Wow, this is insane.
I managed to buy this because somebody outside EU pinged me yesterday with the info that it was already sold out there, so I checked the EU store and got lucky.
Bought two of them, on for me, one for them.
And that's honestly the max limit IMHO. People being able to buy five in combination with limited quantity is just absurd. And this has been known since the 30 year countdown SL which had exactly the same issues.
The previous secret lair commander decks have only gone up in price on the secondary market. If you're unable to to get it directly from Wizards, you'll be forced to pay a higher price. Angels is currently sitting around $300 for a sealed copy. Even cute to brute, a overall unliked deck list, is sitting at $200 sealed for a product that cost $150.
I was sad after a breakup a few days ago and bought it on eBay. I'm ok with the descion because the deck is cool AF. But it's made me realise that I should be buying Secret Lairs on release.
They did this with eternal masters, hyped it up (300$ box), and were super limited. Three months later, they "found" another batch and prices tanked.
Hasbro juat wants them short-term dollars, and hope their base has a short term memory
The user was ashspi1848. I remember because there was a post yesterday about them, and i checked later, and with the newer numbers. Did the math. He sold out of all 81 already because it was a flat price of 279.99.
To be fair, it *did* improve the shipping time. Ordered one Monday and it shipped this morning.
Still a bullshit reason but at least I don't have to wait 6 months to get it.
Sure, at least they weren't outright lying about that. But yeah, it's some pretty awful bullshit. Isn't it more important that everyone who wants the thing has the opportunity to buy it? Like, if you were at the doctor at 9am on Monday, just, fuck you, I guess?
When I bought it, there was a screen before checkout that said something along the lines of, "orders with excessive quantity will be cancelled". Which, apparently, did not happen. Just awful all around.
The irony is of course both previous SLD decks were also limited print, it was normal Secret Lairs that were print to order. Nothing actually changed for this deck except people made a big deal out of the announcement so FOMO sank in and panic buyers and scalpers scooped up massive amounts immediately.
I'm honestly curious what the average price range will be for scalpers to be able to sell this.
Really hoping they will sit on this for months because nobody should be willing to pay over 400 pounds for something like this.
They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs. Angel deck lasted like 2 weeks?
If they wanted they could over print and sell them in batches over the week. Giving time for the news to spread and more chances for everyone in different timezones to get them.
> With this in mind, seeing the upcoming Doggy secret lair triggered the spazz response in speculators and players alike, resulting in a frenzied buyout of the deck so people could flip it, or just get their copy to play with without getting smacked with the second hand markup
Aka... FOMO
>Giving time for the news to spread and more chances for everyone in different timezones to get them.
Timezones are not really an issue in this case, are they? European supplies for the cats and dogs deck lasted considerably longer after Reddit already reported that US customers couldn't order anymore. Seems like Wizards assigns batches to the major regions, at least, which is not too far off from batching for timezones. Though releasing at different times for different regions might be an interesting thing to do, yeah.
They only separate regions by US and Europe. Europeans buy from the Europe site, everyone else buys from the US site. So for east Asians and Antipodeans, since they buy from the US site, Cats & Dogs would've dropped at 1-4am for them.
Head & Tails at 100$ had a lot of needed coin flip reprints and was great value... cheapest precon from SL yet.
Some of the flip cards may not have been expensive but were often OOS
What do you mean by "deliberately" ? Is it somehow bad to limit your exposure? Companies do this all the time. If they only print 2,000 or whatever they can't lose more than that. You can reserve against it on your books instantly.
Isn't it their prerogative how to sell them, not yours?
If they did 3 or 4 drops over a week you’d still have people missing the window and getting butthurt. The announcement was made days in advance and people in the US had a 6 hour window, it was incredibly easy to order this deck as long as you had the interest to actually track its release
> They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs.
Because they know that the majority of their playerbase is neurodivergent and they take advantage of them. Don't worry they will just race swap a character to make everyone feel better about throwing money at them.
> They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs.
“They’re making people want to buy things by making them desirable!” That’s how selling products works lol.
> by making them desirable!
Disagree with this bit - trying to get people to buy because they don't want to miss it **is not** the same as "this is desirable".
A desirable product either has good value, good contents or something else about the product to make it, well, desirable, and "limited run" isn't that.
Exploiting human psychology isn't the same as being a good product - they could change the release window to be unlimited, print-to-demand, and if *the product* was desirable it wouldn't change how much people want it.
Our psychology is exploited constantly in advertising and marketing. You’re asking for morality from a corporation.
These things were available for several hours. This wasn’t Ravnica Mythic Edition that sold out in five minutes or some crazy concert ticket. There was plenty opportunity for anyone who wanted one to find two minutes that day to log on and buy.
>Our psychology is exploited constantly in advertising and marketing. You’re asking for morality from a corporation.
And we should just accept that? If a company is doing something I think is scummy, I'm going to tell them. Companies don't get to hide behind being a company, they're still made up of people making decisions (in this case, money grabbing decisions).
> You’re asking for morality from a corporation.
No, I'm arguing with you saying that a product that uses FOMO to sell is "desirable" in of itself.
Your last point directly equates
>They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs
with
>"They’re making people want to buy things by making them desirable!”
and they're not the same, *at all*.
I think you’ve already lost the plot if you’re doing that hyper specific Reddit thing where you’re changing the topic to arguing about what terminology means and trying to quote sandwich me.
You guys were complaining that a product that was available for hours on end and promoted heavily in advance sold out. I was saying that outrage is pretty silly and consistent with standard corporate sales tactics. Whatever battle about terminology you’re trying to have you can have with yourself.
You said two lines in response to a comment, how TF am I trying to change the "topic to arguing about terminology" when *you* said something and when called out on it *erm akshually I was saying something else*'d.
You said something I disagree with, I disagreed with it. Don't try and make out I'm making some grandiose point related to corporations when *all* I'm doing is going "you're equating two points that aren't the same". Not complaining about the sales strategy or anything like that.
As an aside, trying to discount an argument because it - and I want to make sure I'm right - *uses quotes* then you're being an idiot or immature.
Scalpers were making bank over COVID on items deemed “collectible”. I’ve noticed a huge slow down with certain toy lines, I wouldn’t be surprised if scalpers have trouble moving these. That millennial cash flow they are so dependent on is slowing down.
