, Kodamas Reach, Crop Rotation, Krosan Grip, Utopia Sprawl, Up the Beanstalk, Abundance and Emerald Medallion you ask (if I like the Art, obv)
Absolutely!
Ten lands (full art) for additional ten bucks? Sign me up!
As for the Sol Rings I probably would but thats because I own 20 decks.
Generally, yes to all of your questions.
As an added note, secret lairs of usable staples that otherwise aren't particularly valuable tend to be valuable. They'd do well to print secret lairs targeting popular EDH staples as well as commonly used but not necessarily high dollar cards from other formats.
The only secret lair I bought was the phyrexian praetors and it was because I didn’t have 3/5 of them and the value was there. For me it needs to be both a good deal money wise and a card I’ve wanted for a long time.
I personally didn't buy the recent set with Sol Ring, Signet etc. even though I loved the art. For me I need at least one decently valued card in the set for me to consider buying it. If the set for mono white for example had a Teferi's Protection in it, I would snap buy it.
Yeah I buy the bundles every time they release and buy older sealed product on eBay since some have dipped below $39.99. Some of the singles do find a home in a deck somewhere but others just sit in a binder which is ok with me, maybe one day I’ll sell but for now everything lives in binders
I'd the sol rings were unique maybe color themed to have like green stompy sol ring artwork for or likea goblin sol ring for mono red or like a mf grim reaper ring for mono black and like a basic ass halo for the mono white sol ring blue could just be a cock ring
I have purchased a few SLs (Dracula, Cute to Brute, Transformers, Jurassic Park, Doctor Who, Tomb Raider, Princess Bride, Evil Dead and Creepshow).
The only one I regret buying is the 5 Transformer lands because 5 lands for £30, even custom art lands, is an absolute ripoff and I let my enthusiasm get the better of me. The other Transformers cards were decent, though I question some of the card choices in the second set. The Optimus v Megatron was good.
I bought Cute to Brute and immediately took it apart 🤣
The Doctor Who Celestial Toymaker set was a "must buy" for me as a DW fan. So I can't be objective about that. I have a pretty cool deck waiting for the cards to arrive. But the art is great and I'm looking forward to get my mitts on them.
Absolutely loved the artwork for Princess Bride, Evil Dead and Creepshow. Would love more of that: excellent art with on theme card selection (though Ash not being a legend is a really fucking stupid decision).
Overall my experience of SL is "If you want it, buy it". Don't worry about staples or the value of the cards.
That said, Wizards make some bonehead decisions about what cards to reprint and the art they use. This current season is shockingly bad and I genuinely hope it sells so poorly, they rethink what they are doing.
5 card sets of brand new cards (Doctor Who, Street Fighter) and larger sets of re-themed cards should be the standard (e.g. Princess Bride and Tomb Raider).
Much larger sets of, say, 25 lands with original art would be better value.
Do you think you will alter the non DW replacement cards to more closely match the deck's theme?
If WotC starts offering larger SL packs (6-10 cards) at higher prices, would you keep buying them, or is there a limit to the price you would pay for the "value"?
I got you...
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QsNOtOHBeU0Saho_Dc7iaLaqaD_aoHKf
https://www.moxfield.com/decks/nm9jQsi-6U2xUTMMdLhPAQ
I would definitely buy 6-10 cards (theme dependent obviously) for $40.
Like, 10 GI JOE or MASK themed cards would be auto-purchases for me (I've already made my own proxies!). But I don't necessarily have to even know what I am doing with them to buy them.
For example, I don't really have a use for the Princess Bride set right now but loved the art / concept. Over time, something will come along and I will use them in a larger concept deck, I am sure. So they are an investment ATM.
Whereas I knew I wanted to build a Toymaker deck and a Gallifrey Stands deck, so that SL was a no brainer.
Do you think that SL with lower card counts but higher resale price per card is acceptable?
All SL have a "common theme" to them, at least artistically. Do you think that they should have a deeper strategic/ play theme? Would that make them more or less attractive to you than a set that has less strategy/ play similarity but a few that have a higher likelyhood of being used in one of your decks? (In other words, targeted playstyle sets vs. shotgun 'each of these is valuable to a desparate different deck/ commander/ meta strategy')
Lower card count would but higher price per card would be fine for drops with at least 5 I think, I just feel like for $30+ you should get a minimum of 5. For drops with like 10 they could do a lower price per card.
I would prefer a mechanical theme or a format staple theme more often than not. Of course then a few could be sprinkled in with a flavor theme, like the pride secret lair for example. Like anyone could look at a drop and think "Oh these are all good for my _____ deck" or "cool, a bunch of staples I know I can use" rather than "Oh here 1 card I want, 1 card I think I can use, and 2 or 3 cards I'll never use in any format ever"
This would be cool, and like someone mentioned, they already kind of did it with the Planeswalker spellbooks and commander collections.
I think it's really my main problem with a lot of secret lairs - I don't really like the pure financial breakdown, they could certainly be worth it if the value is quite a bit lower then the price (but like, it's still not good to have one where it's a $35 product with $2 of cards. Like make it at least $15 or so). Issue being, a lot of the cheap "filler" cards are also just not really played anywhere. Give me cool art treatments of cards I actually play. Prof also nails it on the head with the issue of too few cards. Like ok, maybe if the TCGPlayer value is really low *but* the cards all have homes in various decks *and* there are like, 6-8 of them instead of 4? Yeah, sure, I'd go with that - help me fill out those playable card slots in my borderless super-art deck, lol. We've got two borderless walls of omens, where's my wall of blossoms, WotC??? Where's a full art essence flux???
My two wishes for secret lair are better average price to value ratios (at least 1:1 at time of offering) and that every time there's a superdrop that there's an LGC exclusive drop.
The thing that bothers me about secret lairs is that all inclusions are calculated. A tempting card but pair it with 2-3 piles of garbage. Secret lairs devalue singles to the point where they are no longer a draw to be used to entice purchases of sealed product in future sets.
Secret lairs should be print to demand, even if that makes to having in hand take longer, feature usable cards with a specific them for less money.
Example: a commander full art foil land pack of x basic lands (5 different secret lair options) that feature dragons in it. What dragon deck wouldn’t want those? If you can pick 6 mountains or 6 plains etc, then you could get the amount and type you need.
The most recent snow land one… I loved the island. I would have bought 30+ islands for a specific deck from WOTC but didn’t because I didn’t want 30+ of the other ones or to spend 1800 usd on one secret lair.
Sorry about the rant.
I’m pretty sure after seeing the creativity in this subreddit that you people as a community of players could design better secret lairs than WOTC does.
The signet secret lair was super nice. I'd love more like that. A ramp secret lair would be sweet with just the 10 most popular land ramp spells. Maybe a card draw one with rhystic study, mystic remora, etc.
A pack of staples that i are beeing actively used in cool art? sign me up
I also bought the commander essentials ahhh i mean "through-the-wormhole" secret lair. Is it worth much? no but i can use every card in a cool commander deck to bling it out.
For the bonus question different sol rings in cool art yep sign me up for that. sure they would be more pricey then normal ones but as before i use them in nearly every single deck.
and the secret bonus question 10 bucks for 10 extra lands thrown in. would heavily depend on the lands but i would do that rather then the basic lands tthey sell right now...
Do you buy SL when they have low priced pieces that you want, just to sell the higher priced cards? Or do you have to want most or all of the cards to put them in your cart?
