There’s a whole lot going on in the Magic world. We’ve got Final Fantasy previews, we know there’s an Avatar:The Last Airbender Secret Lair in November, and there’s a whole lot of Spider-Man product on the horizon for this summer. That’s before you get to all the fun of Aetherdrift being live and Tarkir: Dragonstorm on deck for April.
With all that in mind, though, I want to take a beat and think about what’s happening with some recent Secret Lairs, because there’s an emerging pattern that has me wondering if I should re-examine the buying I’ve been doing, and will be doing. So let’s look at some of the biggest recent sales and see what changes Wizards has made.
It would be lovely if we knew precisely how many of each Secret Lair drop were sold. With that data, we’d know how rare each of them were compared to each other, and be able to figure out likely pricing on those sets after they sell out. However, we don’t have access to that data, more’s the pity.
What we do have is a case study in Wizards adjusting to meet market demands, and that’s via the four Hatsune Miku drops. In May of 2024, the first drop happened, the Sakura Superstar. That drop, featuring six cards that are quite mid except for the Azusa, Lost but Seeking, sold out in something like three hours. The drop was goosed by the presence of a sweet Rainbow Foil Seedborn Muse, giving you a great bonus card for every $200 spent. Miku was the big draw, though, and the fast sellout was accompanied by high prices. That rapid sellout started the price increasing on the sealed boxes, putting them up over $150 now.
The second one, Digital Sensation, is a much more popular set of individual cards, as I went over back then, with more than one getting their first special printing. Since that was just about a month later in late June, it’s unlikely that Wizards was able to order a greater quantity of the lairs and this one sold out in around two hours. Makes a lot of sense, really. The hype was wild, the first set of Lairs were already selling for double, and everyone wanted their copies.
Where the change can really be seen is in the third drop, Electric Entourage. This was in late September, which is enough time for Wizards to have made changes based on the first drop. The result was that the drop took a lot longer to sell out, with the ENG foil going first, the ENG nonfoil second, and eventually, the JPN nonfoil sold out. There are still JPN foil copies to be found on the Secret Lair website, though it’s got the low stock alert. The additional issues here is that these are all planeswalkers, and only two of them feature Miku herself.
That pattern, of ENG foil-ENG nonfoil-JPN foil-JPN nonfoil, that’s the same order of how expensive the sealed ones are on TCGPlayer.
The most recent and the final drop, Winter Diva, has been up for seventeen days and only the ENG nonfoil has sold out. There’s low stock alerts, but the lack of speed or urgency here is impressive. I fully expect that there’s a lot more copies of this drop than the first, though the exact amount greater is pure speculation. The card selection here is top-notch, as I said, and I have confidence in this lair in the long term. However, I have to revise the timeline of when they’d get profitable, because the drops are already landing and the glut is real. In a few months, we might see these settle out some, but given the hype cycle coming this summer, I’m not sure when it’ll get back.
We have another recent example of the surge of interest: The Marvel X Secret Lair collaboration in late October sold out in five hours or so, with the bonus Signets selling out just before all the Lairs went out too. The process of buying appeared to have lots of technical glitches and bypasses which seemed to have been fixed now but between the Final Fantasy drops and the Spider-Man drops that are inevitably coming, this first Marvel drop is a signpost.
So the saga of the Miku drops directly informs my expectations for the Marvel and Final Fantasy drops. However much got sold in October, Wizards took that data and talked to their printer, very likely increasing the quantity being printed by a significant amount. I don’t think we’ll get to ‘not sold out seventeen days later’ level of quantity, but we should expect that it’s probably not going to sell out in five hours, more like twelve hours or maybe a whole day.
It feels sacreligious to type those words out, that a Secret Lair drop with this sort of IP (dare I hope for some 8-bit Final Fantasy 4 or 6, or polygon-blocky FF7!) would not sell out near-immediately, but Wizards has the data. They know how fast things sold out, and importantly, they want to maximize their profits. They don’t make anything from the secondary market, so their goal is to find the number of lairs where everyone gets all they want. That number was too low for the first Marvel drop, and I expect they’ve learned and adjusted.
I will 100% still be trying to buy as quickly as possible when those are available, but the evidence points me towards thinking that I don’t need to panic. I was feeling that way with Marvel’s first round, but I will be a bit less anxious this summer. They want to sell all the Lairs, to make every dime they can, so I’m expecting a lot more product. That doesn’t mean it won’t sell out, either.
We’ll also have to see what the greater print run means for singles. Marvel had a lot of great things, and some great buying opportunities. For example, Rhythm of the Wild, the Wolverine version, is up a dollar since I picked it in late December. Most of the great singles have started to rise up from their lows, and if you didn’t get something, now is the time.
If the print run is maximized, we’ll see some much lower prices when most of the cards land, and a slower growth in price. Everything depends on the mentality, though, and if the perception is of rarity, it’ll be priced that way.
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 official substitute teacher of the MTG Fast Finance podcast. If you’re ever at a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.