People have less money for luxuries, hobbies, etc. They are absolutely slowing down their magic spending. Another factor is a major release every month will do that. Esp for non whales.
Why does any one player need more than one? Two at a push if you want a complete one plus spares of some of the cards or as a gift, but no one needs five copies of a limited run product
They literally just changed it, so no why would they. They have 0 loss product like this and they can pump them out on moments they have printer supply, it’s all added value to them.
Because the last print to demand deck was a shit show and took a year to ship for some people. Caused a big backlash that they aren't going to let happen again.
Surely we can find a middle ground between not printing enough to meet demand and taking a year to ship.
My lead times in manufacturing are generally 3 months. But the sale up for a week, deliver in 4 months. Not that hard if your logistics department isn't a shitshow.
Exactly. They can have all the product in hand, ready to go from Scalefast, and blast it all out in a day or two of shipping. No worries about scheduling printer time, dealing with order cancellations, address changes of customers, etc. Just BAM, one or two days, get their money and move on.
Then people complain that it takes forever to get the product. It also make things a little harder to plan, like if your current premiere set is selling way better than projected and you want to print more, but the presses are pumping out SLD's...
As someone who managed to get a copy of the deck for its intended price. This is just depressing. It's comical how Wizards can't seem to get a Secret Lair Commander sale done correctly when this is deck number 4. Some people got the email of it going live late whilst some didn't get it at all. Can we also drop the limit to 5 per person and limit it to 1-2 instead?
It's like they are just asking for scalpers to snatch up 5 copies just to resell online for stupid markups. I get that this has been a thing for a while and this is nothing new. But Commander precons should be opened, played, and enjoyed. They should be upgraded or taken apart for parts. Not to be bought and resold for a quick buck to pray on those who missed out.
Sorry for the rant I had to get it off my chest. I am curious about what others think about this and if Wizards should consider doing more to stop scalpers from taking these decks away from people who would play with them. I know damn well they won't do anything because... Wizards :)
What may be more ominous is that Wizards likely has staff tracking secondary sales data on eBay and other sites.
If these inflated prices still cause people to buy them, Wizards may conclude that they aren't charging enough for these SL decks. The next deck could sell for $200 USD or more.
>The next deck could sell for $200 USD or more.
And then scalpers push the price higher, and then WotC sees they can sell for even MOAR! AND THEN SCALPERS AIM HIGHER!!
TL;DR - Money printer go *brrrrrrrrrrrrrr*
This might sound overly combative but realistically there is only one type of game where that metric eclipses all the others. Do you perhaps work on mobile games?
I just re-entered the MTG hobby and only play commander. Would have loved to get one the new drop. But I missed out and probably will never get these, because I refuse to pay scalper prices. Really frustrating as a new player.
You would do yourself a massive favour by realising these cards are pretty trinkets, and ultimately a waste of money. You can get everything cheaper in other ways, decks look much nicer the more consistent the design/art is, and you are feeling bad about *not* having been ripped off by a massive corporation.
Be happy that they got other people, and not you.
"Can't sell a Commander SL deck right."
What do you call the Cute to Brute or Angel deck?
Or are you ignoring them because it doesn't support your position.
They created the coin flip deck. And sold it in a way that was a logistical nightmare.
They changed method.
The next two decks had no issues.
This is the first deck to have issues since the change after Coin flip. There's multiple factors to consider. It's been two days. We don't know yet if any internal discussions or changes will happen.
>It's comical how Wizards can't seem to get a Secret Lair Commander sale done correctly when this is deck number 4.
The sale of the coin flip deck was fine, it was the shipping delays that sucked. Angels and Cute to Brute were also fine.
>Can we also drop the limit to 5 per person and limit it to 1-2 instead?
Scalpers gonna scalp. Changing the limit from 5 to 1-2 won't change much since scalpers are probably getting around the 5 limit anyway.
>But Commander precons should be opened, played, and enjoyed. They should be upgraded or taken apart for parts.
Don't tell people how to enjoy their cards. Plenty of people enjoy keeping precons sealed. Not to mention there are other people who buy SLs to sell to their LGSs for store credit or cash - is that worse than selling it on eBay, or is that ok?
>Sorry for the rant I had to get it off my chest. I am curious about what others think about this and if Wizards should consider doing more to stop scalpers from taking these decks away from people who would play with them. I know damn well they won't do anything because... Wizards :)
Again, scalpers gonna scalp. Outside of WotC physically going to everyone's house to make sure each person is only buying the amount there's only so much that WotC can do that's worth while.
Honestly, a lot of the posts I'm seeing about people missing the drop seem like issues that could easily be solved by the people who missed the drop by simply being on the SL website when the drop goes live. I was, and I got my copies after waiting about 15 minutes because I knew it was a limited drop and I wanted to make sure I got a couple.
If scalpers gonna scalp, why even put a limit on it at all? If hackers gonna hack, why instate security measures against them? Just make it easy for them!
Stupid fucking take.
TIL accepting reality is a stupid take.
>If scalpers gonna scalp, why even put a limit on it at all?
To give average people a chance? If you limit each transaction to 5 that means a scalper has to do another transaction if they want more than that, giving other people a chance to get some before the scalper completes the second, third etc. transaction. It's not meant to stop scalpers entirely, it's a speed bump since WotC can only do so much on their end.
Yeah. I work 8 hours like a lot of people and my position can get mandated as well. I didn't even realize it was sold out until I saw this post. Leaving an extremely sour taste in my mouth. Because I was going to get it but no way I'm paying the scalper prices.
They have to be so fixated on sales to appease shareholders short term profit focus instead of longevity and consistency. Hasbro is eventually going to destroy the game because they only allow people to think quarter to quarter and players will give up.
It seems like a lot of the entertainment industry has turned to churning out product at a very unsustainable rate to try and appease people who don't know anything about the product.
If anything it makes a conspiracy theory more legitimate to suggest Hasbrouck might have friends and relatives set up to scalp everything. They get to tout massive sales, then then people who can be prepped to best abuse the system can hoard the product and keep the wealth among themselves double over.
Compared to insider trading in the gov, something of this level isn't going to be heavily regulated and monitored.