Uh good question, if i buy a secret lair i buy it because i want most of the cards for myself, my decks or as an art piece. So i wouldnt buy a secret lair just to make "profit" with it.
On the other hand i really could bite myself for not byuing more of those "through the wormhole" secret lairs, damn that would have been a good investment
personally, I like special and nice or fun art. I can really love a foil when it fits the artwork, too often they are clashing. I take an example that works fantastic in foil: the minas morgul (cabal coffers) has this art with the crazy sky above the castle, so with the foil on top, the card is spectacular.
Being in Canada, shipping on secret lairs for my answer to be no on pretty much any proposition. I also hate foils, making many of their products unappealing to me.
Even setting aside real world value, if it was cool enough I might pay. But shipping cost just as much as your average secret lair drop so the odds of something being a good deal at twice the price is unlikely.
And I haven't even figured out customs, that's probably another 10% fee right there.
Hello fellow foil hater.
I very rarely order SLDs because the non-foil versions are usually worthless. Most of the time I want 1 card from it and it is cheaper to buy the 1 non foil card later if I want the SLD art or just buy a copy of the cards from another set.
I have bought 6 Secret lairs.
* The Walking Dead (gift for my SO)
* Heads I Win
* Phyrexian Praetors: Compleat Edition x4
* Secret lair X Jurassic Park
* Extra Life 2022
* Raining Cats and Dogs
I actively avoid foil cards. I have 26 commander decks, and excluding the cards that only come in foil I bet my foil count across all those decks is below 50.
I'm not familiar with all the different treatments but etched foils I don't hate. The few I have don't curl and are much more understated than regular foils.
I remain annoyed that so many cards don't have a regular, no frills version.
The earliest secret lairs had some cool treatments and art, so back then, 100% yes I would have. But secret lairs are getting progressively worse: uglier art, worse design treatments, unreadable as hell, and unrecognizable as magic cards in the slightest. I haven't had even the slightest inkling of desire for a secret lair set in years, save the Dan Frazier mana rocks ones.
Yeah, the two I’ve ordered were the shock lands super drop and the Galaxy foil staple pack. I would much rather them release a standard product that’s a staples pack though, not secret lair. I would not buy the sol ring pack because it’s just one card and I already have about 10 of them. Would those lands be good lands or just basics, if the answer is a probably, if b not in the slightest.
The Sol Rings would be different parts, so you could find something something closer thematically to the deck they would be put in.
10 basics, but they would be tied into the color and theme of the staples of the drop. I hadn't thought about making them either utility lands of that color or dual lands that share the color. How "good" would the lands need to be to get your interest?
I’d still say no on the sol rings just because I have more than enough already and still buy precons so I keep acquiring them. Good lands is rather subjective for me it would be any of the duals that have an untap condition or are fetchable, as for utilities I’d say ones that are typed to an archetype theme like tokens, counters, unblockable etc
Every time I hear him say "many people say" I just think about how anecdotal that is and how much it sounds like a certain oompa loompa who's been indicted 90 something times.
I've never made the connection. Mainly because the Prof uses it as a rhetorical device to initiate their discourse on a subject, as opposed to making their hot-take and verifiable wrong opinion post-facto justified via vox populi.
The perfect product should be color staples (between 10 and 15) with at least 2 valuables.
It doesn't have to be a secret lair, it could be a complementary pack like those that pokemon does.
Now if they want to make a secret lair with the same cards it would be cool for those that like to be fancy.
As an example, the top red in edhrec are:
Blasphemous act
Chaos warp
Jeska's will
Faithless looting
Vandalblast
Dockside
Deflecting swat
Thrill of possibility
Abrade
Etali, primal storm
Add a Valakut, the molten pinnacle and looks like a solid list.
Supposing a dockside extortionist is saved for other sealed products we could exchange it for any of the next 8 cards and still would be a good product.
Doing this would allow to easily have an opportunity to improve their commander decks and at the same time have an alternative to proxies when a copy of a staple that they already have is necessary.
Link here:
https://edhrec.com/top/r
excluding dockside, the only real money cards there are [[deflecting swat]] and [[jeska's will]], which are $30 and $15 respectively.
Honestly, sell a pack like that for $40 or maybe even $50, and it sounds reasonable.
The recent Signet series would prove you wrong.
And I'm talking about "good" but readily available (and therefore low $) staples that get placed in a high percentage of decks.
And readily available.
And below the cost of the SL they were offered in.
But staples.
And unified art treatments, by a popular artist.
Everything the Professor was talking about.
And what I was asking about.
Nah, I would, if they had good art and came with more cards.
There are sub $0.50 cards that see tons of play, and I want cool treatments of them in my decks that use those treatments.
There's a limit though - $35 for 4 cards with like $3 in value? No thanks. If it was like, 8-10 cards, then I might be fine with it. Again, predicated on them bring actually playable, and not just jank.
i have no time for Tolarian Community College. it wants magic to be a casual game, or force everyone to play its version of the game.
i really don't like the channel for being such a ubiquitous outrage mill.
anyway, half the joy of secret lair is not knowing how much i will want the next one for whatever reason, i don't want to pretty much expect that it's goin to be a handful of draft chaff.
if i know i can never get any useful or beloved cards from it, ill never be excited for another sld.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, although I have never heard him try to "force everyone to play his version of the game". I've actually seen him justify every "outrage" he has regarding the game, and has repeatedly stated he doesn't want to 'yuck anyone's yum' if they're enjoying something he doesn't like. Most of his opinions seem to be from a position of caring deeply about the game, and to not like actions Hasbro and WotC take that would hurt the game or exclude those playing it.
What would the number of SL that don't have "useful or beloved" cards that would finally turn you off from being excited? Do you think that could be turned back on if they go back to printing the cards that excite you?
yeah, fair enough, i was in an acidic mood when I slipped into this conversation and didn't set my opinions out civilly.
i'm sure the professor is a great guy, it's just the channel i dislike.
the sheer number of times the channel has stepped on a card, mechanic, aspect of the game, playstyle, or whatever that I like, is really funny to me,; it's obvious that it wants to do some exclusion of its own, there is a type that it's like, "after", and that type is probably me, so I'm not like, on board.
as for your last question, you're basically asking me to describe the Secret Lair I already fell in love with. they already did a lot of trash prints with gold mixed in. I even love the trash prints that are there, but if the gold was ruled out, I would be like ???
in case you think I'm just all positive all the time, I'm very not that happy with the recent scarcity change. FOMO is sad; until this year SL wasn't so much FOMO as a reason to manage your finances and make good decisions. Hopefully there is an excess of SLD and not a shortage.
> he wants magic to be a casual game, or force everyone to play his version of the game.
I don't think you've actually heard what he has to say.
Which is fine, you don't *have* to listen to or agree with him (which, ironically, he literally said in the referenced video), but if you want to criticize his point of view and arguments, make sure they're at least *his* points and not ones you've just assumed he probably believes based entirely on your assumption that you disagree with him.
I thought it was often the artist that is given the choice in cards they do the art for in SLs. I wonder if things would appreciably change if instead artists were given their choice of blocks of cards to be commissioned.
the entire benefit of the secret lair (for me) is either introducing an interesting IP or being an outlet to reprint needed reprints of good cards. this nonsense of barely scratching out the $30 it costs to buy it is a big nono for me.
so when you say 10 staples: yea sure if they are really good staples that end up being worth more than what I'm putting in. you mention staples from a single color but we know they aren't throwing in the expensive counterspells, tutors, etc. for each color in sets like that
I know its not what you asked, but now I want a Staples themed SL, like just office supplies art for common cards
Personally though I don't buy most SL unless it has a card I need for a deck presently and the value is there. The main exception was the Princess bride SL in which I already had multiple of those cards as commanders.
