It’s a tortured title, yes, but the philosophy is sound. 

We’ve got a wild situation here with the current Secret Lair pace. Last year, there was a whole series of bangers from the Secret Lair folks, and this year, we’re off to a more tepid start. Several days since it became available, and none of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle lairs are even low stock.

What does this mean for those Lairs, and what does this mean for the SLD genre? Let’s discuss.

First of all, the big thing, the overarching concept, the idea that matters above all else: Card choice is still the most important thing in a Secret Lair. Other factors can help, and we’ll get to those, but really, it comes down to the cards themselves. The folks who are aware of Secret Lair as a website/buying platform are mostly savvy to value and demand, and in this case, we’ve sussed out that the value mostly isn’t there. These are neat, and I certainly got some personal cards to appease my inner twelve-year-old, but highly collectible these are not.

Not all reprints are the same. Master of Ceremonies, Species Specialist are the newest examples and illustrate a concept that makes a lot of sense to you, if you’ve bothered to find and read this article on this site: High price is not the same as high demand, and many SLs highlight this. A lot of cards from Commander sets have a surprising price, but only because you had to get them from a deck or they were mixed in with other tough pulls from Collector Boosters. There’s also a subset of cards whose only foils were from the promo packs, and that is pure scarcity, not power or demand. Life Insurance is one card that’s an example of this, with foils being more than 10x the price of either nonfoil copy. 

As far as we can tell, Wizards isn’t making more copies of each Secret Lair. There’s some datamining of the SL website that indicates what quantity of sales triggers a ‘Low Stock’ warning, and that’s the only sort of data we have on the relative numbers of Lairs out there. I’m not convinced on the numbers, but Avatar’s drops and more recent drops all experiencing the same slow trickle of demand has me leaning to think that the quantities are similar. 

Related, though, is that I completely believe Wizards cranked the overall quantity up from last year. The line must go up, and Secret Lairs are an easy place to make 5-10% more cards and sell them to consumers, and the margin on these cards is pretty damn disgusting. I’ll be interested to see if these more mediocre Lairs are the new standard, or perhaps they are going to slow down the pace a little.

So what happens if you bought these Lairs and now you’re looking at them while they laugh at you? Well, you can sell them around $40, and depending on your taxes, fees, and shipping, you’re going to lose $10-$20 overall. I’m amazed at people who sell Lairs at that cost, considering what they are losing. I recommend against selling at those prices, and if you’re that desperate for cash, you likely shouldn’t have bought that Lair, or any Lair, in the first place.

Your best bet is its own truism: On a long enough timeline, everything gets profitable. Most Lairs creep upwards in price, as time and collectors take their toll. Chucky, NOT A WOLF, even the Foil Full-Text Lands are up in the $70 range. There’s no guarantee about age, though. A 2020 Women’s Day lair is still just $80, but a Lair from the same year called The Path Not Traveled is selling on TCGPlayer for under $30. Demand, even small demand, adds up over time. 

There’s another factor to consider: When Lairs don’t sell out, that means there isn’t a lot of stock online. This can cause singles to go up in price, to the point that the Lair becomes awfully tempting. An excellent example of this is the still-available Dreaming Darkly. The Guardian Project at Dump Week was under $10 but now it’s close to $20. The Archmage is $14 in foil, and the Soulherder gets you over the top. The quantities available are quite low, with under 30 vendors for each card (Project has 13!) and almost no walls of copies to be had. 

I’m annoyed that I missed Dump Week on those Projects, as I knew that was the card to watch, but the $40 is still a fine deal.

Currently, 48 out of 96 individual Lairs are currently sold out – perfectly half, though that number is off by a bit because of the Prints of Darkness Lairs that were sold at different price points. There’s a wide range left, from Furby to a couple of Marvel lairs and a scattering of Fallout and D&D Lairs. I expect that sometime soon, Wizards will purge a bunch of the older Lairs from the site, as they do every so often, but they aren’t in a hurry here. All it takes is someone adding an extra Lair here or there to increase their profits just a little more. They don’t need Lairs to sell out immediately, they just need them to sell eventually. They don’t care if sellers on TCGPlayer or eBay undercut them, so long as the originals move, slowly but surely. 

