How Has the Print Change for Secret Lair Affected Prices So Far?
It’s been a little over half a year since Wizards of the Coast changed
Secret Lair Singles
First off, I’m here to tell you that – overall – the change in sales strategy for Secret Lair has not made the singles contained in these products any more expensive, at least in the long term. To explain why, let’s start off with one of the most recent Secret Lairs to have sold out near-instantaneously: the second Hatsune Miku collaborative release.
Starting off with some background, the Summer Hatsune Miku Secret Lair – containing cards such as
Hatsune Miku is a very popular intellectual property with significant consumer crossover in the Magic player base, as can be seen with Wizard’s other anime-adjacent projects. On top of that, Hatsune Miku’s first collaborative project with Magic, the earlier Spring release, sold out rapidly. This success, coupled with the more ubiquitous card selection for the Summer Secret Lair (e.g., Sol Ring), spurred a fear-of-missing-out in the market as release day approached, compounding the already high demand. The result was a rapid sell-out on release day and a skyrocketing pre-sale price on the secondary market. These prices, however, were very short-lived.
Just like with nearly any Magic product, once copies started to hit players’ hands and enter the market, non-speculative fashion prices began to drop, and drop fast. The Secret Lair may have sold out in a matter of hours, but that didn’t actually translate to noticeably higher prices for the cards within. Sure, the Sol Ring contained within may be $20 more than your average Sol Ring, but so too are nearly every other Secret Lair Sol Ring – both pre- and post-print structure change.
It’s worthwhile to note that this example is of Secret Lair releases at their most problematic – that is, the cases when they sell out on day one. These are the products with the highest demand, the most FOMO, and the most volatility. Other Secret Lairs wherein this isn’t the case, such as the Not a Wolf Secret Lair from the same Superdrop as Hatsune Miku’s Summer release, display less volatility in the immediate aftermath of their release but nonetheless also drop off in value once they hit the secondary in full force. So, while every Secret Lair is limited in print run and predictably going to have single prices drop off, not all of them will be equally volatile in the interim.
Secret Lair Sealed
Speaking of volatility, it’s the sealed side of Secret Lair where the change in release structure has made the most difference, but once again this difference appears to mostly be in the short-term pricing of products.
Now, before I get deeper into this, it is important to talk about the timescales at play here. Sealed products tend to move at a slower rate than singles, meaning that the seven-or-so months of data we have right now for Secret Lair post-change puts us more into the medium timescale than a long perspective (for that, we’d need closer to twelve-to-eighteen months for several Secret Lair drops). Despite this truncated timeline, there are nonetheless some trends that can be pulled from the data.
Overall, the release structure change has resulted in two shifts: increased short-term volatility and decreased long-term weakness, specifically for the weaker Secret Lairs within a drop.
The first of these two changes can be readily summed up by our prior discussion on the Summer Hatsune Miku release. The limited print run structure has increased the fear-of-missing-out, leading to increased speculation, which runs rampant in the limited supply pool up until the point at which Secret Lairs actually make it to people’s hands. In this interim window, prices are artificially high and move rapidly due to secondary market sales being based on incomplete information.
After this period of volatility is over, however, prices begin to stabilize. This isn’t the same degree of collapse seen in Secret Lair singles, wherein some cards can fall by 75%+, but it is nonetheless a notable drop in the market value of a Secret Lair as compared against its speculative value. Taking a look back at the Summer Hatsune Miku release, we can see that the market value for a sealed Rainbow Foil package is around $70, a much more stable price than the $185 speculative price it was briefly trading at for nearly a month before hitting players’ hands.
Looking at comparably weaker Secret Lairs, such as Not a Wolf – which is currently trending at $55 for the sealed Rainbow Foil version – we can see that it’s already starting to firm up, with the cheapest copies of this Secret Lair rapidly disappearing from the market and pushing the market value higher. This makes its current price trajectory (in terms of percentage change) similar to that of Hatsune Miku, despite a significant difference in popularity.
Wrap Up
Although the modern sales structure of Secret Lair has caused significant difficulties for many players in accessing these limited-run drops, this FOMO hasn’t directly translated to skyrocketing prices or completely inaccessible collector items the likes of direct-to-consumer disasters of the past (we’ve come a long way since the first Ravnica Mythic Edition). Instead, prices are more volatile for a brief window, then tend towards normalcy once they hit the market in full force. So, while Magic’s recent Monty Python Secret Lairs may have sold out in a matter of hours, I don’t actually think they will be too terribly expensive in the months to come.
Further Reading:
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.
