There’s a Secret Lair drop arriving on the 22nd of September, and it features our friendly neighborhood Spider-Man!

As a Marvel character, and one of the biggest, there’s a range of stuff happening with this drop. Let’s go over the cards, the usage, and where the value is currency sitting for this drop.

For each card, I’m listing the EDHREC usage and the value of any premium versions of the card. That’s the most useful comparison, even if the old premium isn’t exactly as cool. Just a reminder about EDHREC: Their data is super helpful but it is by no means the one and only truth. Tons and tons of casual players don’t use the site, and there’s a bias towards preconstructed decks as people do variations on ‘precon with upgrades’ so some of the staples have staggering inclusion rates. 

Secret Lair x Marvel’s Spider-Man: Daily Bugle Breaking News

1x Fact or Fiction ($5 SLD foil, 171k decks)

1x Frantic Search ($21 SLD foil, $1 CMM Borderless Foil, 453k decks)

1x Scheming Symmetry ($16 SLD foil, 61k decks)

1x Blasphemous Act ($31 SLD foil, $5 SLD foil, 1.12 million decks) – 37 printings!

1x Impact Tremors ($16 SLD, $2 WOT foil, 339k decks)

First of all, I both love and loathe this frame. I love big bold card names, and this is so thematic it hurts, but it also looks like it’s got the same issue as the Creepshow SLD: If you make a frame with wrinkles and frayed edges (comic book, newspaper, etc.) then the cards always look like they are LP or worse. Aside from that, this is everything you want in a Lair: high inclusion rates, this looks different than the other premium versions, and the floor of $5 for some of these cards makes the others look pretty good.  

One thing you’re going to notice as a theme: All of these have more than one SLD printing already, and this is the third time around for Blasphemous Act. I picked the Deadpool version on MTG Fast Finance not too long ago, so my stack of those will take a bit longer to mature. That’s the usual pattern for repeat SLDs, and something to keep in mind with all of the new SLD versions. Older ones won’t lose value, but there will be slower growth in the future.

Secret Lair x Marvel’s Spider-Man: Heroic Deeds

1x Ephemerate ($30 JPN STA foil, 181k decks)

1x Three Visits ($42 SLD foil, 770k decks)

1x Lightning Greaves (INV foil $215, SLD foil $37, 2XM foil $19, SLD foil $16, LCC foil $22, SLD foil $6, 1.7 million decks)

1x Sol Ring (too damn many, all of them)

1x Command Tower (too damn many, all of them)

The Ephemerate and the Three Visits are doing a lot of work here. Three Visits especially is an outlier, as it’s the iconic, often-imitated Knights Who Say “Ni!” from the Monty Python SLD. If it wasn’t a collectible from that particular IP, I think it’d be cheaper, but that is the only special version until now.

Greaves, Sol Ring, and Tower have lots and lots of versions. Sol Ring has 111 printings, according to Scryfall, with 30 of those being $10 or more. Command Tower has 97 separate printings listed, but only 15 are $10+. Still, the Ephemerate and Three Visits are going to do the best here, and I’ll definitely be targeting those cards at Dump Week. 

Secret Lair x Marvel’s Spider-Man: Mana Symbiote

2x Plains, 2x Island, 2x Swamp, 2x Mountain, 2x Forest

These lands are reminiscent of the oil-slick lands from All Will Be One, and those range from $5 to $12 for the Swamp. Here, you’re paying $60 and getting ten lands, for a solid entry of $6 each. Supply on this will be constrained, and I expect the red and black ones to be the most popular. These look amazing, and I am hoping to pick up a nice stack during Dump Week but gives the higher price of this drop it’s possible that no one ever prices these cheaply. 

Secret Lair x Marvel’s Spider-Man: Venom Unleashed (Colors)

Secret Lair x Marvel’s Spider-Man: Venom Unleashed (Inks)

1x Damnation (MP2 foil $120, Textless foil $40, SPG foil $40, 240k decks)

1x Dark Ritual (SLD foil $140, MP2 foil $110, STA JPN foil $50, FCA foil $45, 808k decks)

1x Peer into the Abyss (FEA $16, 90k decks)

1x Surgical Extraction (2X2 borderless foil $8, OTP foil $2, 3700 decks)

1x Tendrils of Agony (STA JPN foil $4, 18k decks)

The ink version of a comic page is a true tradition in the collecting of comics, and this is an awesome set of art to showcase the difference. If you’re the type who likes to frame and display cards in a set, then putting these cards next to each other will look phenomenal. Damnation clearly is the big one here, but Dark Ritual is another one I’ll be on the lookout for cheap copies. 