Finally, let’s talk about the ones that aren’t sold out which I think are worth it and why.

A Lot to Learn (foil and nonfoil) – As previously stated, the value of Serra Ascendant is high, and this should eventually recover nicely. 

Trick or Treat (foil and nonfoil) – Already profitable given the cards inside it, so worth buying. 

The Last Ronin (foil and nonfoil) – I wrote about it before, but the Misstep alone will make this worth it over time.

Greet the Dog (foil and nonfoil) – This would be the first cat or dog themed Lair to miss, which seems pretty unlikely to me. 

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Welcome back to another installment of Mana Math, where I do my best to take the soup of information that Wizards throws at us and try to answer the core question of these packs: How many do I need to open to get the card/cards I want?

They are legally required to give us a certain amount of this information, but they love to obfuscate things a bit. The odds for each category are clearly laid out, but you’ve got to hunt through the Collecting TMNT article to get the needed numbers. I’ve done all that for you, and I have a set of charts that should help clear up what you can open in a TMNT Collector Booster.

This set might be a record for the number of treatments in a Collector Booster: Headliners, Silhouette, Source Material, Japan Showcase w/Fracture Foil, Pixel Art, and Extended-Art frames. There’s a lot of options, so let’s go through some of the later slots in a pack and break down what you get. Everything in a bullet point is taken verbatim from the Collecting article. 

1 Traditional foil or surge foil basic land

• A traditional foil (66.7%) or surge foil (11.1%) pizza basic land
• A surge foil rooftop basic land (22.2%)

The pizza lands are such fun, I know a lot of folks don’t like them, but I really appreciate the whimsical art here. Giant broccoli on a pizza slice is hideous and hilarious. The lands should be decent value for a while, as people who love these lands are gonna get a bunch. Probably not going to be more than a few dollars each, but it should hold up at that price over time. 

1 Traditional foil rare or mythic rare card

• There are 53 rare (87.6%) and 15 mythic rare (12.4%) cards from the main set that can be found in these slots.

Regular foil rares/mythics aren’t usually something we track, but the numbers are a little smaller and the timeline is compressed, so I’m keeping an eye on everything. 

• 1 Non-foil (75%) or traditional foil (25%) source material card 

I do so love it when there’s a clear ratio for cards. Yes, you can get a nonfoil Source Material card from Play Boosters, but it’ll take 560 of those boosters to get you one specific nonfoil. That’s a pretty low rate, and I’m not going to worry about that as a source of cards to throw off the ratio. We’ll need to keep an eye on how many of these cards end up with a foil multiplier higher than 3x, almost like the good old days.

2 Booster Fun or TMC cards

• A non-foil mythic rare silhouette card (2.9%)
• A non-foil rare scene card (5.8%)
• A non-foil rare (13.2%) or mythic rare (1.4%) sewer card
• A non-foil extended-art rare (16.1%) or mythic rare (less than 1%) card from the main set
• A non-foil borderless mythic rare from the Turtle Power! Commander deck (2.2%)
• A non-foil new-to-Magic rare (26.2%) or mythic rare (less than 1%) card from the Turtle Power! Commander deck
• A non-foil rare reprint card from the Turtle Power! Commander deck (19%)
• A surge foil new-to-Magic rare (6.1%) or mythic rare (less than 1%) card from the Turtle Power! Commander deck
• A surge foil reprint card from the Turtle Power! Commander deck (4.4%)
• A surge foil rare (1.3%) or mythic rare (0.6%) pixel card

The above adds up to 99.2%. The three ‘less than 1%’ are each one-card categories, so on my table, I’m giving each an equal shot of 0.26%. Nonfoil borderless TMC Mythic means the six face commanders from the Turtle Power deck, which is Heroes in a Half-Shell, the four Turtles, and Splinter. 