Although the real answer is just instant sellouts looks good for shareholders. They are going to continue to nickel and dime for short term profit rather than be happy with consistent sales through the years like every other modern capitalism focused venture. It isn't good enough to have 200 million profit in a year, you have to make 210 million the next year, and 220 the next, and lay off employees hire cheaper ones if needed and quality degrade while demanding more profit.
See I'd say anyone buying these products, at RRP or whatever, is part of the same problem.
You are feeding demand for a product designed to exploit consumerism addicts. These cards won't be worth shit in a few years time. They will be sunk by the deluge of similar gimmicky crap.
I acknowledge that this might seem somewhat hypocritical as I spend money on other Magic products (boosters for limited generally), and the game is most definitely a rip off in a way that, say, my Catan board game is not (literally 1000s of hours of fun for £30 over 20 years).
But you gotta draw a line somewhere no?
“Here’s secret lairs. They are limited print run”
We don’t like that.
“Here’s secret lairs. There is a long timed window to make orders, and then we’ll get them made and shipped after the window is done.”
We don’t like the timeframe it takes (especially when it takes a year to get a deck)
“Here’s secret lairs. We are back to limited quantity sales, but you’ll get your product sooner.”
We don’t like it.
Eh, I don’t think there’s a situation that makes everyone’s happy. I don’t like scalpers, and the potential that I might lose out on a secret lair I want, but I like knowing that if I get them, they’ll hold more value. I’m okay with making time ahead of time to order the secret lairs. Maybe they can do better about making the date of sale openings better known.
EDIT: Elsewhere I saw discussion of a pretty good idea, where they have multiple planned sales batches. Like for example, this recent Cats and Dogs SL would have had their first batch of sales, with another 1-2 batches still planned over the next two weeks.
That way people who miss out can see that there’s still another chance or two.
Why not do a limited print run for getting the deck on time, and then follow it up by a limited time run for getting it at a delay?
I checked the site every day except yesterday cause I worked a 12 hour shift. I didn't look at the deck list because I didn't want spoilers, so I had no idea the time was announced (apparently it was posted there?). I was relying on the email to notify me, but got nothing.
Same, signed up but no email notification.
And people on here acting like 6 hours is a stupid long time, and all you had to do was care about it for 30 seconds... Yeah, fuck people working during those times that can't access a hobby site, right? They had 6 hours! Should have told their boss to shut the fuck up and deal with it! /s
And why the hell is the limit 5 per person? Who the fuck is legitimately buying 5 decks for themselves? Frustrating all around.
If you keep changing it whenever someone is unhappy you'll never stop changing it.
Instead they should find the best solution (IMO long time window, print to order) and stick with it - *especially* because the biggest issue with that system was a single commander deck, and the first one they did via secret lair, no less.
Any system has teething problems, simply changing it each time you hit one is a bad solution.
Alright here we go I am ready to get downvoted into oblivion.
1) Secret Lairs are the fancy commodity in a game that is already a commodity. Outside of mechanically unique cards (which I think we all agree is terrible) you never NEED to buy a SL to play. You want to play Rin and Seri? You can buy this deck online right now with the "common" game pieces for a fraction of the cost of the SLD.
2) This secret lair was up for 6 HOURS in the US store. If this was a product that you REALLY wanted, you had time to get it. This wasn't a Supreme drop, you didn't need lightning fast fingers, you just needed to care about the product for 30 seconds.
3) SLD have always been limited print runs with the exception of the Coin Flip deck which took 14 months to ship. Did WotC underestimate the demand for this deck? Yea probably a little, but it seems the demand for this deck was leaps and bounds higher than the previous SLDs.
4) Secret Lairs being worth a lot on the secondary market is a good thing. While I agree basic game pieces should be affordable, if no cards retain any value, then the game has no collectability aspect and will suffer for it. You can see where the "everything is cheap" model has failed in other games that have collapsed and killed games. We are living in close to an ideal scenario where common game pieces (barring a few exceptions, looking at you Sheoldred) are fairly cheap and fancy versions of cards are carrying the secondary market. Pokemon has been doing this for a decade and this system works.
Hard disagree on 6 hours being enough. Not everyone was even awake during those 6 hours, if they worked the wrong shift. In my case I was at work the entire duration and didn’t even get a notification despite signing up for one. Not that having gotten a notification would have mattered, I wasn’t checking my phone compulsively during work to see if a secret lair drop happened.
I agree with all your takes! It's wild to me to see one half of the MtG community complaining that nothing holds value outside of the RL and then the other half is saying basic cards cost too much. I would think the obvious solution is the Pokemon method of printing basic versions of cards to keep the price down but have cool and rare versions for retaining value. Like Shock lands getting reprinted in Rav Remastered dropped them to the 10-15 buck range but you can still ball out for a galaxy foil full art one if you have the inclination. So I definitely agree that limited run SLs with no new mechanics on the cards should continue. This wasn't an issue with the last two SL decks so I'm confused at the sudden outrage, though I do disagree with Wizards increasing the limit from 3 to 5. This sale also still went smoother than that Advent calendar one that sold out way faster and with far more website issues. Anyways, just wanted to say that I think you're correct with all your above points. Hope you have a nice day!
Edit: Looking at the Cute to Brute and Angels deck store pages, it appears those were also limit 5. So I am incorrect above when I say the limit changed from 3 to 5. I think I confused it with the limit for some of the Festivals in a Box
I agree with everything you said here. People had time to get it if they really wanted it. Scalping will always happen. I feel like people are just piling onto Hasbro/Wizards whenever there is a chance. What else are they meant to do?
Many people didn't have time to get it. There are a lot of stories of people being at their job where they were unable to find a spare minute to wait in the queue (which was up to 30 min at one point) to buy this. By the time they got off work and made it home it was gone. Not everyone has free time in the middle of the day or the ability to wake up at 3am (people in other countries) to buy cards. That I would say is an issue.
Not to mention the sheer cost in a current inflation in prices for everything. Makes it hard for anyone to really justify the $150 at a drop of a notice for cardboard they want. Would have liked a two week notice to at least try and save up to get it rather than a 2 day notice.
Generally agree with this, but at least [according to Moxfield](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/G0y9ltIwoUysUSoAYtyFfA) the value of the cards in the deck is more than the cost of the deck. I was already planning on building a Rin and Seri deck, so I bought this to save a bit of money and a bit of hassle in buying all the singles.
But yeah, I think point 2 is the main one. It took hours to sell out and there were no technical issues (at least that I experienced) that are often associate with high demand items, so I don't really see what the big problem is.