Secret Lair x Marvel’s Spider-Man: Villainous Plots

1x Deadly Dispute (FCA foil $2, SLD foil $4, SLD foil $6, 409k decks)

1x Go for the Throat (PCBB foil $5, 233k decks)

1x Lightning Greaves (INV foil $215, SLD foil $37, 2XM foil $19, SLD foil $16, LCC foil $22, SLD foil $6, 1.7 million decks)

1x Sol Ring (too damn many, all of them)

1x Command Tower (too damn many, all of them)

I’m lower on this drop than I am with the Heroic Deeds version, as Dispute and Throat aren’t very pricey and as I said, these staples will hold a few bucks but are unlikely to become very expensive. Nothing wrong with $5 foils, but I’d be a lot happier if those three $5 foils came with a $15 and a $20 in my $40 set of cards. 

Overall, even with sweet art, this is a drop I’d be likely to avoid on the day of if this were six months ago. There’s nothing mechanically unique, there’s only one card in all of this that hasn’t had a premium printing before. Good, but not great. Thankfully these are all at the $30/$40 price instead of the $40/$50, with the exception of the $60 for 10 lands.

However, we’re in a different era and a very different IP. Spider-Man is one of the most recognized figures on the planet, and the comic collecting crowd is going to be wild for this. The hype is high, and I fully expect the Secret Lair site to be extremely busy, if not outright crashed, as happened with the Marvel release last November.

As such, I think these are all pretty safe buys if you can get in at MSRP. I have a strong preference for the Heroic Deeds set, as I said, but these should all do well. If the site crashes or you can’t stare at the little walking figure all morning, don’t fret. I suspect a lot of these will have very good prices when Dump Week arrives and people flood the market as is the usual pattern.

We haven’t been told about the bonus cards, or special add-ons like a Seedborn Muse or an Arcane Signet, and if there’s extra collectibles around, that just means more value. 

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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

Spider-Man will be completely previewed by the end of today, which is two weeks ahead of the prerelease. I have to admit, the schedule feels funky, like Final Fantasy was ended a bit fast and Edge of Eternities has lasted a bit longer than usual, but with so many sets, everything is different from the times that used to be. 

This set has an MSRP of $38 for a Collector Booster, but on TCGPlayer, they are going for at least double that, on an individual or a box price. It’s also a smaller set, in terms of the number of cards, so they have filled the Collector Boosters with a range of treatments and styles, then given us an article with lots of obfuscations. My goal today is to break it all down and tell you have many packs you’d have to open to pull the cards you want. 

Generally speaking, it’s easier to buy the singles you want rather than open packs and hope for those specific cards. Your odds are better in Spider-Man than they were in Final Fantasy for most things because of the smaller set size, and that’s a theme you’ll see in these numbers. I’ve put in the MSRP price of the packs, just because I can easily imagine the prices of these packs varying widely. Right now it’s double, could go up, could go lower.

There’s four slots we care most about in the Collector Boosters, and the first two are nonfoil Booster Fun:

All of these drop rates are within expectations, although the mythic rare scene cards are pretty high at 125 packs to get a single copy. Nonfoils will drain out a lot slower than the foil versions will, though, but tournament players might well go for nonfoils first.

Borderless Source Material Cards: This is very similar to the FCA sheet, although it’s got the MAR set code. Formally known as Source Material, it’s a series of iconic comic book covers done into Magic cards. I have high hopes for this sheet, especially at these drop rates: 

As a point of comparison, in the Final Fantasy sheet, it was 250 packs to get a foil rare from that set and 500 to get a foil mythic. So yes, it’s about 5-10 times easier to get a nonfoil, and 2-3 times easier to get a foil, depending on if the card would be rare or uncommon. They could have put those designations in again, but no, they made it easy on us for the Spider-Man sheet, designating all of the cards as mythic. (If they had done the same in FCA, everything the same rarity, it would have been 128 packs for a specific foil.)

I wanted to take this a step further, since they made these much more common than the Final Fantasy bonus sheet. So I sat down with the mythic drop rates, for foils and nonfoils, and tried to figure out how the drop rates on the MAR sheet compare to an actual in-set mythic rare in a regular frame.

To do this, I had to estimate the relative number of Play Boosters sold vs. the number of Collector Boosters sold. We don’t have exact figures on this but based on assorted industry chatter we’ve decided on a ratio of one Collector Booster sold for every three Play Boosters sold. Expressed as percentages, that means Play Boosters are 75% of the number of total packs sold for Spider-Man. The absence of Commander decks with sample packs for this set eliminates a variable that has been present with other sets.

