Stranger Things Secret Lair
-
https://secretlair.wizards.com/us/product/687521/secret-lair-x-stranger-things
Seems blessedly devoid of things you need to buy for the format and largely for EDH alone. I would not be shocked if a card came up and suddenly had some niche value somewhere (Maybe Will in a flickering death and taxes build?) but overall you can ignore the set unless you want to get into the MTG Finance of it all.
-
@protoaddict I like the clue token.
I'm glad though I don't have to buy every WoTC product released just to play vintage.
Its nice to have a few cards that might be sleepers, or people might spend many fruitless hours trying to break. Not every card has to be great. and I like that. -
interesting things to note for edh, mostly just due to the mana costs of the cards and the fact that they have partner-horsemanship:
-it is now possible to play a 5 color deck with 2 commanders
-it is now possible to play a 4 color deck with lurrus as companionalso i believe the non-branded versions of these cards are going to be in 1-in-8 new capenna set boosters. overall i think we can just ignore them in vintage.
A grave is the safest place to store ill-gotten treasures.
NYSE 3 winner, vintage champs 2015 top 4, vintage champs mox emerald 2021 top 4.
Unban Shahrazad.
-
@blindtherapy said in Stranger Things Secret Lair:
interesting things to note for edh, mostly just due to the mana costs of the cards and the fact that they have partner-horsemanship:
-it is now possible to play a 5 color deck with 2 commanders
-it is now possible to play a 4 color deck with lurrus as companionalso i believe the non-branded versions of these cards are going to be in 1-in-8 new capenna set boosters. overall i think we can just ignore them in vintage.
Is that really the number? I was under the impression that it was 1 in 8 cards printed from the list, but that the list was already one in every 4 packs, there for it was 1 in every 32 set booster which is less than 1 per box on average.
-
@protoaddict https://clips.twitch.tv/YummySparklingStarHumbleLife-TM1Ty6pEGlv42lDH
1 in 8 set boosters are going to be these, 1 in 8 will have a list card. previously, 1 in 4 packs had a list card.
half of all list slots will be these 8 cards, then. -
Nice to see that there will not be mechanically exclusive secret lair cards.
-
@botvinik said in Stranger Things Secret Lair:
Nice to see that there will not be mechanically exclusive secret lair cards.
I remain of the mindset that it was never going to be a big deal if there were. Walking dead sold so many copies you can readily get them and the secondary market prices on them are no more out of line than any of the other secret lairs which are just swag copies of existing cards.
There are probably more Ricks floating around out there for most players that want them than there are ABU duals, Tabernacles, Wheel of Fortunes, etc. And to be able to buy the card you want for your deck for 30-40 dollars a copy and then get a buncha extra stuff to sell back is still cheaper than many standard mythics right now.
-
That's true for this release but what about the next or the one after and until the invention of dredge there were more bazzars than buyers. Its bad for the game and any time they dont print mehc-unique cards out of a set proper is a win for us.
-
@botvinik They print mechanically unique cards all the time now out of proper standard legal booster sets.
Commander decks
Planeswalker decks (when they did them)
Secret Lairs
Horizons sets
Jumpstart
MTG ArenaNone of them are reserve list and none of them are unlimited printings either. Most people have more issues right now getting Dockside Extortionist than they do anything from Walking dead.
There certainly is a threshold for when a mechanically unique card becomes an issue, but it is almost always going to be because of underprinting than how it was released. If you needed to do something to get the secret lairs that was not just spend money, win a raffle or play x number of tourneys or something, then yea it would be a problem, but it is not the case.
Secret Lair is a product that is sold to the public on a limited time frame. Saviors of Kamigawa was a product that was sold to the public on a limited time frame. I'll bet you the availability of Oboro, Palace in the Clouds is more hurtful to any given eternal format of magic than the accessibility of anything from Walking Dead.
-
That's true for today but for how long? See the bazaars example the issue is not the single wrong thing but rather minimizing the exclusivity of product. This is where I take issue with your comparison SoK was available in significant print for months during which time more would be printed if shortages developed and the cards could be extensively played and tested in and outside tournaments. Secret Lairs are available for a weekend, not available through events like draft, not available through standard retailers, no additional will be printed, and they give wizards a perverse incentive to print good cards in the hardest to get way. At a point a quantitative difference in availability becomes a qualitative difference in availability. Remember when bazaars had no value, cards can sleep for a long time and there is a lot less miscellaneous secret lair opening than booster opening.
-
@botvinik said in Stranger Things Secret Lair:
Secret Lairs are available for a weekend, not available through events like draft, not available through standard retailers, no additional will be printed, and they give wizards a perverse incentive to print good cards in the hardest to get way.