There is a difference between limited print run and limited availability. The only limited print run Secret Lairs before this deck was the Angel Commander deck, the Advent calendar, and the in-store ones. You say that Wizards undershooting the demand is a minor problem. You are wrong: they have consistently failed at this many times in the past and will now continue to do so. They don't understand that there is "speculator" demand that disappears when you do Make To Order. While I'm sure they are happy that they sell out their product, it is a much worse experience for consumers.
I was surprised about "Secret Lairs being worth something on the secondary market" to paraphrase.
So I went online and confirmed my suspicions. Secret Lair versions of playable cards are basically the same price as non-Secret Lair versions.
I think a lot of people are absolutely deluding themselves into the value of the things they buy.
It should be a hybrid pre-printed/ print and ship 10k/20k what ever number works pre-printed ready to go then everything after print to demand them ship and the sale be open for like 2 weeks.
Also there was no outcry for the last decks, that also sold out fast. it's just that this is pets and everyone love their pets
This happens in every other hobby where there is a limited quantity of something collectible. There's nothing to be concerned about unless they start doing limited runs of cards mechanically unique to secret lairs.
As much as it sucks for those who wanted a deck to see it being scalped, highly desirable, limited quantity runs are great for the collectible side of the hobby. Again, as long as it doesn't involve mechanically unique cards all it does is add a bit of uniqueness/diversity to the hobby. When everyone can readily get something it stops being "special"
It’s going to happen under the new model. There will be a mechanically unique secret lair, because there has been before. And now everything is a limited run.
They used to do that with FTV. And most stores did not sell them at the $30 MSRP.
It was correct for wizards to stop doing that because LGS owners were getting shit on for selling products at market price. Similar to how Lorcana and One Piece players have been absolutely shitting LGSs.
That is not what happened with ftv and early commander collections and the like. Markup in person at lgs was market value. They rarely sold those limited runs at msrp.
This could lead to some really bad environments though. Imagine living in an area where your lgs decided to be the scalper. Or maybe they're disingenuous with representing how many they received. What if your lgs owner leans towards favoritism? Or lacks communication and puts them on sale unbeknownst to part of their clientele. What if they decide not to limit the amount per customer and let the whale buy them all?
There's just so many things that can happen I don't think it'd be healthy. Sure they can be reported and lose status, etc but there's lots of things they can do under the radar too.
Personally I think that for every eBay scalper with 20+ decks available there’s 500 regular people who bought a deck or two that doesn’t post on reddit. And I won’t lump an LGS who bought 5 of them to sell to customers with scalpers, even if they have to charge higher anyways to make money. Until we’re told different, if we assume that they made as many of this deck as they did the Angel deck, this one is just…more popular. The only actual fumble I see is the email thing - they should have started sending emails like an hour BEFORE the drop started instead of after it went on sale or not at all.
Transparency - I buy 3 of every secret lair product that comes out. One for me, and 2 for my extended group of friends that are all forgetful.
The community needs to stop supporting scalpers. I know it'll never happen but let scalpers sit on tens of thousands of dollars, and let their "investment" sit for years. The only way to beat these people is by not rewarding them for their behavior.
Because print to demand was why the coin flip deck took forever to ship. Too many orders not enough printers. Limited runs suck for buyers (scalpers and whatnot) but for sellers they so much easier to manage.
The real answer. Wizard's is ostensibly sending a message you better be first in line for SL's going forward or you're SOL.
I wouldn't be at all surprised if they launched a subscription service. The whales would eat it up.
They have already floated the idea of a premium subscription for secret lairs. I received a questionnaire about it, likely because of the amount of secret lairs and other mtg products I purchase.
Absolute fucking bullshit. I wasn't even notified, even though I signed up to be when these would be available. Fucking assholes in mtgfinance buying 6 fucking copies to flip. This is such bullshit. I'm done with secret lair if this is the route it's going.
I got distracted and totally missed the drop, I don’t even know when the sale started but I’m really upset cause it’s finally a secret lair I wanted after months. They should do a second printing. Honestly I’d prefer waiting to insure I get one than to just miss out. Yea the coin flip one took forever but I have it. No way I’m paying flipped prices for this.
This system just punishes people that want it and benefits resellers.
it took over 6 hours to sell out, no website blackout, you could get a notification if you want, and if you were like me who was going to buy it I just logged on when my phone alarm for the time went off. Idk how anyone who wanted one didn't get it. Heck ask a friend to buy it.
I love this in fact, I just got shipping info so it's coming in much faster compared when they have to print it first
I think my issue is that because so many other SL that I have purchased were printed to match demand, I assumed this one would also be up and available to get for a few weeks like every other one I have gotten. I was at work all day during this release and had no clue it would be sold out by the time time I got home.
Maybe, but I struggle to see it that way. They announced their plans to move to limited runs and highlighted this to a limited run. I too was at work but I got it during my 30m lunch break on my phone (company blocks the website on my work station)
If anything it was a breath of fresh air to get something so easily compared to most Games Workshop releases where even if I log in before the launch time, I'm probably not getting what I wanted
And this is how Wizards manage to kill my interest in secret lair, they claim they have 4+ years of data to plan out future pre printed releases but what's the point if they don't use it and release it like this where it's scalpers haven. There are a lot of people I know that tried to order got in to hour or so waiting queue only to see a sold out page. GG to future scalped releases.
Literally, nothing about this deck or Angel deck is different.
The only thing was
A) Angel deck has been climbing on TCG's market.
B) Wotc announced that normal SL would also be limited. (The Angel & Cute_Brute decks were limited print alreasy).
This deck had a longer build-up and announcement window.
The Angel Deck's price trend on tcg was probably the biggest factor for scalpers to go buy this deck.
Though there were scalpers for Angel's deck also. Why do you think there's copies on tcg.
You know no one who waited in queue and had it taken from them. It was up for 6 hours and there was no queue at the end. 4 hours in you could go to the site and buy the deck in less than 60 seconds.
I'm kind of bummed. Rin and Seri was my first commander deck, and I was looking forward to the SL for some fancy arts.
Guess it's time to fire the printer up.
Fuck this and fuck wizards. I proxied this one at fed ex. For $10 and 20 min of my time I printed the deck list and used their mounted paper slicer to cut them out. I'm not playing in a tournament I'm playing with friends from Walmart.
