In modern Magic: The Gathering, there are few things more certain than death, taxes, and Universes Beyond crossovers: whenever the queues open up for the latest collector drops on Secret Lair, you get stuck in an hours-long holding pattern only to eventually find out everything’s sold out by the time you get in. That wasn’t always the case, but despite years of fan requests to return to a more available format for Secret Lair, Wizards of the Coast is sticking with it.
“The short answer—and again, not a sexy one—is that this one is better for business,” Lindsay Bartell, Wizards of the Coast’s senior director for Secret Lair, recently explained on the WeeklyMTG livestream (via Polygon). “The last thing we want is, ‘Oh, Secret Lair had to get in there, so now Final Fantasy is going to be late.’ We don’t want to be that guy.”
“This one,” as Bartell put it, is Secret Lair’s current approach to drops, a limited-print model that means once a set is gone, it’s gone (she also firmly pushed back on the chance of Wizards ever re-releasing past Secret Lairs, arguing that part of the appeal of the program is its collectability). But that’s not always been how Wizards has approached Secret Lair. When the program kicked off back in 2019, it actually operated on a print-on-demand model, meaning Secret Lairs would be up for pre-order for a set period of time, and then whoever purchased it in that window was guaranteed a drop.
According to Bartell, citing the fact that the nature of print-on-demand meant that users ended up waiting months and months to actually receive their cards, Wizards then tried a hybrid approach that kept the on-demand preorder window but also sought to get cards in collectors’ hands quicker by pre-printing a large amount of Secret Lair products. Except predicting the popularity of each drop was difficult, meaning there would be situations where a ton of excess stock sat around disrupting the company’s supply chains, which could in turn affect the printing and rollout of main Magic releases.
So now the limited runs are here to stay, much to the chagrin of anyone who’s ever wasted an hour queuing only to not get the cards they wanted. But it’s clear Wizards sees it as the nature of the collecting beast and the least-worst option they have available (even if we’ve seen in recent months that other companies in a similar space, like Games Workshop, don’t agree).
At the very least, Wizards is trying to cut out some of the frustrating FOMO that comes with Secret Lair operating in this way. While most drops through the program reprint available cards with new art, some contain unique cards with new mechanics (like the recently revealed Fallout Secret Lair)—but Bartell noted that Wizards now finds ways to both make drops with unique cards available for longer and eventually get them released in other ways. As for queue times, Bartell acknowledged the issue but defended that while they’re still long, they’re not as bad as they were when Secret Lair initially moved to limited-run releases.
“It is never okay for me for people to be waiting five hours for their drop,” she said. “That absolutely does not meet my standard, was absolutely embarrassing, and is not something I ever want to see again.”
Bartell’s explanation is unlikely to be a popular one, but it’s still interesting to see Wizards explain their approach to collectors in this way. The next test of Secret Lair’s current model will come next week, with a massive drop of Secret Lairs inspired by Dungeons & Dragons. May your queue times be as lucky as your dice rolls!
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