Exclusive: Magic Designers Reveal Why Secret Lair's New Zeta Set Had to Come in Booster Packs

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Published Aug 25, 2026, 11:00 AM EDT

The randomized Zeta Set transforms Magic’s handmade playtest cards into bizarre new collectibles

What do a baby swan, a prosthetic elf ear, a disco ball, and a pile of loose change all have in common? They’re all featured on cards in Magic: The Gathering’s first-ever Secret Lair booster packs.

Polygon can exclusively reveal Secret Lair x MSCHF: The Zeta Set, a collaboration with Brooklyn art collective MSCHF that’s inspired by the crude, handmade cards used to playtest Magic before its official release more than 30 years ago. Rather than purchasing a predetermined collection of cards, players will spend $19.92 on a sealed envelope containing seven randomized cards.

In an exclusive interview with Polygon, Secret Lair art director Jacob Covey and MSCHF designers Niek Dekker and Kevin Wiesner explained how a playful tribute to Magic’s handmade origins became Secret Lair’s first experiment with randomized booster packs.

Each Zeta Booster contains three commons, two uncommons, one rare or mythic rare, and one wildcard of any rarity. The release goes on sale through Secret Lair’s Chaos Vault on Sept. 2 at 12 p.m. ET, with purchases limited to 12 boosters per customer while supplies last. Even the $19.92 price point pays homage to 1992, when Magic’s earliest playtest cards were still being printed on ordinary paper and cut out by hand, often featuring placeholder art.

Why Secret Lair’s first booster packs had to look unfinished

The Zeta Set recreates that DIY aesthetic using public-domain images, archival material, original MSCHF photography, and typography reminiscent of an early word processor. Its 121 cards span early Magic classics and modern Commander favorites, with three available visual treatments: Photocopy, Photocopy Negative, and Color Banding.

The results look unlike almost anything Wizards of the Coast has printed before. Arcane Signet depicts a cygnet (a baby swan). Llanowar Elves features a single prosthetic elf ear. Spell Pierce spells out “PIERCE” with decorative letters. Birds of Paradise has that 18th-century sketch of the extinct dodo that you’ve definitely, probably, maybe seen at least once in your life. Chrome Mox gets a disco ball. Land Tax is a pile of loose change. The only constant across the various cards is unpredictability, but the art is playful, clever, and always interesting.

For Secret Lair art director Jacob Covey, the project began with a question the team had considered for some time: How could Secret Lair reproduce the experience of cracking open a booster pack? And how could the Chaos Vault help them make it special?

“We had been tossing around the idea for a long time about how we could bring the pack-ripping experience to Secret Lair,” Covey told Polygon. MSCHF, which previously collaborated with Wizards on a 2022 Secret Lair Drop, proved a natural partner. “MSCHF is just playful and smart, and it was a perfect wedding of idea and form factor.”

Arcane Signet + Spell Pierce + Llanowar Elves + Birds of Paradise [4 cards ana48l]

MSCHF designer Niek Dekker said the collective remained interested in Magic after that first collaboration. Its members regularly draft at the office. Eventually, they contacted the Secret Lair team to inquire about working together again. Wizards gave them what Dekker described as a “blank slate.”

MSCHF presented several experimental concepts, including ideas involving physical objects, but both sides responded strongly to one based on the earliest playtest cards in Magic history.

“Those cards just look very beautiful,” Dekker said. “There’s a very cool, unintentional beauty in that aesthetic that we loved very much.”

Before Magic became one of the world’s most popular trading card games, its creators assembled test cards from whatever material they could access. Images were pulled from magazines, comic strips, books, and nearby objects as designers attempted to determine whether the underlying game actually worked.

MSCHF’s Kevin Wiesner compared the process to “found object assemblage,” with each finished card preserving evidence of the designer’s thought process. As he put it, that approach closely resembles MSCHF’s own habit of treating existing pieces of culture as creative raw material.

The collective searched image archives, consulted microfiche at the New York Public Library, scanned physical objects, and staged original photographs. A few cards directly reference images used on early Magic prototypes, including Vandalblast, which features a scan of matches. Other cards emerged from visual jokes. MSCHF used an image of a cygnet for Arcane Signet to capitalize on the cheeky pun.

“The original cards also had little jokes on them, and things that actually didn’t always resonate with what the card actually says,” Dekker said.

The team did not begin with a target of 121 cards. MSCHF simply produced a large collection of sketches, and the Secret Lair team responded by asking for more.

“We actually like them all,” Dekker recalled the team saying. “Can we just do them all?”

Covey said the large pool became necessary once the project evolved into a randomized product. Secret Lair needed enough possible pulls to create what he described as “a fun chase,” but the selection was guided more by the artists’ enthusiasm than by any attempt to balance colors or card types.

“As big and thoughtful as Magic is as a company, we also just kind of wanted something fun,” Covey said. “We ended up going with where the passion was.”

Although the cards are manufactured products, the team wanted them to preserve the visible imperfections of something made by hand. The black-and-white Photocopy treatment evokes the original prototypes, while the other two resemble different kinds of printing failures. Photocopy Negative imitates an inversion function available on older Xerox machines, while Color Banding recreates the distorted colors produced by a misaligned or malfunctioning printer.

The creative process sometimes involved physically generating those imperfections. Dekker made Eerie Interlude by placing his hand on a scanner and moving it as the scanner operated. The resulting image stretches his fingers in a way that reproduces his wedding ring several times.

“It was a good example of how fun the process was,” Dekker said. “It was just messing around with scanners and stuff.”

The set also contains a cleaned-up tribute to one of the stranger pieces of early Magic history. Some original playtest sheets wound up with several cards’ worth of blank spaces. Some of those spaces bore an ominous warning: “You Are Fucked.” MSCHF initially wanted to reproduce at least one, but that version did not make it into the commercial release. Instead, Path to Exile bears the more family-friendly “YOU ARE EXILED.”

“The actual reprint of ‘You Are Fucked’ is one of those things that doesn’t pass into a general release, much to our chagrin,” Wiesner said.

Despite their rough appearance and occasionally archaic terminology, these are genuine Magic cards intended for actual play. Covey also rejected the idea that players would necessarily divide them between collectibles and game pieces.

“The beauty of Magic players is there’s no difference between collector and player,” Covey said. “I know people around the office who have ridiculously hard-to-get cards that they play in their decks. I think it’s meant to be collected, but mostly played. Everything is played in Magic.”

Whether randomized boosters become a recurring part of Secret Lair may depend on how players respond to this first experiment.

“The pack-ripping experience will be new,” Covey said. “Who knows if we’ll ever do it again? We’ll see if people enjoy it.”

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