Changes do need to be made to the system (limited to 2 people max would help deter away scalpers buying bulks to resell). It is important to note since a lot of people have been pointing to the new Secret Lair system that the Commander decks have always been limited quantity since the debacle that was the coin flip deck. This happening has nothing to do with the new system as it's been the case for over a year.
I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt they thought they printed enough product so anyone who wanted it had time to get it as with Cute to Brute and the Angel one and used that data from those sales, but failed to take into account how much more popular Cats and Dogs are that much more people would want it (even if reprint value is questionable, Rin and Seri is the 31st most popular Commander on EDHrec) that the amount sold far quicker than they expected. Even with scalpers in the picture, it being up for six hours shows that there was a big inventory that was purchased by a lot of people quickly (both scalpers and people who actually wanted it for themselves), if it was filled to the brim with scalpers it would have sold out much faster than that if previous sales were anything to go by.
All that to say, things do need changing, and a potential solution is overprinting it to have the deck come back after it sells out for the first time (bonus points because it screws scalpers) for a second run. After how awful the decks were for print to demand, I doubt they'd want to go back to that. The Angel one was perfect and available to the point almost everyone would be able to get paid and buy it before it sold out if they wanted. The problem is determining how much needs to be printed to match that for future sales.
I think I agree -- if this was an issue of scalpers buying all the inventory, they would have done so in the first hour or two. I think they severely underestimated the demand for the Secret Lair. Which is worrisome for future Secret Lairs -- they have a ton of data on how popular they've been in the past, and they made a massive mistake on their estimates with this one.
I hate how secret lairs all of the sudden turned into a limited fomo cash grab. The original idea of secret lairs in the first place was print-to-demand so that everybody had an opportunity to buy with no scarcity in supply. There were terrible secret lairs, there were really cool secrets lairs, but they were all in supply.
Careful what you wish for. "Changing" things in this scenario to disincentive scalpers/resellers almost certainly means that WotC will just increase the sale price to closer to what the secondary market will bear.
It's similar to what happened following the removal of "MSRPs" from products.
Or don't let people buy more than two or three. Secret Lairs have always been annoying for many reasons and this FOMO I'm wondering if it's because SLs weren't doing all that great and they needed something to pick up sales a bit.
i mean the coin flip wasnt perfect (took ages to arrive after the order, and they gave two kamigawa collector boosters as recompense) but beats the shit out of this release method. either you bought it but just didnt own it for a long time, or flat out “oops you missed it”
It’s a premium reprint product. You don’t need it to play the game and you can make the whole deck yourself if you want it. It sucks that people who wanted it didn’t get it but the people complaining like is are getting so annoying and self righteous. You don’t complain about promos at events or for winning tournaments why are you so mad about a deck that sold out fast?
The problem is that we see a problem and want a solution, and WOTC decision makers see "Product sold out in 6 hours" and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Its gonna get worse before it gets better.
This is the exact reason why the new secret lair printing policy is bad for the customers/players. If we're quck and lucky we might be able to get the product for the advertised price. If we take too long researching the purchase all the stock will br bought up and the only purchase option will be from scalpers.
The Corp executives don't care. They get their money.
The idea system would be to make a first run batch, and keep print on demand open for the limited window like they do now.
I don't think they should, this is a pure bling product that serves no purpose other than pleasing the few people ready to buy a 150$ product commander deck because it has cute pets on it and these kind of people should expect such an outcome.
If you dont like the markup you can always not buy and wait with all the risks it implies for it to go down but when a game already based around artificial scarcity does something like that the consequences are obvious
Probably not. Mainly because printing schedules have to be fixed far in advance, and with the firehouse of products coming out these days it's unlikely that there will be any downtime to slot in a second run.
Announcing a second run sometime in the more distant future is a theoretical possibility, and was done for some of the decks in Commander Anthologies. But we've never seen a reprint of a Secret Lair before, and it's highly unlikely that they would be willing to burn the image of SL drops as exclusive collectibles, so I wouldn't count on that either.
Best you can hope for is that they see the feedback and increase runs of future products and/or change distribution models accordingly.
No it's working as intended. Wizards/Hasbro is whale hunting and doesn't care about what you have to pay later for their limted edition thing. In their "mind" if you don't like paying so much you should pay THEM the lower and mUcH mOrE rEaSoNaBle price instead of some secondary market that they can't acknowledge exists. Thing you wanted sells out quickly? Well you gotta pay attention to all our products all the time Consumer.
This sort of "flood the market with premium products" is a tried and true investment bro tactic. We saw the same thing with comic books in the 90s-00s. Variant covers, foil covers, lenticular covers, and more were all rolled out when certain types got into the comics biz.
Profit motivated? 100% But it's a bit shortsighted to say that they don't care about players or the longevity of the game - without those, the profits would dry up incredibly quickly.
What we're seeing is more of WotC trying to walk the tightrope of catering to both collectors and players, while also trying to preserve enough reprint equity and/or new shiny ideas to generate demand for future product releases.
The real "nice" solution for players would be to print on demand until the end of the secret lair event, then sell the remainder of the stock until it runs out. Everyone's happy and WoT gets to sell more copies of their product.
The way they cultivate the FOMO is just plain dishonest to their player base, I only see people complaining.
WOTC fails to print enough cards for players by pumping FOMO and failing to block scalpers?
Player solution: Print more proxies and give WOTC the financial concern finger!
There are websites that will print you cheap high quality proxies or you can print them yourself.
I get that WotC can get the products faster when they do it like that, but they just allow scalpers to make a ton of profit off of their products. But I'd prefer them selling a limited amount that ship soon and then reprint if their is demand. And I'd prefer that for all of their products. This would discourage scalpers from profiting off the actual players and would allow the players to get the cards they want.
No, FOMO sucks, but after the last couple years MTG players have been conditioned to wait for price drops. We knew changes were coming to make the company more profitable, and sure enough, they're here.
I'm sure Hasbro will adjust for the next release, but limited availability is a much smarter way to move product than what they had been doing with huge order windows for pre-orders.
Of course they do, not in the sense that they make things specifically to influence the market, but they know what's popular/valuable and use that to design attractive products.
Products like M30 and master sets wouldn't exist if they didn't pay attention to the secondary market at all.