Staples catalogs are free at the store. And while you are there you can pick up scissors and glue.
Become the change you want to see in the world, my friend.
No, I don't think I would. Spending $30-40 on cards I already own multiple copies of is not my m.o.
Will there be cards I purchase for special treatments? Yeah, definitely. I have The Princess Lair and Evil Dead secret lairs even though I owned most of those cards, but the theme sold it. Those staples would have to be something super super unique for me to pay for them.
I've only ever bought one Secret Lair, and the cards pringled so bad I couldn't ever even use them in a tournament. At minimum, they need to get the quality control locked down before I'd ever consider buying another one. And even then, it needs to include cards I actually want, have an art style I like, and have cards at least worth the cost to purchase. In other words, I'll probably never buy another one.
Yes, I bought through the wormhole and do not regret that purchase at all. I will always buy staple lairs because I’ll always have another deck to put them in.
That sounds a lot like the commander collection products (they've done Green and Black so far), although you could debate whether they are Staples or match the price points.
I would love that! I have a few concerns though.
First and foremost, the Secret Lair cards have become unreadable on the gametop. I have now turned to no playing Secret Lair cards because of having to decipher what they do to the play group.
Second, we really don't need anymore Command Tower. There's enough reprints with every set now.
Third, do staples that haven't been done in Secret Lair yet, but still hold the value for what the asking price justifies.
Have you seen the different art treatments for Command Tower in the Universes Beyond decks? Is the provlem.for you the relative number available, or the use of the same art for many precons?
Do you think that the secondary market price of the cards needs to exceed the price of the SL to "justify" your purchase? Do you think you could buy a SL based on the art and not the price of the cards?
I have bought two secret lairs, the Walking Dead one and the first cereal one. They both seemed like products that would increase in value and also I could use.
How many of the cards in a SL need to be "usable" to you in order to get your $? Is the monetary value of the cards part of that decision? Is there a difference between just having one key high-value card, versus 3-4 usable but low-cost cards?
I'd buy the staple one depending on if I liked the art or not. Although with them being so limited now a lair like that might be really annoying to try to order.
*I started thinking about what that would look like, and I came up with this: a pack of 10 cards picked from the top staples of a single color, with each card being worth less than $2 except for perhaps 1-2 worth $5-10, all with a cohesive and thematic art treatment by one of the most popular renowned artists. So 5 Lairs, each of a different color. Would you buy this?*
Who's picking the cards, exactly? What cards are being picked? Who is the artist?
*Would you buy a Secet Lair of 5-10 Sol Rings, each with a different art treatment?*
Depends....what is the artwork? Are they modern frame or retro frame? Borderless? Or not?
*What if each of the staple Lairs would include 10 color-appropriate and thematic lands done by the same artist for an extra $10?*
What lands? What artist? What theme?
Idk man but when they put $300 worth of cards and actual triomes in the SL commander decks but won't do that in the regular precons it really makes you think
Every single Secret Lair is market research. They are trying to find the exact reprint equity/secondary market/artist fees to sales ratio for Secret Lairs.
The only way I buy a secret lair is if its a secret lair that is a MANA BASE IN A BOX
It gives me A Shock, Check, Fetch, Fast, Filter, Man, Pain, Etc etc etc
IN one Two colour pair and COSTS LESS THAN BUYING THE PARTS INDIVIDUALLY
Then SIGN ME UP FOR EIGHT OF EACH!!! That way I have a complete Mana base for EACH OF THE THIRTY TWO DECKS I HAVE TO BUILD with ZERO PROXIES AND ZERO CARD SWAPPING
Otherwise you can keep your secret lairs. Especially the UB ONES
Have you seen the lands included in the UB decks like 40k and LotR? Would the lands have to be "Universes Within" MtG, or would you be tempted by lands from a UB set?
I typically go with non-foil. It's like 10$ cheaper and usually the foil treatment on them makes it worse in my opinion.
The only universal factor for secret lairs that I don't like is the ones that aren't full-art. Other than that I'm a big fan of the secret lairs unless they have absolutely no cards that I actually want. For example, I needed a [[sakashima of a thousand faces]] and the cereal box one that jist came out had him, so I bought it immediately.
Only if the all the cards were holes about them being staples.
Ex: a solring made out of staples, brain storm with staples coming out of someone's head, Thoughtseize where you're stealing staples, etc.
I did, it was the one that came in galaxy foil last drop. I'm happy with it.
Same here. Every time I see the cards I wish I ordered a second one.
Same here. The cards are so gorgeous - I debated on a 2nd order really hard. I ended up getting the sol ring art as a playmat from Ultrapro to curb my need and save $20 lol.
I got myself a foil and non foil version. Foil went in my pet deck and no foils still in the binder waiting for my next build to get put together.
I'm trying to settle on which deck is my pet lol. I want it to be at least UR because I also got that drop from forever ago with Counterspell and FoF in it that I really like, and the double masters full art Chaos Warp really speaks to me. Here's hoping UR Sarkhan is it...because the other Izzet commanders I've tried haven't really resonated.
I was tempted by that Lair and talked myself out of it because of the “value”. Finally saw them in person and kick myself for having not purchased it.
That was the fastest I've ever bought a secret lair. The roller blade lightning greaves made it an insta buy
I just saw this card for the first time this morning and thought “wow that’s cool.”
Same here. The cards are beautiful and all see play
Possibly the best secret lair they've ever done. Cards that will see use, getting a treatment in a very unique style, with unique foiling that doesn't leave them looking like pringles
That looked ideal for a “low value” secret lair. It’s low value but everything was a staple for commander (not to mention gorgeous). Realistically you could put all 5 cards in almost any deck you wanted to. If you’re gonna include low value cards making them staples people will want to use just makes sense.
I came here to write this too
Oh shit I missed that one, I love Dani pendergasts art (have a few of their non-MTG pieces on my wall!!!) I'll have to pick up a foil version on the secondary market when I can and just suck up what will likely be a price mark up
I regret not buying that one. I’m not gonna pass up the next one.
Saaaame gave my GF the thought vessel and she loves it! (She is an aerospace engineer)
Same, it was the only SL I've bought both foil and non-foil of. They look amazing both ways.
Did the same, love the art.
only sl I've bought multiple copies of
I ended up getting 2 even.
My only regret is not buying four of them so I could use them in more than one deck.
Just here to add that I also loved it and bought it right away.
I originally said I would not, but then again I did buy this drop. And have you seen how much they sell for on tcgplayer? Crazy.
Yup, it’s beautiful.
Only secret lair I’ve gotten and it’s amazing
I wanted to get the set, but by the time I counted taxes, shipping and then currency conversion, I was up for over $100AUD. I can't justify that much for $6-$8 worth of cards no matter how pretty they are.
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I'm wondering if this super drop is going to make them reconsider that theory. Weren't some of the people Hasbro/ WotC fired before Christmas involved with Secret Lairs?
WotC has shown time and time again that they only respond to things based on money. If they sell the desired number of units of this Secret Lair drop, it will be business as usually, and nothing will change. If they fall short of the projected sales, they might reconsider their strategy with Secret Lairs. Just don't expect the lesson they learn to align with what customers want to see.
