Secret Lair Shakeup
Welcome to 2024, everyone! I hope your holidays went well. We may only be a week into the year, but the world of Magic is already abuzz with change.
The News
Moving forward, Secret Lair drops will be printed in set quantities, rather than in a print-to-demand fashion. According to the Wizards of the Coast announcement, this will be applied to “most products,” allowing for some ambiguity and breathing room in how the rollout is going to be initiated.
Overall, we should anticipate this change to apply to any and all Secret Lair products. From Secret Lair Commander decks to our near-omnipresent Drop Series, the print runs for all Secret Lairs are going to be tightening.
The primary justification cited in the announcement is the issue of shipping times. Purchasers frequently wait weeks, if not months, before Secret Lair boxes are shipped out. Beyond the satisfaction with wait times, the long slog between order, production, and shipment is also a significant logistics concern for Wizards, adding an additional level of complexity to the product from the company’s perspective.
Secret Lair Retrospective
In order to understand how this change is going to affect prices for Secret Lair products going forward, we first have to understand where things were with Secret Lair in the immediate lead-up to this change. First, production.
If you’ve been a longtime customer of Secret Lair, you’ve likely noticed that the time between order placement and product receipt has shortened significantly. While this is a wonderful thing for consumers, the back-end side as to why this is the case has very little to do with simply paying for expedited shipping. Rather, it has to do with estimated preorder production. As Wizards of the Coast said in their announcement, they have four years of Secret Lair order data to use as a blueprint for calculating print runs, a technique that has already been in place for a while now as they’ve attempted to address the order-to-arrival timeline. In short, Wizards has been printing a “limited” amount at the outset of most drops for a while now. The significant difference we’ll likely see going forward is going to be the cutoff of subsequent waves of production, corresponding to a slightly larger initial wave. This brings us to the second key issue: order size.
Secret Lair drops have frequently been a hit or miss product, and I don’t just mean in terms of artistic appeal. Outside of a handful of particularly successful (i.e. value-filled) drops, the sellthrough rate and volume of Secret Lair orders has been diminishing over time. This was particularly noticeable with the recent “Festival in a Box'' release, which was headlined by the inclusion of a Secret Lair containing - among other cards -
Despite being both advertised as a limited-run product and containing a highly desirable, valuable card, the posting was available for purchase for an extended period of time, so much so that its value on the secondary market fell significantly in the weeks immediately following its release. Couple this with the preproduction practices mentioned earlier, and the impetus for this change becomes clear: many Secret Lair products have been launched without needing successive print runs.
FOMO and Looking Forward
Now that we know where things were with Secret Lair, what can we expect this print run change to actually do? Well, let’s break it down into two categories, the logistical and the psychological. First, the logistical.
In the immediate future, I don’t really expect this change to have a significant effect on the price of Secret Lairs on the secondary market, nor will it significantly affect the prices of single cards contained within. The reason for this is that, in practice, we’ve already essentially been in a limited print run market for a while now, as many Secret Lairs haven’t needed substantial subsequent print waves. Rather, most sell within their preorder production quotas, so the market quantity reflects a single print run supply. Where things get a bit more interesting, however, is in the secondary category of market pressures: the psychological.
Advertising Secret Lairs as a limited print product increases their perceived desirability and the race for consumers to order them, meaning that we’ll likely see a short-term distortion in the prices of Secret Lairs, relative to the window of their release. This fear of missing out (FOMO) is a real market mover, but usually only for limited windows of time. As such, secondary prices for Secret Lairs may go up slightly as they arrive in consumers’ hands after the release wave, but I doubt that this will substantially alter the pricing model for Secret Lair as an asset category in the long run. In order for that to be the case, the size of this limited print run would need to be significantly reduced, and Wizards of the Coast has made no public mention of doing so.
Wrap Up
I hope this article has helped to clarify where things are going with Secret Lair, both in terms of the general accessibility update as well as the pricing implications as such. Overall, this seems more like a streamlining of current operations rather than a news source of significant concern. Good luck getting your Lairs in 2024, and I’ll see you next time!
Further Reading:
Harvey McGuinness
Harvey McGuinness is a student at Johns Hopkins University who has been playing Magic since the release of Return to Ravnica. After spending a few years in the Legacy arena bouncing between Miracles and other blue-white control shells, he now spends his time enjoying Magic through CEDH games and understanding the finance perspective. He also writes for the Commander's Herald.