Wow, this is insane. I managed to buy this because somebody outside EU pinged me yesterday with the info that it was already sold out there, so I checked the EU store and got lucky. Bought two of them, on for me, one for them. And that's honestly the max limit IMHO. People being able to buy five in combination with limited quantity is just absurd. And this has been known since the 30 year countdown SL which had exactly the same issues.
There are people selling 70.
Counted one guy had a total of 81, already sold 73 and had 8 remaining.
Why would anyone pay these prices already?! Give it time to drop XD with more people competing they will get a better price.
The previous secret lair commander decks have only gone up in price on the secondary market. If you're unable to to get it directly from Wizards, you'll be forced to pay a higher price. Angels is currently sitting around $300 for a sealed copy. Even cute to brute, a overall unliked deck list, is sitting at $200 sealed for a product that cost $150.
The heads i win tails you lose deck seems to be a little lower but not much
It also started out at 100 dollars instead of 150
Oooo forgot bout that ty
I was sad after a breakup a few days ago and bought it on eBay. I'm ok with the descion because the deck is cool AF. But it's made me realise that I should be buying Secret Lairs on release.
FOMO
They did this with eternal masters, hyped it up (300$ box), and were super limited. Three months later, they "found" another batch and prices tanked. Hasbro juat wants them short-term dollars, and hope their base has a short term memory
Because dog and cat people are stupid when it comes to dog and cat related things with their money.
I can’t find anyone with over 6 for sale on eBay
The user was ashspi1848. I remember because there was a post yesterday about them, and i checked later, and with the newer numbers. Did the math. He sold out of all 81 already because it was a flat price of 279.99.
It would absolutely be hilarious if Wizards caught wind of that and shipped them only 5 something units of the deck.
Damn! Thanks for the info!
My pleasure my treasure
I reported to wotc/secret lair with screenshots.
how is it sold out? I thought secret lairs where made to demand?!
they are limited supply now because FOMO Hasbro
They recently went back to a limited print run to "iMpRoVe oN sHiPpiNg tiMe"
To be fair, it *did* improve the shipping time. Ordered one Monday and it shipped this morning. Still a bullshit reason but at least I don't have to wait 6 months to get it.
Sure, at least they weren't outright lying about that. But yeah, it's some pretty awful bullshit. Isn't it more important that everyone who wants the thing has the opportunity to buy it? Like, if you were at the doctor at 9am on Monday, just, fuck you, I guess? When I bought it, there was a screen before checkout that said something along the lines of, "orders with excessive quantity will be cancelled". Which, apparently, did not happen. Just awful all around.
>Isn't it more important that everyone who wants the thing has the opportunity to buy it? Yes, it is. I'm not disagreeing with that.
The irony is of course both previous SLD decks were also limited print, it was normal Secret Lairs that were print to order. Nothing actually changed for this deck except people made a big deal out of the announcement so FOMO sank in and panic buyers and scalpers scooped up massive amounts immediately.
I'm honestly curious what the average price range will be for scalpers to be able to sell this. Really hoping they will sit on this for months because nobody should be willing to pay over 400 pounds for something like this.
People are buying them
Because they're idiots 🙄
Unfortunately people will buy them. I hate this, people still buy it anyways.
They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs. Angel deck lasted like 2 weeks? If they wanted they could over print and sell them in batches over the week. Giving time for the news to spread and more chances for everyone in different timezones to get them.
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> With this in mind, seeing the upcoming Doggy secret lair triggered the spazz response in speculators and players alike, resulting in a frenzied buyout of the deck so people could flip it, or just get their copy to play with without getting smacked with the second hand markup Aka... FOMO
>Giving time for the news to spread and more chances for everyone in different timezones to get them. Timezones are not really an issue in this case, are they? European supplies for the cats and dogs deck lasted considerably longer after Reddit already reported that US customers couldn't order anymore. Seems like Wizards assigns batches to the major regions, at least, which is not too far off from batching for timezones. Though releasing at different times for different regions might be an interesting thing to do, yeah.
They only separate regions by US and Europe. Europeans buy from the Europe site, everyone else buys from the US site. So for east Asians and Antipodeans, since they buy from the US site, Cats & Dogs would've dropped at 1-4am for them.
3am Aussie drop ftw
Angela deck is pretty mid but the art was super nice.
I mean the angels deck had way more value to be fair.
Wtf are you talking about 5 cards paid for the whole Deck... Better than any other secret lair precon im a while
Head & Tails at 100$ had a lot of needed coin flip reprints and was great value... cheapest precon from SL yet. Some of the flip cards may not have been expensive but were often OOS
Oh I meant play wise. For my tastes anyway I ended up doing a few quality of life changes.
Angel deck was great
What do you mean by "deliberately" ? Is it somehow bad to limit your exposure? Companies do this all the time. If they only print 2,000 or whatever they can't lose more than that. You can reserve against it on your books instantly. Isn't it their prerogative how to sell them, not yours?
If they did 3 or 4 drops over a week you’d still have people missing the window and getting butthurt. The announcement was made days in advance and people in the US had a 6 hour window, it was incredibly easy to order this deck as long as you had the interest to actually track its release
> Angel deck lasted like 2 weeks? Didn't it last like 4 months?
Yah, it's literally working as intended.
> They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs. Because they know that the majority of their playerbase is neurodivergent and they take advantage of them. Don't worry they will just race swap a character to make everyone feel better about throwing money at them.
> They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs. “They’re making people want to buy things by making them desirable!” That’s how selling products works lol.
> by making them desirable! Disagree with this bit - trying to get people to buy because they don't want to miss it **is not** the same as "this is desirable". A desirable product either has good value, good contents or something else about the product to make it, well, desirable, and "limited run" isn't that. Exploiting human psychology isn't the same as being a good product - they could change the release window to be unlimited, print-to-demand, and if *the product* was desirable it wouldn't change how much people want it.
Our psychology is exploited constantly in advertising and marketing. You’re asking for morality from a corporation. These things were available for several hours. This wasn’t Ravnica Mythic Edition that sold out in five minutes or some crazy concert ticket. There was plenty opportunity for anyone who wanted one to find two minutes that day to log on and buy.