I'm going to treat you saying 'secret lair' as 'mechanically distinct cards appearing for the first time in a secret lair', because that's what this is about, not the gravecrawler in a slinky dress or the assassin's trophy that looks like a metal album. I'll use the same shorthand.
Many cards have been printed exactly once in a commander deck, planeswalker deck, magic game night, or other non-draft product. any card printed in, say, a 2018 commander deck is a card that you have to find on the secondary market, because your LGS likely doesn't have any left (dockside extortionist). mana crypt went 21 years between its first printing and its next non-judge promo printing; its distribution is probably closest to the secret lairs if you're concerned about things like 'was there a period of time when I could find this in sealed product at my local store'.
I'd point out that, at least local to me, stores seem to put in orders for a good number of secret lairs so they can sell them later. I'm not sure how widespread this is, but it is effectively something of a retail product.
I think the idea of any of these or future such cards being sleepers that later enable something broken, ballooning to ridiculous prices because of scarcity can be more or less disregarded. these cards will be in new capenna set boosters with non-branded versions; as game pieces they'll be plenty available, i think by the math given not much worse than standard mythics. long-term prices aren't going to be the issue.
No, i think any card availability issues relating to these are going to be when a card is an instant legacy staple on release (vintage is much less relevant). remember 2013, when true-name nemesis came out? it was a disaster, because stores had to order commander decks in the set of 5 decks, the grixis one (with TNN) would sell out instantly, and they would be left with a bunch of other product and not able to just order more of the grixis one. if we consider commander 2013 as purely a distribution method for TNN, plenty of players would probably have preferred 'you give wotc money, they print to demand, and everyone gets their cards at the same time' to scrambling around for supposedly in-print products going for twice their msrp.SLs are, between the day the cards are known and the last day you can order them, up for a few weeks. a few months later, the cards actually arrive. a few months after that, the cards will also be found in set boosters of a standard legal set. both runs are print to demand, though the initial SL run counts all the demand up front and prints exactly that much.
I don't like the branded SL cards because it is indeed a cheap cash grab tie in product, but if the plan going forward is to have in-booster magic-branded versions of these cards within 6 months, I think it's much less likely to be a card availability concern for the game overall than cards that get printed in one commander deck and then never again.
-
@blindtherapy I have no issue with these this discussion actually grew out of me expressing relief at the fact they would be in capena boosters, exclusive printing not the existence of secret lairs are what I take issue with.
For the lair exclusives the sleeper ballon effect you wayed off is still highly live and I am not a fan of the printing of things like dockside in highly limited numbers but there was a lot more than a weekend to buy docksides and you got to play with it during the window it was available.
You say a lot of things that make sense but you seem to be aiming your arguments at a case I am not making.
-
@botvinik said in Stranger Things Secret Lair:
This is where I take issue with your comparison SoK was available in significant print for months during which time more would be printed if shortages developed and the cards could be extensively played and tested in and outside tournaments. Secret Lairs are available for a weekend, not available through events like draft, not available through standard retailers, no additional will be printed, and they give wizards a perverse incentive to print good cards in the hardest to get way. At a point a quantitative difference in availability becomes a qualitative difference in availability
I am going to disagree with you here simply because the number printed are reflective of the demand, pure and simple. Yes SOK had a larger print window but was also during a period of time when magic literally almost died, and the player base was much lower than it is now. TWD is a set that literally a bunch of resellers bought 10 of at a time to sell them on the secondary market, and was at the time the number 1 selling Secret Lair (maybe still is?) If the players wanted to get in and buy 10 copies each or any given secret lair there would be literally 2.5 times the supply needed for the playbase.
I also genuinely do not know anyone who could tell me "I did not oder the set because I could not get to a computer for a day", and there was plenty of warning that it was coming to give people time to plan around or set up a shill buyer. It isn't even the case anymore as the SLs have a week to a month long window now.
I know WOTC does not release numbers to the public typically but I would not be shocked to hear that there are more copies of Rick in circulation than there are any given rare from a poorly selling set like SOK or even just earlier non reserve list sets that did not have the player base that the game does now. Rick is something like a $50 card and the rest of the stuff in the set is mostly chaff, and I don't think that is too bad a price point for most serious players who either want him for EDH or for Legacy humans, considering there are plenty other cards in those decks that cost much more.
If anything, the absolute biggest issue with mechanically unique Secret Lairs like TWD is that there are no non foil copies for people who are serious about playing them in a tournament setting, and even that seems to have been rectified now with the Stranger Things set having both versions.