Again, that’s an estimate, and if we get better info, we’ll update this post accordingly. But with that ratio, and with the drop rates in both types of boosters, I estimate that the ratio of mythics to MAR cards is about 3:2, meaning that for every two copies of a particular MAR card, there’s three copies of a particular in-set mythic.

This ratio is present for foils and nonfoils, which is an interesting surprise.

Now as a reminder, we’re starting from a hype cycle that is already inflated, and so we’ll see some sky-high prices for cards from this sheet, especially as people notice the same visual features as the FCA sheet. My initial expectation here will be to sell early, and wait a couple of weeks to get what you can as people crack boxes and put their stock online. Given the higher prices of boxes, the individual card prices may never come down, but FCA prices have mostly trended downwards and I hope the MAR cards will as well.

Complicating this plan is that these cards, as reskins of some legendary comic book covers, will pull interest from those same comic collectors. Just like we weren’t ready for the Final Fantasy collectors, we might not be ready for the comic folks to come storming into this hobby too. It is entirely possible that the extra collecting pressure on these cards, plus the rising price of boxes, leads to everything only going up.

I don’t think that will happen, but it’s definitely possible. I’d still be on the ‘sell into early hype, then wait’ plan.

The final slot in the Collector Booster will be filled with all sorts of wonderful shiny goodies:

Now note that these categories leave out four types of pulls, and only add up to 98.1%. In the Collecting article, we’re told that all four of these groups of cards are each less than 1%:

7 Textured Foil Costume Change

1 Borderless Gauntlet Soul Stone

2 Mythic Rare Scene Cards

1 Borderless Cosmic Foil Soul Stone

Now we’ve got to get into some assumptions. I’m being as logical as I can from here on out, but these are still guesses. Please feel free to disagree, I can only make my best guesses about the data in the absence of specifics. 

There’s 1.9% left over, and 11 cards. If it’s evenly split, that’s 1 in 579 packs to get any of these eleven particular cards. That’s already a lot harder to get, as each of the other mythics are at most 187 packs. I think we can do better, though, especially knowing that the Soul Stone variants are hyper-premium.

I’m going to presume that the two mythic rare scene cards have a total drop rate of 0.9%, to fit the <1% designation. I’ll do the same for the seven textured foils. That leaves us with 0.1% for all special Soul Stones. Already a 1 in 1,000 drop rate at that point, I went with two possible ratios of Gauntlet to Cosmic. Here’s a table with these presumptions, and the two possible distributions.

In the first pair of lines, the two sets of Soul Stones are in a 3:1 ratio (three Gauntlet foils for every Cosmic foil) and the second is 19:1, leading to some absurd rarities for the most chase versions. I think the first set of numbers is more likely, because it’s in line with what the super-rare drops have been in the past. As examples, the rarest non-serialized drops have been the Lost Legends rares (Roughly 46,700 packs for a specific Legends rare out of DMU), the first set of Surge Foil Realms and Relics (~3,900 packs),and the Jurassic Park Emblem Foils (3,800). We estimated Sothera’s super-rare version to be around two to three thousand packs for a single copy, but it’s impossible for outsiders to know for sure.

I repeat, I do not know what the actual drop rates are for these eleven cards, and these numbers are estimates. If Wizards gives us better data (they likely won’t, alas) then I’ll update this with more precise and attributable numbers.

If you want to discuss the percentages and math from this article, please reach out on social media or the ProTrader Discord. And good luck, if you decide to open some packs!

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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

It’s hard to believe that Final Fantasy was officially released only ten weeks ago! We’ve seen the Collector Boosters get so expensive that the empty display boxes are going on TCGPlayer for more than $20, and I’m told this is a common thing for the hardcore collectors, having the empties of the boxes you’ve cracked open. 

Final Fantasy’s subset, Through the Ages, is a true home run, giving us very useful cards with some wonderful/iconic/nostalgic art. Doesn’t matter if this is not your cup of tea, there’s something here to enjoy and the collectors have come out of the woodwork. We’re told by Wizards employees that the print run for this set was bigger than any other set ever, and the demand was still too high. 

As a result, we’re seeing some cards start to dry up, and while usually I like to wait for six months or so to let a card find its bottom, when the boosters are this pricey, I can’t imagine these sink much lower before rising up. So let’s review the cards with the right mix of demand, current price, and low inventory.

For each card, I’ve listed the EDHREC data, but please keep in mind that it’s not a perfect set of data. EDHREC is both skewed to the most invested players, a very small group of very online folks, and those who do ‘precon plus some upgrades’ for leagues and other limited-pool Commander decks. I also want to remind you that per the Collecting article, it takes roughly 50 Collector Booster packs to get a foil uncommon from this sheet, about 250 for a foil rare, and a whopping 500 packs for a mythic. At $1300 a box, that’s just over $27,000 for a rare (most of this list) and $54,000 for a single foil mythic!