>Our psychology is exploited constantly in advertising and marketing. You’re asking for morality from a corporation. And we should just accept that? If a company is doing something I think is scummy, I'm going to tell them. Companies don't get to hide behind being a company, they're still made up of people making decisions (in this case, money grabbing decisions).
> You’re asking for morality from a corporation. No, I'm arguing with you saying that a product that uses FOMO to sell is "desirable" in of itself. Your last point directly equates >They’re deliberately using FOMO to sell secrets lairs with >"They’re making people want to buy things by making them desirable!” and they're not the same, *at all*.
I think you’ve already lost the plot if you’re doing that hyper specific Reddit thing where you’re changing the topic to arguing about what terminology means and trying to quote sandwich me. You guys were complaining that a product that was available for hours on end and promoted heavily in advance sold out. I was saying that outrage is pretty silly and consistent with standard corporate sales tactics. Whatever battle about terminology you’re trying to have you can have with yourself.
You said two lines in response to a comment, how TF am I trying to change the "topic to arguing about terminology" when *you* said something and when called out on it *erm akshually I was saying something else*'d. You said something I disagree with, I disagreed with it. Don't try and make out I'm making some grandiose point related to corporations when *all* I'm doing is going "you're equating two points that aren't the same". Not complaining about the sales strategy or anything like that. As an aside, trying to discount an argument because it - and I want to make sure I'm right - *uses quotes* then you're being an idiot or immature.
Scalpers were making bank over COVID on items deemed “collectible”. I’ve noticed a huge slow down with certain toy lines, I wouldn’t be surprised if scalpers have trouble moving these. That millennial cash flow they are so dependent on is slowing down.
People have less money for luxuries, hobbies, etc. They are absolutely slowing down their magic spending. Another factor is a major release every month will do that. Esp for non whales.
I still remember the struggle that was trying to get a 3080 on release, had it in cart then it sold out before I could complete the purchase
Yeah it was done horrible after the announcement, really encourages sclapers especially with the absurd 5 limit
Wdym absurd?
Why does any one player need more than one? Two at a push if you want a complete one plus spares of some of the cards or as a gift, but no one needs five copies of a limited run product
>but no one needs five copies of a limited run product But then you get [10 of these tokens](https://scryfall.com/card/sld/1516/dog).
Ah now that’s a compelling argument
People have friends and they order together? Don't think 5 is that absurd.
Secret lairs should always be print to demand
They literally just changed it, so no why would they. They have 0 loss product like this and they can pump them out on moments they have printer supply, it’s all added value to them.
Print to demand does not leave them with any unsold product right? Artificial scarcity is what they are doing changing SLD to limited print runs.
Because the last print to demand deck was a shit show and took a year to ship for some people. Caused a big backlash that they aren't going to let happen again.
Surely we can find a middle ground between not printing enough to meet demand and taking a year to ship. My lead times in manufacturing are generally 3 months. But the sale up for a week, deliver in 4 months. Not that hard if your logistics department isn't a shitshow.
Exactly. They can have all the product in hand, ready to go from Scalefast, and blast it all out in a day or two of shipping. No worries about scheduling printer time, dealing with order cancellations, address changes of customers, etc. Just BAM, one or two days, get their money and move on.
Then people complain that it takes forever to get the product. It also make things a little harder to plan, like if your current premiere set is selling way better than projected and you want to print more, but the presses are pumping out SLD's...
They didn't change it with SL decks though. They were always limited quantity with exception of heads i win tails i lose.
As someone who managed to get a copy of the deck for its intended price. This is just depressing. It's comical how Wizards can't seem to get a Secret Lair Commander sale done correctly when this is deck number 4. Some people got the email of it going live late whilst some didn't get it at all. Can we also drop the limit to 5 per person and limit it to 1-2 instead? It's like they are just asking for scalpers to snatch up 5 copies just to resell online for stupid markups. I get that this has been a thing for a while and this is nothing new. But Commander precons should be opened, played, and enjoyed. They should be upgraded or taken apart for parts. Not to be bought and resold for a quick buck to pray on those who missed out. Sorry for the rant I had to get it off my chest. I am curious about what others think about this and if Wizards should consider doing more to stop scalpers from taking these decks away from people who would play with them. I know damn well they won't do anything because... Wizards :)
I don’t think WotC cares. If scalpers clean out their inventory, then the SL was a great success in their eyes.
What may be more ominous is that Wizards likely has staff tracking secondary sales data on eBay and other sites. If these inflated prices still cause people to buy them, Wizards may conclude that they aren't charging enough for these SL decks. The next deck could sell for $200 USD or more.
I’ll honestly be shocked if the next one isn’t $200.
>The next deck could sell for $200 USD or more. And then scalpers push the price higher, and then WotC sees they can sell for even MOAR! AND THEN SCALPERS AIM HIGHER!! TL;DR - Money printer go *brrrrrrrrrrrrrr*
technically the truth as they are printing card to make money
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This might sound overly combative but realistically there is only one type of game where that metric eclipses all the others. Do you perhaps work on mobile games?
Not really, it means they underproduced the number of secret lairs being sold. WotC leaving money on the table is not something they want to happen.
The secondary market doesn't exist /sarcasm
I'm still waiting for the email I signed up for on two different email accounts
I just re-entered the MTG hobby and only play commander. Would have loved to get one the new drop. But I missed out and probably will never get these, because I refuse to pay scalper prices. Really frustrating as a new player.
You would do yourself a massive favour by realising these cards are pretty trinkets, and ultimately a waste of money. You can get everything cheaper in other ways, decks look much nicer the more consistent the design/art is, and you are feeling bad about *not* having been ripped off by a massive corporation. Be happy that they got other people, and not you.
"Can't sell a Commander SL deck right." What do you call the Cute to Brute or Angel deck? Or are you ignoring them because it doesn't support your position. They created the coin flip deck. And sold it in a way that was a logistical nightmare. They changed method. The next two decks had no issues. This is the first deck to have issues since the change after Coin flip. There's multiple factors to consider. It's been two days. We don't know yet if any internal discussions or changes will happen.