Putting the Pixel cards in this slot (and thereby giving you two shots at them) was a nice choice, else the Pixel cards would be harder to get than Fracture Foils usually are, which may or may not be the thing they wanted to do. We’re getting a nice supply of the new-to-Magic cards, and there will certainly be some wonderful opportunities to spec on those cards in Surge Foil too.

Even with the double-slot bonus, the Surge Foils and Pixel cards are difficult to pull and are tougher to open than anything except the Fracture Foils and the Headliners. If any of these are in big demand, watch out.

Then we have the big-money slot: 1 Foil Booster Fun rare or mythic rare card

• A traditional foil rare scene card (13.2%)
• A traditional foil rare (29.7%) or mythic rare (3.3%) sewer card
• A traditional foil extended-art rare (36.3%) or mythic rare (less than 1%) card from the main set
• A traditional foil silhouette card (6.6%)
• A traditional foil (9%) or fracture foil (less than 1%) Japan Showcase card
• Kevin Eastman headliner cards appear in this slot at a low rate in Collector Boosters.

The above add up to 98.1%. The leftover 1.9% is some combo of the Foil Extended-Art mythic, the Fracture Foils, and the Headliners. From here, we’re getting into speculation, and you should treat the numbers as guesswork. Logical guesswork, but guesswork nonetheless. 

The first category is that solo FEA mythic card.  If we presume it has the same drop rate as the Mythic Foil Sewer and Silhouette, 121.21. That’s 0.825%, and leaves us with 1.075% for the Fracture Foils and the Headliner Gold Signatures.

The last sets with Fracture Foils, it’s been very consistently at 1000 packs to get a specific card, or a 1% drop rate. This number was as close as I could get it and still be under the 1% number. I want to repeat that this is an estimate, since they don’t want to tell us the proportion of the chase cards. I believe it’s higher than the 0.6% drop rate of the mythic rare pixel art, but I don’t have the specifics for the drop rate. The precise data needed to get this in the wild would be an exorbitant number of CB boxes opened by one source, who counted them all up, and that’s not feasible either. 

I genuinely don’t understand why they could give us the 0.6% figure on the Surge Foil Mythic Rare Pixels in the previous chart, but have to skimp out on other numbers. As such, I could be horrifically wrong in my estimates, even though I think the logic is sound. 

As a bigger picture, these slots need to be highlighted: 80.3% of the double-slot pulls will be rares of some sort, and 79.2% of the last slot will be rares. Together, that means just over half of the CBs opened will be triple-rare Collector Boosters. Some of the rares might be decent value, especially with special frames, but that’s still a lot of feels-bad moments. CBs have always been a different sort of lottery, but please keep in mind that when chasing the big money, you’re going to hit a lot of potholes on the way. 

The Surge Foils (including the Pixel cards) are cards I would likely hang on to if I opened them in packs. Being as rare as they are, we’ve got a lot of time for these to mature and become surprisingly expensive. Keep in mind that even with the two chances, the Surge Foils are all at least twice as rare as Sewer cards, Silhouette cards, or even the regular foil Japan Showcase cards.

The final foil slot of a CB is 99% cards that aren’t very rare, in terms of the packs needed to find a copy of a specific card. If the Japan Showcase foils (not the Fracture Foils) end up being mid-tier in price, then these packs will be very swingy indeed. We’ll keep an eye on these prices, and see where the packs end up. 

I hope this data helps you decide about your pack buying and cracking. As always, if you want to discuss the methods or results, please feel free to reach out, especially on the ProTrader Discord!

Cliff (@WordOfCommander at Twitter and BlueSky) has been writing for MTGPrice since 2013, and is an eager Commander player, Draft enthusiast, and Cube fanatic. A high school science teacher by day, he’s also the co-host of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at an event and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.