As the FF Collector Boxes stay at such a high price, being collectibles in and of themselves, the supply on these foils is already low, and there’s not much more coming into circulation. 

One more detail to note: James and I have spent a lot of time on MTG Fast Finance discussing how Japanese-language cards are undervalued compared to the English versions of chase cards. Frequently, the JPN price is half or less of the ENG price, but because so much of this set’s collectors just don’t care about the language, the JPN cards are often within 10-20% of the English price. If you like the foreign-language version, all of these get significantly cheaper. 

Command Beacon (317,000 decks on EDHREC, $19 for a NM English Foil) – This is one of the most popular EDHREC cards you can get in the FIC sheet, and also a bit misleading. Beacon was put into two recent Commander precons, and a lot of expensive commanders won’t even run the card. It is understandable if you don’t like the FF8 art, straight from the PlayStation 2, but we’ve already got a Galaxy foil of this at more than $30. Once these last few cheap foils are gone, we’re going to see this hit $40 or $50 pretty easily. 

Bolas’s Citadel (282k decks, Game Changer, $50) – If you’ve never played with or against this in Commander, just know that it’s a worthy Tinker target in Vintage Cube, and that’s a format with only 20 life! In Commander, it’s very easy to abuse this card and while there is a Post Malone SL version as well as a white border from MYB2, this is already the chase version at $50. 

Loran of the Third Path (205k decks, $20) – Another card with art that’s the flower of 2000’s technology, Loran is a tremendously popular card given the enters-play Disenchant and the politics of drawing extra cards. We also know that these collectors spend a lot for the anime-type art, so this just feels like a matter of time. 

Adeline, Resplendent Cathar (167k decks, $24) – The card is great, the art iconic, and the price is perfect. A rare case where the Japanese-language copies are a lot cheaper, you can get copies for $14! 

Sram, Senior Artificer (186k decks, $25) – The Commander is a draw engine for three types of decks, as well as being a fantastic include in the 99 of a lot of types of deck. We’ve had special versions, even serialized ones, and this FCA version will surpass all but the numbered copies. The art is perfectly arranged on the text, making this extra awesome.

Carpet of Flowers (104k, $18) – The SL version is already in the low $30 range, and that’s not even borderless or extended art. Even if the art makes no sense to you, knowing the game lore or not, it seems easy to see that this will grow to match and surpass that version of the card. 

Isshin, Two Heavens As One (23k as commander, #15 in last two years, 47k more, $70) – All-time confluence of factors here: Isshin is a terrifying commander in the aggressive colors, the aforementioned supply issues, and FF collectors love Lightning. I won’t be surprised when these are $150 by next summer. 

Jodah, the Unifier (24k as commander, #13, 17k more, $31) – There’s some competition in here, as we got the Spongebob Jodah not long before this was released, but the art is by Amano, and some people don’t like the bright cartoon colors. Jodah should break the top ten commanders over time, as it’s just an excuse to play all your favorite legendary creatures. 

Gix, Yawgmoth Praetor (51k, $34) – All the other mythics from FCA are super-pricey but this one is surprisingly affordable. Gix sees less play than the others, and buying in on this is more of a supply spec than anything else. 

Muldrotha, the Gravetide (20k decks, #24, 58k more, $12) – Top graveyard-based commander, great art. There are other borderless versions out there, including a Fracture Foil from Foundations, but this is still a great price for a very collectible version. 

I don’t think you need to buy any of these immediately, but I wouldn’t wait too long. Most of them have already rebounded off of lows, and as the CBs rise in price, these cards should get harder and harder to find. 

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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.

I’ve been making a lot of posts lately, mainly in the ProTrader Discord, that come down to one thing: Final Fantasy was the harbinger of change. There is a before and there is an after, and just as we needed to adapt in COVID times, and adapt post-pandemic, now we need to look at what is happening with an impartial eye.

We’re not here to talk about the morality of the new reign, or the unfairness, or anything else that is as useful as an ‘old man shakes fist at cloud’ meme. We’re being clear and concise about what’s happening now in Magic and what it means going forward. 

Before we go too deep, let’s take a beat and review a little history, so we can see where we are at. 

We have to start with Universes Beyond: The Lord of the Rings. This set dropped in June of 2023, and was known to have the serialized Rings, a Realms and Relics subset, and also a special Holiday release with its own Showcase art, the 60’s poster treatment, and even more serialized cards. 