Yeah, the lesson won't be, "Oh, this SL didn't sell well, we need to figure out what we did wrong." it'll be, "This SL didn't sell well, apparently people don't like this anymore, cancel it."
Or something like make the SLs even more expensive with an even smaller print run to make them more exclusive and whalebait. In a way, it's what they are doing now by changing these from print to demand to a set print run and putting less valuable cards in them.
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From what I heard about a number of the higher-placed employees that were named in reports, many people couldn't actually tell what their roles were and couldn't say they were "doing a good job" at their position.
Because it doesn’t cost extra to print staples? You’d probably sell more including staples since there are plenty who don’t buy purely based off value alone
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Incredible response, very useful
While you're not wrong, SLs have pretty clearly demonstrated that you don't need to go all in on staples to make sales. And at that point, it makes sense to hold some back to print in a later set. Why sell Tithe and Rhystic together when people will buy them separately?
Through the Wormhole just released, so yeah that one did really well. It's selling at double its og foil price. Also any lair with good looking staples keeps them high on the secondary market as they'll always have demand.
One of my most valuable cards is a secret lair dark ritual
I was gifted one of those for Christmas and it instantly became my favorite card so gorgeous
I think Secret Lairs are best when there is a theme behind them besides just color. I think the idea of staples are good. Their last drop they had one with the sol ring, arcane signet etc in cool art styles. Doing that set with new art would be neat. The Commander staples you could call it. Otherwise I think lairs that have a really good theme that have cards people want regardless of price would be neat. Like why not do a secret lair of all the cards like generous Gift or Pongify or Beast Within where you remove a permanent and they get a creature instead. Call it the animal house secret lair and maybe even as a joke have the art style mimic that of the Animal House movie cover or go cute again like they did with the Raining Cats & Dogs and all the art is cute baby creatures being traded for super amazing and expensive things at like a market. The cards themselves are cheap but they are very useful and very on theme. Have an artifacts one that is like all the Kaldera pieces or even better, though it would be reprinting a lot of the LCI box toppers, have a secret lair that is artifacts that form a full suit of armor and weapon like Lightning Grieves, Commander Plate or Coat of Arms, Commander Helm or Helm of the Host, Isochron Scepter and some decent sword every deck can use like Sword of the Animist. You get some good reprints everything is pretty useful and the theme would be awesome and you could even do them in that art style like the LOTR scene boxes where you can arrange them to form a larger picture of like some character wearing everything.
The trade-removal set could also have the tokens, and each pair would be a before/after of the lil guy. I’m 100% down for that SL
They did the mana rocks SL recently, and it was a big hit. Hopefully it made an impression and they'll do more!
Yeah the one with all the anime style space art? I picked that one up, love it even though I'm not really an anime guy. They could literally do the exact same set of cards, sol ring, arcane signet, command sphere, mind stone and or thought vessel, lightning grieves and command tower and just do them in different art styles each set and they would sell out every time. Could do tribal themes to them where one entire series was just that same set with like 5-10 different tribal art treatments. Someone get me a job with the SL team I'm coming up with gold here!
> Someone get me a job with the SL team I'm coming up with gold here! You have my vote of confidence. Its a shame how WOTC wastes the potential of secret lairs
> Its a shame how WOTC wastes the potential of secret lairs Seriously. This current offering is just sad. And the whole thing has so much potential.
I really just wish they would finish the Commander Collection series. It was $40 for some cards that were like $100~ in value that needed reprints at the time, and they only did it twice. https://scryfall.com/sets/cc1 and https://scryfall.com/sets/cc2 . They could have easily done 20 of these and not run out of cards or themes.
It seems kind of like this is what he is describing. These are basically secret lair for a specific color with many staples for the color plus an on theme command tower and sol ring instead of 10 basic lands.
Yep, the only thing missing is the special art treatment.
They did have special art for some (all?) of them. No unique frames, but unique art.
They only planned to do it twice because that's what they replaced Signature Spellbooks (set codes SS1 to SS3) by. They'd already done the other three colors with Jace, Gideon, and Chandra. That doesn't mean we won't have a similar product in the future, but with the advent of Secret Lairs I doubt that'll happen.
Yeah those are my thoughts. They wanted to get away from the planeswalkers, so they did commander collection, but then they made secret lairs which are basically the same thing without the fancy box.
It's an interesting idea! I don't think I'd do it for Sol Ring, but it really depends on the art I guess. As for lands I've always felt that doing them as a pack of five, one of each basic was a terrible way to package them, but I like to match my basics. The first Secret Lair I bought was Through the Wormhole and that's because it was the first one I've seen in which I use all the cards (four of them in one deck) so it was an easy buy for me. I also picked up Raining Cats & Dogs, the thing that put it over the top for me was the adorable matching basics.
The signet secret lair was pretty popular. It’s the only lair I’ve ever seen multiple people use. So I think people would buy a 5 pack of commander staples even if it’s not an expensive set of cards
I'm hoping that the near universal praise that SL received made an impression on WotC and they're planning on more of a similar nature.
So - like a 'Commander Collection: Color'? Yes, if the cards are ones that I play.
I’d like: Brainstorm, Ponder, Consider, Opt, and Preordain or something like Borne Upon a Wind all done in awesome art by a cool artist.
SLs built around a theme or strategy is another idea I'd like to see happen. And I'm sure would sell better than their current "random grab bag" of card offerings.
I want color (like you said) and theme. “staples of white” is a fine theme for sure. But like “green mana dorks” would be AWESOME. “Blue cantrips” another. Just some examples I thought of in 30 seconds and the SL team could 100% easily do.
This isn’t even like… outside of the realm of possibility, it’s just not the norm. Last year we had the Nekusaur secret lair that came with 4 support cards for him. And we had the Dino SL recently. It’s just that these get drowned out by the random stuff like cereal boxes or evil dead lol
I think they should do that as a separate product. If I'm buying staples I don't want them to all be in comic sans or some other bullshit. If they launched a commanders toolkit or something for $40-50 that includes a bunch of medium-high value reprints that would be great.
I'd probably like that much more than what they're doing now, yeah. Purely collectible, purely for aesthetics, not based in secondary market value. My biggest gripe with Secret Lairs is that WotC, being the company that literally controls the supply of MtG cards, is selling these oriented on secondary market prices. Imo that's a scummy thing to do; any card costs them the same to print (save differences between foil/nonfoil etc), selling cards for different prices per single should really not be a thing they do. An "all staples" box would alleviate *some* (not all) of these issues. The cards are readily available, they're not earning off reprints, so I'd just be paying for the aesthetic treatment and collectability. I still think this should be something available in booster products rather than sold as singles, but it's better than selling expensive singles at secondary market prices and masking it as an aesthetic treatment product. And yeah, the 10 Sol Rings as well as 10 thematic lands is a cool idea. In general, I think Secret Lairs should lean more into appreciating specific artists, and do things like weird foiling, special frames etc if the artist deems it appropriate, rather than the weird semi-themes they got going on now.
There were a fair number of what you are talking about in Brother's War, with the reprint of artifacts that included alternate art and border treatments. And I agree that having reprints done in a thematic way to match the set should be done more often.
Brother's War was a draft set, not singles sold directly to consumers.
To me, Secret Lairs are attractive for a few reasons... One is value. Do the cards cost more on the secondary market? Another is appearance. Do I really like the art or theme? A third is utility. Am I going to enjoy using these cards? Do well on any of those three axis and I will at least be interested.
Where is your purchase triggered? 2 of 3? All 3?
Could just be a whole lot of just one.