This was the first true Universes Beyond full set, as before, we’d only gotten little glimpses of this world. A Secret Lair, a subset of cards like Transformers done inside of a regular set, that was as far as we had gone.

LOTR was the first time that Magic players intersected with another big fandom, and since Magic’s appeal has generally been as a game, not as its own lore, the ‘collector’ aspect of the game kicked in hard. We had the 1/1 The One Ring sell for $2 million US, a record which was eclipsed last May by a 10.0 Pristine Alpha Black Lotus that went for $3 million. 

Lord of the Rings as a set, was handled almost perfectly. The biggest flaw was that the surge foil Realms and Relics went from super-mega-rare in the original Collector Boosters and then they were close to 10x easier to pull in the Holiday edition. That’s the only blemish here. And ever since those Holiday packs came out in late 2023, they’ve done nothing but go up in price. They were $350/box on release, then by the following July they were pushing $500. At one year old, in late 2024, they’d broken past the $1000 mark, and thanks in part to a lot of sales at Black Friday, it was $1500 at the start of 2025. Currently, the cost for a Holiday edition box is $2400, and the regular LOTR is at a grand.

The next inkling we had of things being different was last November, when the Marvel Secret Lairs dropped, and had mechanically unique cards in them, and good ones at that. The Secret Lair site went down and was back up and then restarted, with some server patches that ravenous fans got through. We’d seen popular things–we’d never crashed the whole damn endeavor.

And that leads us to a team–up that seemed wildly unlikely. Final Fantasy already has a whole card game, with lots of expansions and its own market! The nostalgia was too strong, and the FF collecting whales went for the Surge foils first, new depictions of beloved characters. Those went up in price fast, and the Collector Boosters they came from followed suit, buoyed by the astronomical prices of the Neon Chocobos. 

Collector Booster boxes for Final Fantasy had an MSRP of $450, which is the same as a Modern Horizons set. This stayed consistent for a bit but as soon as the collectors kicked in, the prices started going up and they did not stop. When individuals were able to sell their own boxes, the supply dipped a little and then started to climb. We’re at $1400 and past lots of predictions, but here’s the real issue: Anyone who sold a box at close to MSRP was losing out on something like 100% profit, and now anyone who could buy at MSRP would be able to resell for mega profits.

As a result, Magic has attracted the attention of the networks of folks who are trained to buy MSRP on sight and expect immediate profits. Their business model is about speed, exploiting botnets and other programs that find available inventory and buy it instantly. Pokemon and sneakers are the most common uses here, but concerts have this problem too. And let’s face it: We would buy Final Fantasy at MSRP instantly too. 

Wizards has noticed the changes in behavior too, and Collector Booster boxes for the next Universes Beyond sets (Spider-Man and Avatar: the Last Airbender) are starting out at much higher prices, to the dismay of folks who want to get those packs for cheaper. 

So where are we now?

First of all, the prices of the regular singles are not heavily impacted yet. Nonfoils in the regular frame for FIN and EOE both remain in the range of where other sets were at this point, with perhaps the exception of Starting Town, which spiked a lot earlier than I expected. While the special versions are getting crazy expensive, the regulars are fine. 

Please remember that the panic currently overtaking folks is all about special shiny versions. Regulars, and regular foils, are still not difficult to find. 

Also, we need to keep in mind that Wizards wants the profit too. Once the distributor gets the product, Wizards doesn’t make any more money. So they are going to set that price higher whenever they think the market will bear it. Up to this point, that’s meant the Horizons sets or reprint sets stuffed with value. Now, though, we’re seeing some reaction from them and they are making more money per box. 

The scary thing is, there’s nothing in the future that should slow this down. The ‘regular’ Magic sets might be a blip, but the presence of an Infinity Gauntlet means big-time Marvel crossovers. We’re already seeing Spider-Man variants with classic comic book covers, and those sorts of collectibles have lots of crossover appeal.

Finally, the bots and such should be a fixture of life online for the foreseeable future. As long as there’s profit to be made in being the first to buy out someone who lists an Avatar CBB at $600, there will be scrapers and crawlers flagging and buying faster than humans can click links. This will keep happening until a) technology to block the bots arises or b) there’s no longer profit to be made. I don’t know when (if) either of those things will happen.

The one good thing I can see here is that the folks running bots aren’t looking to do anything but instantly flip. We are seeing some impressive lows for the Final Fantasy SL cards, and I’m looking forward to buying plenty of the recent FIAB promos as well. Even if something sells out online, you’ll usually have chances to get singles at decent prices.

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 a GP and you see a giant flashing ‘CUBE DRAFT’ sign, go over, say hi, and be ready to draft.