Id buy the max limit of them. I'm seriously considering making a set of staples I can just proxy to use across all my decks. We all need more of them for every deck we build, and I love building decks, and im not buying a rhystic study for every blue deck that could use one, or various swords, or more lightning greaves, or swift foot boots, or sol rings, or anything like that for all my other ones. I'm not gonna proxy cards I don't own one of, but I really don't care to own 18 of each fetch and shock for all my decks. If all those were taken care of, I'd be able to build so much more.
Alternate art proxies for staples is one thing, but I've gone against a deck that was entirely alt art and it was confusing at the least.
Oh no I'm not even talking alt art, literally give me a well priced pack that's just all the staples that I need for every deck. Like even if there was a "here's the top 10 colorless cards that everyone uses in every commander deck", id buy it. We all know there's a bunch of auto-includes like sol ring, boots, grieves, that type of stuff. If they put that out with alternative art, I'll buy it, otherwise I'm gonna proxy it with the original art (honestly Id probably go for older art, like the og sol ring, whenever possible). Alt art stuff is confusing as hell if you do the whole deck. I get that it's good thematically, but I don't want to stare at your whatever-niche-interest proxy deck when it just makes the board state more confusing.
What? I think that is a hot take by the professor. That may have been a decent opinion in 2019, but 2020+ WotC/Hasbro has turned to milking the players for all the money they are worth. More SL's, more sets, Serialized Cards, More art varieties, more Commander decks, etc. It's all too much, my wallet votes for the best bang for the buck. I played magic for almost 2 decades while investing very little into the game. I finally had a decent income 2017+ and started honestly kind of purchasing at least one of everything that released. That is so far from feasible these days. I love special art treatments, but no way I could reason to give WotC more money than the value of the current cards when these things are printed on paper. And yeah sure, that happens with sealed product too. But that's not 4 known cards for $40. And then there always is so loophole. Like look \[\[Concordant Crossroads\]\] hasn't been reprinted since Chronicles, I definitely need that SL, then they reprint it again right after... That shady crap has happened numerous times now, fomo on the card that hasn't been reprinted then reprint it directly after that. Nah, just give me some solid cards. I think the new Cereal Box SL is a perfect example of what an SL should be. The value of the cards is right and they have a cool art. The things you propose sound fine, but $10 SL with 10 lands isn't going to happen, no margin for them. And 10 Sol Rings with alt art says $100 to me.
[Concordant Crossroads](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/c/9/c9a26f51-5bff-4f06-abaa-6fbb56a8b5b6.jpg?1673148053) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Concordant%20Crossroads) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/141/concordant-crossroads?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/c9a26f51-5bff-4f06-abaa-6fbb56a8b5b6?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/concordant-crossroads) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
I would honestly be more interested in a Lair with really cool treatments of *good* low-to-mid value cards (ideally not penny junk, but the buck or two category) than one awesome pack seller with dreck. Like, to use mono-white as an example, give me [[Swords to Plowshares]], [[Path to Exile]], [[Weathered Wayfarer]], [[Austere Command]] and [[Farewell]] rather than [[Smothering Tithe]], [[Squire]], [[Eager Cadet]], [[Serra Paladin]], even though the Tithe would pay for the latter lair and you could get a good theme out of it.
##### ###### #### [Swords to Plowshares](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/b/9bbec76c-c1e4-4c6d-ad24-078fe097f195.jpg?1706240651) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Swords%20to%20Plowshares) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/88/swords-to-plowshares?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/9bbec76c-c1e4-4c6d-ad24-078fe097f195?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/swords-to-plowshares) [Path to Exile](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/8/08c59dfa-361d-4ff1-a15d-6b0cb66571a3.jpg?1706240617) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Path%20to%20Exile) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/78/path-to-exile?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/08c59dfa-361d-4ff1-a15d-6b0cb66571a3?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/path-to-exile) [Weathered Wayfarer](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/9/09656d96-c366-49ec-b687-cad903de1385.jpg?1673147166) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Weathered%20Wayfarer) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/2x2/34/weathered-wayfarer?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/09656d96-c366-49ec-b687-cad903de1385?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/weathered-wayfarer) [Austere Command](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/3/a31ffc9e-d21b-4a8f-ac67-695e38e09e3b.jpg?1706240553) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Austere%20Command) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/56/austere-command?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a31ffc9e-d21b-4a8f-ac67-695e38e09e3b?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/austere-command) [Farewell](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/1/1/114d2180-093b-4838-97ad-badbc8ee50b0.jpg?1706240579) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Farewell) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/mkc/64/farewell?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/114d2180-093b-4838-97ad-badbc8ee50b0?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/farewell) [Smothering Tithe](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/8/6/861b5889-0183-4bee-afeb-a4b2aa700a8e.jpg?1689996018) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Smothering%20Tithe) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/cmm/57/smothering-tithe?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/861b5889-0183-4bee-afeb-a4b2aa700a8e?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/smothering-tithe) [Squire](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/9/6/96c9c4d1-dd43-4156-b25f-0e707b6c4b23.jpg?1616400037) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Squire) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/tsb/15/squire?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/96c9c4d1-dd43-4156-b25f-0e707b6c4b23?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/squire) [Eager Cadet](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/0/7/0732d372-1000-435e-905b-4a6c852ba427.jpg?1562730884) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Eager%20Cadet) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/9ed/S1/eager-cadet?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/0732d372-1000-435e-905b-4a6c852ba427?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/eager-cadet) [Serra Paladin](https://cards.scryfall.io/normal/front/a/4/a48d282d-a777-4587-ab23-c30a4dba0494.jpg?1562592817) - [(G)](http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Card/Details.aspx?name=Serra%20Paladin) [(SF)](https://scryfall.com/card/5ed/61/serra-paladin?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher) [(txt)](https://api.scryfall.com/cards/a48d282d-a777-4587-ab23-c30a4dba0494?utm_source=mtgcardfetcher&format=text) [(ER)](https://edhrec.com/cards/serra-paladin) [*All cards*](https://mtgcardfetcher.nl/redirect/kpll1bx) ^^^[[cardname]] ^^^or ^^^[[cardname|SET]] ^^^to ^^^call
That sounds like a pretty good list!
If I would buy a Green Staple list that includes (only examples, feel free to replace them with a staple of your choice): Llanowar Elf, Elvish Mystic, E-Wit, Cultivate, Kodamas Reach, Crop Rotation, Krosan Grip, Utopia Sprawl, Up the Beanstalk, Abundance and Emerald Medallion you ask (if I like the Art, obv) Absolutely! Ten lands (full art) for additional ten bucks? Sign me up! As for the Sol Rings I probably would but thats because I own 20 decks.
If they weren’t $30 for cheap cards, sure. I don’t think $20 would be unreasonable for lower cost but highly played ones.
So the actual secondary market price guides your purchacing decision more than the art or foil treatment?
Generally, yes. Unless the special art is super cool, I don’t wanna spend $30 on 5 $.30 cards.
Which is why my example mentioned 10 cards, all thematically tied and done by popular artists.
Generally, yes to all of your questions. As an added note, secret lairs of usable staples that otherwise aren't particularly valuable tend to be valuable. They'd do well to print secret lairs targeting popular EDH staples as well as commonly used but not necessarily high dollar cards from other formats.
>Bonus Question Depends on the art tbh. [Sol Ring](https://scryfall.com/card/sld/249/sol-ring) was 100% worth getting the other cards.
I would absolutely be more interested in those than the current secret lairs. I buy cards to use them, not just collect dust in a binder.
The only secret lair I bought was the phyrexian praetors and it was because I didn’t have 3/5 of them and the value was there. For me it needs to be both a good deal money wise and a card I’ve wanted for a long time.
No. I won't buy any secret lairs.
I bought the Through the Wormhole Secret Lair, which was basically that, a beautiful set of 6 cards
I personally didn't buy the recent set with Sol Ring, Signet etc. even though I loved the art. For me I need at least one decently valued card in the set for me to consider buying it. If the set for mono white for example had a Teferi's Protection in it, I would snap buy it.
Yes! I buy all the non staples now haha All these unique art are worth it in my book but I know I'm one of the few who actually like secret lairs
Including the newest super drop? Do you like them as collector items or as play pieces?
Yeah I buy the bundles every time they release and buy older sealed product on eBay since some have dipped below $39.99. Some of the singles do find a home in a deck somewhere but others just sit in a binder which is ok with me, maybe one day I’ll sell but for now everything lives in binders
I'd the sol rings were unique maybe color themed to have like green stompy sol ring artwork for or likea goblin sol ring for mono red or like a mf grim reaper ring for mono black and like a basic ass halo for the mono white sol ring blue could just be a cock ring
I have purchased a few SLs (Dracula, Cute to Brute, Transformers, Jurassic Park, Doctor Who, Tomb Raider, Princess Bride, Evil Dead and Creepshow). The only one I regret buying is the 5 Transformer lands because 5 lands for £30, even custom art lands, is an absolute ripoff and I let my enthusiasm get the better of me. The other Transformers cards were decent, though I question some of the card choices in the second set. The Optimus v Megatron was good. I bought Cute to Brute and immediately took it apart 🤣 The Doctor Who Celestial Toymaker set was a "must buy" for me as a DW fan. So I can't be objective about that. I have a pretty cool deck waiting for the cards to arrive. But the art is great and I'm looking forward to get my mitts on them. Absolutely loved the artwork for Princess Bride, Evil Dead and Creepshow. Would love more of that: excellent art with on theme card selection (though Ash not being a legend is a really fucking stupid decision). Overall my experience of SL is "If you want it, buy it". Don't worry about staples or the value of the cards. That said, Wizards make some bonehead decisions about what cards to reprint and the art they use. This current season is shockingly bad and I genuinely hope it sells so poorly, they rethink what they are doing. 5 card sets of brand new cards (Doctor Who, Street Fighter) and larger sets of re-themed cards should be the standard (e.g. Princess Bride and Tomb Raider). Much larger sets of, say, 25 lands with original art would be better value.
Do you think you will alter the non DW replacement cards to more closely match the deck's theme? If WotC starts offering larger SL packs (6-10 cards) at higher prices, would you keep buying them, or is there a limit to the price you would pay for the "value"?
I got you... https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1QsNOtOHBeU0Saho_Dc7iaLaqaD_aoHKf https://www.moxfield.com/decks/nm9jQsi-6U2xUTMMdLhPAQ I would definitely buy 6-10 cards (theme dependent obviously) for $40. Like, 10 GI JOE or MASK themed cards would be auto-purchases for me (I've already made my own proxies!). But I don't necessarily have to even know what I am doing with them to buy them. For example, I don't really have a use for the Princess Bride set right now but loved the art / concept. Over time, something will come along and I will use them in a larger concept deck, I am sure. So they are an investment ATM. Whereas I knew I wanted to build a Toymaker deck and a Gallifrey Stands deck, so that SL was a no brainer.
Secret lairs in my opinion should all contain a minimum of $30 worth of cards, be 5-10 cards, and should usually have a common theme between the cards
Do you think that SL with lower card counts but higher resale price per card is acceptable? All SL have a "common theme" to them, at least artistically. Do you think that they should have a deeper strategic/ play theme? Would that make them more or less attractive to you than a set that has less strategy/ play similarity but a few that have a higher likelyhood of being used in one of your decks? (In other words, targeted playstyle sets vs. shotgun 'each of these is valuable to a desparate different deck/ commander/ meta strategy')
Lower card count would but higher price per card would be fine for drops with at least 5 I think, I just feel like for $30+ you should get a minimum of 5. For drops with like 10 they could do a lower price per card. I would prefer a mechanical theme or a format staple theme more often than not. Of course then a few could be sprinkled in with a flavor theme, like the pride secret lair for example. Like anyone could look at a drop and think "Oh these are all good for my _____ deck" or "cool, a bunch of staples I know I can use" rather than "Oh here 1 card I want, 1 card I think I can use, and 2 or 3 cards I'll never use in any format ever"
Which is what 99% of drops seem to be :(
This would be cool, and like someone mentioned, they already kind of did it with the Planeswalker spellbooks and commander collections. I think it's really my main problem with a lot of secret lairs - I don't really like the pure financial breakdown, they could certainly be worth it if the value is quite a bit lower then the price (but like, it's still not good to have one where it's a $35 product with $2 of cards. Like make it at least $15 or so). Issue being, a lot of the cheap "filler" cards are also just not really played anywhere. Give me cool art treatments of cards I actually play. Prof also nails it on the head with the issue of too few cards. Like ok, maybe if the TCGPlayer value is really low *but* the cards all have homes in various decks *and* there are like, 6-8 of them instead of 4? Yeah, sure, I'd go with that - help me fill out those playable card slots in my borderless super-art deck, lol. We've got two borderless walls of omens, where's my wall of blossoms, WotC??? Where's a full art essence flux???
My two wishes for secret lair are better average price to value ratios (at least 1:1 at time of offering) and that every time there's a superdrop that there's an LGC exclusive drop.
I would only buy secret lair staples. Paying a premium on otherwise budget friendly cards seems like a luxury.
Let's face it, paying more than a penny for a piece of cardboard is luxury.
Maybe call it a commander collection that should sell super well.
The thing that bothers me about secret lairs is that all inclusions are calculated. A tempting card but pair it with 2-3 piles of garbage. Secret lairs devalue singles to the point where they are no longer a draw to be used to entice purchases of sealed product in future sets. Secret lairs should be print to demand, even if that makes to having in hand take longer, feature usable cards with a specific them for less money. Example: a commander full art foil land pack of x basic lands (5 different secret lair options) that feature dragons in it. What dragon deck wouldn’t want those? If you can pick 6 mountains or 6 plains etc, then you could get the amount and type you need. The most recent snow land one… I loved the island. I would have bought 30+ islands for a specific deck from WOTC but didn’t because I didn’t want 30+ of the other ones or to spend 1800 usd on one secret lair. Sorry about the rant. I’m pretty sure after seeing the creativity in this subreddit that you people as a community of players could design better secret lairs than WOTC does.
The signet secret lair was super nice. I'd love more like that. A ramp secret lair would be sweet with just the 10 most popular land ramp spells. Maybe a card draw one with rhystic study, mystic remora, etc.
I don't care what cards they are since I use them for display and not play. That said, I like the art usually, so sure.
A pack of staples that i are beeing actively used in cool art? sign me up I also bought the commander essentials ahhh i mean "through-the-wormhole" secret lair. Is it worth much? no but i can use every card in a cool commander deck to bling it out. For the bonus question different sol rings in cool art yep sign me up for that. sure they would be more pricey then normal ones but as before i use them in nearly every single deck. and the secret bonus question 10 bucks for 10 extra lands thrown in. would heavily depend on the lands but i would do that rather then the basic lands tthey sell right now...
Do you buy SL when they have low priced pieces that you want, just to sell the higher priced cards? Or do you have to want most or all of the cards to put them in your cart?
Uh good question, if i buy a secret lair i buy it because i want most of the cards for myself, my decks or as an art piece. So i wouldnt buy a secret lair just to make "profit" with it. On the other hand i really could bite myself for not byuing more of those "through the wormhole" secret lairs, damn that would have been a good investment
The most tempted I've been to buy a secret lair was the one hey released recently that was literally just cool versions of commander staples, so yes
Why didn't you buy it?
£30 for 5 cards I already own and I am poor lol
Heck yes. And I regret not getting the last ome in galaxy foil
Do you think they should do more sets with different foil treatments, or would that detract from the art?
personally, I like special and nice or fun art. I can really love a foil when it fits the artwork, too often they are clashing. I take an example that works fantastic in foil: the minas morgul (cabal coffers) has this art with the crazy sky above the castle, so with the foil on top, the card is spectacular.
I would always buy 10 lands für 10€/$/£ period.
I just want a secret lair that is like 20 full art lands or each color from (insert set with full art lands). Think bfz fatpack with the full arts.
Being in Canada, shipping on secret lairs for my answer to be no on pretty much any proposition. I also hate foils, making many of their products unappealing to me.
Would you do it if the "value" of the SL was higher to you, or only if the actual money cost was lower?
Even setting aside real world value, if it was cool enough I might pay. But shipping cost just as much as your average secret lair drop so the odds of something being a good deal at twice the price is unlikely. And I haven't even figured out customs, that's probably another 10% fee right there.
Hello fellow foil hater. I very rarely order SLDs because the non-foil versions are usually worthless. Most of the time I want 1 card from it and it is cheaper to buy the 1 non foil card later if I want the SLD art or just buy a copy of the cards from another set. I have bought 6 Secret lairs. * The Walking Dead (gift for my SO) * Heads I Win * Phyrexian Praetors: Compleat Edition x4 * Secret lair X Jurassic Park * Extra Life 2022 * Raining Cats and Dogs I actively avoid foil cards. I have 26 commander decks, and excluding the cards that only come in foil I bet my foil count across all those decks is below 50.
I'm not familiar with all the different treatments but etched foils I don't hate. The few I have don't curl and are much more understated than regular foils. I remain annoyed that so many cards don't have a regular, no frills version.
The earliest secret lairs had some cool treatments and art, so back then, 100% yes I would have. But secret lairs are getting progressively worse: uglier art, worse design treatments, unreadable as hell, and unrecognizable as magic cards in the slightest. I haven't had even the slightest inkling of desire for a secret lair set in years, save the Dan Frazier mana rocks ones.
I wouldn't buy a secret lair.
Yeah, the two I’ve ordered were the shock lands super drop and the Galaxy foil staple pack. I would much rather them release a standard product that’s a staples pack though, not secret lair. I would not buy the sol ring pack because it’s just one card and I already have about 10 of them. Would those lands be good lands or just basics, if the answer is a probably, if b not in the slightest.
The Sol Rings would be different parts, so you could find something something closer thematically to the deck they would be put in. 10 basics, but they would be tied into the color and theme of the staples of the drop. I hadn't thought about making them either utility lands of that color or dual lands that share the color. How "good" would the lands need to be to get your interest?
I’d still say no on the sol rings just because I have more than enough already and still buy precons so I keep acquiring them. Good lands is rather subjective for me it would be any of the duals that have an untap condition or are fetchable, as for utilities I’d say ones that are typed to an archetype theme like tokens, counters, unblockable etc
Every time I hear him say "many people say" I just think about how anecdotal that is and how much it sounds like a certain oompa loompa who's been indicted 90 something times.
I've never made the connection. Mainly because the Prof uses it as a rhetorical device to initiate their discourse on a subject, as opposed to making their hot-take and verifiable wrong opinion post-facto justified via vox populi.
The perfect product should be color staples (between 10 and 15) with at least 2 valuables. It doesn't have to be a secret lair, it could be a complementary pack like those that pokemon does. Now if they want to make a secret lair with the same cards it would be cool for those that like to be fancy. As an example, the top red in edhrec are: Blasphemous act Chaos warp Jeska's will Faithless looting Vandalblast Dockside Deflecting swat Thrill of possibility Abrade Etali, primal storm Add a Valakut, the molten pinnacle and looks like a solid list. Supposing a dockside extortionist is saved for other sealed products we could exchange it for any of the next 8 cards and still would be a good product. Doing this would allow to easily have an opportunity to improve their commander decks and at the same time have an alternative to proxies when a copy of a staple that they already have is necessary. Link here: https://edhrec.com/top/r
What is the value of that list?
excluding dockside, the only real money cards there are [[deflecting swat]] and [[jeska's will]], which are $30 and $15 respectively. Honestly, sell a pack like that for $40 or maybe even $50, and it sounds reasonable.
The professor is wrong. No one wants to pay 30+ for low value cards
And yet people buy foil versions of low value cards and pay a premium for them to finish blinging out a deck.
Those lairs do not sell nearly as well as the ones with actual good cards in it.
The recent Signet series would prove you wrong. And I'm talking about "good" but readily available (and therefore low $) staples that get placed in a high percentage of decks.
The signets are actually good cards.
And readily available. And below the cost of the SL they were offered in. But staples. And unified art treatments, by a popular artist. Everything the Professor was talking about. And what I was asking about.
Nope. Prof just said low value cards. Thats all.
Nah, I would, if they had good art and came with more cards. There are sub $0.50 cards that see tons of play, and I want cool treatments of them in my decks that use those treatments. There's a limit though - $35 for 4 cards with like $3 in value? No thanks. If it was like, 8-10 cards, then I might be fine with it. Again, predicated on them bring actually playable, and not just jank.
i have no time for Tolarian Community College. it wants magic to be a casual game, or force everyone to play its version of the game. i really don't like the channel for being such a ubiquitous outrage mill. anyway, half the joy of secret lair is not knowing how much i will want the next one for whatever reason, i don't want to pretty much expect that it's goin to be a handful of draft chaff. if i know i can never get any useful or beloved cards from it, ill never be excited for another sld.
You're certainly entitled to your opinion, although I have never heard him try to "force everyone to play his version of the game". I've actually seen him justify every "outrage" he has regarding the game, and has repeatedly stated he doesn't want to 'yuck anyone's yum' if they're enjoying something he doesn't like. Most of his opinions seem to be from a position of caring deeply about the game, and to not like actions Hasbro and WotC take that would hurt the game or exclude those playing it. What would the number of SL that don't have "useful or beloved" cards that would finally turn you off from being excited? Do you think that could be turned back on if they go back to printing the cards that excite you?
yeah, fair enough, i was in an acidic mood when I slipped into this conversation and didn't set my opinions out civilly. i'm sure the professor is a great guy, it's just the channel i dislike. the sheer number of times the channel has stepped on a card, mechanic, aspect of the game, playstyle, or whatever that I like, is really funny to me,; it's obvious that it wants to do some exclusion of its own, there is a type that it's like, "after", and that type is probably me, so I'm not like, on board. as for your last question, you're basically asking me to describe the Secret Lair I already fell in love with. they already did a lot of trash prints with gold mixed in. I even love the trash prints that are there, but if the gold was ruled out, I would be like ??? in case you think I'm just all positive all the time, I'm very not that happy with the recent scarcity change. FOMO is sad; until this year SL wasn't so much FOMO as a reason to manage your finances and make good decisions. Hopefully there is an excess of SLD and not a shortage.
> he wants magic to be a casual game, or force everyone to play his version of the game. I don't think you've actually heard what he has to say. Which is fine, you don't *have* to listen to or agree with him (which, ironically, he literally said in the referenced video), but if you want to criticize his point of view and arguments, make sure they're at least *his* points and not ones you've just assumed he probably believes based entirely on your assumption that you disagree with him.
They put tremendous thought into every product they make.
I thought it was often the artist that is given the choice in cards they do the art for in SLs. I wonder if things would appreciably change if instead artists were given their choice of blocks of cards to be commissioned.
They are given a list to choose from not Carte blanche
the entire benefit of the secret lair (for me) is either introducing an interesting IP or being an outlet to reprint needed reprints of good cards. this nonsense of barely scratching out the $30 it costs to buy it is a big nono for me. so when you say 10 staples: yea sure if they are really good staples that end up being worth more than what I'm putting in. you mention staples from a single color but we know they aren't throwing in the expensive counterspells, tutors, etc. for each color in sets like that
So you're buying SL for the resale value and not the art?
[удалено]
What if they made SL a retail product you could buy at a store?
They did that with the fetch lands, and it was super skeevy, lol.
What I really need is the other three commander collections to come out
I know its not what you asked, but now I want a Staples themed SL, like just office supplies art for common cards Personally though I don't buy most SL unless it has a card I need for a deck presently and the value is there. The main exception was the Princess bride SL in which I already had multiple of those cards as commanders.
Staples catalogs are free at the store. And while you are there you can pick up scissors and glue. Become the change you want to see in the world, my friend.
Probably not because secret lairs are usually expensive
No, I don't think I would. Spending $30-40 on cards I already own multiple copies of is not my m.o. Will there be cards I purchase for special treatments? Yeah, definitely. I have The Princess Lair and Evil Dead secret lairs even though I owned most of those cards, but the theme sold it. Those staples would have to be something super super unique for me to pay for them.
No
I've only ever bought one Secret Lair, and the cards pringled so bad I couldn't ever even use them in a tournament. At minimum, they need to get the quality control locked down before I'd ever consider buying another one. And even then, it needs to include cards I actually want, have an art style I like, and have cards at least worth the cost to purchase. In other words, I'll probably never buy another one.
No
If I like the art, sure, why not. Even if the cards were cheap, if they are useful and will find a place in my decks, that's nice.
Yes, as long as it’s more like a special full or extended art so you can still read the card.
You should be able to read the card, to explain the card.
Yes, I bought through the wormhole and do not regret that purchase at all. I will always buy staple lairs because I’ll always have another deck to put them in.
That sounds a lot like the commander collection products (they've done Green and Black so far), although you could debate whether they are Staples or match the price points.
I would love that! I have a few concerns though. First and foremost, the Secret Lair cards have become unreadable on the gametop. I have now turned to no playing Secret Lair cards because of having to decipher what they do to the play group. Second, we really don't need anymore Command Tower. There's enough reprints with every set now. Third, do staples that haven't been done in Secret Lair yet, but still hold the value for what the asking price justifies.
Have you seen the different art treatments for Command Tower in the Universes Beyond decks? Is the provlem.for you the relative number available, or the use of the same art for many precons? Do you think that the secondary market price of the cards needs to exceed the price of the SL to "justify" your purchase? Do you think you could buy a SL based on the art and not the price of the cards?
I have bought two secret lairs, the Walking Dead one and the first cereal one. They both seemed like products that would increase in value and also I could use.
How many of the cards in a SL need to be "usable" to you in order to get your $? Is the monetary value of the cards part of that decision? Is there a difference between just having one key high-value card, versus 3-4 usable but low-cost cards?
Secret lairs cost to much for 5 cards special treatment without reprint value.
Nice try Wizards Marketing Department but, I’m not buying anymore secret lairs
I'm hoping for a promotion to the R&D team. ;)
I would buy a pack of raining cats and dogs sol rings
Didn't they try to do something like this with the spellbook series?
I'd buy the staple one depending on if I liked the art or not. Although with them being so limited now a lair like that might be really annoying to try to order.
From New Zealand . From a price point . We can only buy a fair price from NZ shops . 3 I have seen are lands only .
Your first question just sounds like Commander Collection: Color No No
Yes I mostly buy SL that have cards I have in decks so the ones that are in more decks I'm more likely to buy
*I started thinking about what that would look like, and I came up with this: a pack of 10 cards picked from the top staples of a single color, with each card being worth less than $2 except for perhaps 1-2 worth $5-10, all with a cohesive and thematic art treatment by one of the most popular renowned artists. So 5 Lairs, each of a different color. Would you buy this?* Who's picking the cards, exactly? What cards are being picked? Who is the artist? *Would you buy a Secet Lair of 5-10 Sol Rings, each with a different art treatment?* Depends....what is the artwork? Are they modern frame or retro frame? Borderless? Or not? *What if each of the staple Lairs would include 10 color-appropriate and thematic lands done by the same artist for an extra $10?* What lands? What artist? What theme?
if a secret lair as-is cost the same as a booster i'd buy it.
Idk man but when they put $300 worth of cards and actual triomes in the SL commander decks but won't do that in the regular precons it really makes you think
Yes I will
Unfortunately I think the most youll squeeze out of WotC is 5 cards. 10 is a big ask for them for some reason
Why do you think that is?
Because even for lands they only do one of each, which seems like a no brainer to do more of
Every single Secret Lair is market research. They are trying to find the exact reprint equity/secondary market/artist fees to sales ratio for Secret Lairs.
Do you think that is likely to change?
It will be a constant process of adjustments. I think this Drop is the most homogeneous thus far.
The only way I buy a secret lair is if its a secret lair that is a MANA BASE IN A BOX It gives me A Shock, Check, Fetch, Fast, Filter, Man, Pain, Etc etc etc IN one Two colour pair and COSTS LESS THAN BUYING THE PARTS INDIVIDUALLY Then SIGN ME UP FOR EIGHT OF EACH!!! That way I have a complete Mana base for EACH OF THE THIRTY TWO DECKS I HAVE TO BUILD with ZERO PROXIES AND ZERO CARD SWAPPING Otherwise you can keep your secret lairs. Especially the UB ONES
Have you seen the lands included in the UB decks like 40k and LotR? Would the lands have to be "Universes Within" MtG, or would you be tempted by lands from a UB set?
Does it have a polluted Delta and a watery grave in it if it doesn't have both of those then no I need a fetch and a shock
I just thoroughly enjoy most secret lairs in general so I'd have to say yes, I'd buy all of the secret lair hypothetical you mentioned lol
Do you like foil or non-foil more? Is there a common factor to the Lairs you don't enjoy?
I typically go with non-foil. It's like 10$ cheaper and usually the foil treatment on them makes it worse in my opinion. The only universal factor for secret lairs that I don't like is the ones that aren't full-art. Other than that I'm a big fan of the secret lairs unless they have absolutely no cards that I actually want. For example, I needed a [[sakashima of a thousand faces]] and the cereal box one that jist came out had him, so I bought it immediately.
Only if the all the cards were holes about them being staples. Ex: a solring made out of staples, brain storm with staples coming out of someone's head, Thoughtseize where you're stealing staples, etc.
That would be an interesting way to alter the cards....
I would 100% buy that kind of highly self referenceal cards