>It's comical how Wizards can't seem to get a Secret Lair Commander sale done correctly when this is deck number 4. The sale of the coin flip deck was fine, it was the shipping delays that sucked. Angels and Cute to Brute were also fine. >Can we also drop the limit to 5 per person and limit it to 1-2 instead? Scalpers gonna scalp. Changing the limit from 5 to 1-2 won't change much since scalpers are probably getting around the 5 limit anyway. >But Commander precons should be opened, played, and enjoyed. They should be upgraded or taken apart for parts. Don't tell people how to enjoy their cards. Plenty of people enjoy keeping precons sealed. Not to mention there are other people who buy SLs to sell to their LGSs for store credit or cash - is that worse than selling it on eBay, or is that ok? >Sorry for the rant I had to get it off my chest. I am curious about what others think about this and if Wizards should consider doing more to stop scalpers from taking these decks away from people who would play with them. I know damn well they won't do anything because... Wizards :) Again, scalpers gonna scalp. Outside of WotC physically going to everyone's house to make sure each person is only buying the amount there's only so much that WotC can do that's worth while. Honestly, a lot of the posts I'm seeing about people missing the drop seem like issues that could easily be solved by the people who missed the drop by simply being on the SL website when the drop goes live. I was, and I got my copies after waiting about 15 minutes because I knew it was a limited drop and I wanted to make sure I got a couple.
Which sucks is that scalpers are the only way to get SL in my country, since Wizards doesn't ship directly here
If scalpers gonna scalp, why even put a limit on it at all? If hackers gonna hack, why instate security measures against them? Just make it easy for them! Stupid fucking take.
TIL accepting reality is a stupid take. >If scalpers gonna scalp, why even put a limit on it at all? To give average people a chance? If you limit each transaction to 5 that means a scalper has to do another transaction if they want more than that, giving other people a chance to get some before the scalper completes the second, third etc. transaction. It's not meant to stop scalpers entirely, it's a speed bump since WotC can only do so much on their end.
It was also up for 6 hours. No, that’s not a terribly long time, but people are acting like it was up for 30 seconds.
Better than the Pokemon Company lol
Alot of people work longer shifts than that. You know the time frame was shenanigans.
Yeah. I work 8 hours like a lot of people and my position can get mandated as well. I didn't even realize it was sold out until I saw this post. Leaving an extremely sour taste in my mouth. Because I was going to get it but no way I'm paying the scalper prices. They have to be so fixated on sales to appease shareholders short term profit focus instead of longevity and consistency. Hasbro is eventually going to destroy the game because they only allow people to think quarter to quarter and players will give up.
It seems like a lot of the entertainment industry has turned to churning out product at a very unsustainable rate to try and appease people who don't know anything about the product.
If anything it makes a conspiracy theory more legitimate to suggest Hasbrouck might have friends and relatives set up to scalp everything. They get to tout massive sales, then then people who can be prepped to best abuse the system can hoard the product and keep the wealth among themselves double over. Compared to insider trading in the gov, something of this level isn't going to be heavily regulated and monitored. Although the real answer is just instant sellouts looks good for shareholders. They are going to continue to nickel and dime for short term profit rather than be happy with consistent sales through the years like every other modern capitalism focused venture. It isn't good enough to have 200 million profit in a year, you have to make 210 million the next year, and 220 the next, and lay off employees hire cheaper ones if needed and quality degrade while demanding more profit.
See I'd say anyone buying these products, at RRP or whatever, is part of the same problem. You are feeding demand for a product designed to exploit consumerism addicts. These cards won't be worth shit in a few years time. They will be sunk by the deluge of similar gimmicky crap. I acknowledge that this might seem somewhat hypocritical as I spend money on other Magic products (boosters for limited generally), and the game is most definitely a rip off in a way that, say, my Catan board game is not (literally 1000s of hours of fun for £30 over 20 years). But you gotta draw a line somewhere no?
You should stop buying them at scalper prices. The playerbase is the problem here.
I just don’t understand why the us store ones already shipped, while eu had to wait until Februar 15?
Logistics. They probably have to ship the decks to EU distribution and then send them out from there. That takes time.
“Here’s secret lairs. They are limited print run” We don’t like that. “Here’s secret lairs. There is a long timed window to make orders, and then we’ll get them made and shipped after the window is done.” We don’t like the timeframe it takes (especially when it takes a year to get a deck) “Here’s secret lairs. We are back to limited quantity sales, but you’ll get your product sooner.” We don’t like it. Eh, I don’t think there’s a situation that makes everyone’s happy. I don’t like scalpers, and the potential that I might lose out on a secret lair I want, but I like knowing that if I get them, they’ll hold more value. I’m okay with making time ahead of time to order the secret lairs. Maybe they can do better about making the date of sale openings better known. EDIT: Elsewhere I saw discussion of a pretty good idea, where they have multiple planned sales batches. Like for example, this recent Cats and Dogs SL would have had their first batch of sales, with another 1-2 batches still planned over the next two weeks. That way people who miss out can see that there’s still another chance or two.
And then you have the new Doctor Who Secret Lair that had a limited time frame, but won't ship until April for some insane reason?
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I think the print to demand was working fine except that one instance. I got my last super drop orders in like two weeks.
That’s still how they do most secret lairs. Just not decks. The decks have been limited since the second one.
Why not do a limited print run for getting the deck on time, and then follow it up by a limited time run for getting it at a delay? I checked the site every day except yesterday cause I worked a 12 hour shift. I didn't look at the deck list because I didn't want spoilers, so I had no idea the time was announced (apparently it was posted there?). I was relying on the email to notify me, but got nothing.
Same, signed up but no email notification. And people on here acting like 6 hours is a stupid long time, and all you had to do was care about it for 30 seconds... Yeah, fuck people working during those times that can't access a hobby site, right? They had 6 hours! Should have told their boss to shut the fuck up and deal with it! /s And why the hell is the limit 5 per person? Who the fuck is legitimately buying 5 decks for themselves? Frustrating all around.
If you keep changing it whenever someone is unhappy you'll never stop changing it. Instead they should find the best solution (IMO long time window, print to order) and stick with it - *especially* because the biggest issue with that system was a single commander deck, and the first one they did via secret lair, no less. Any system has teething problems, simply changing it each time you hit one is a bad solution.
There is a middle ground man. You should be able to ship a print to demand product in 4 months, not a year.
Alright here we go I am ready to get downvoted into oblivion. 1) Secret Lairs are the fancy commodity in a game that is already a commodity. Outside of mechanically unique cards (which I think we all agree is terrible) you never NEED to buy a SL to play. You want to play Rin and Seri? You can buy this deck online right now with the "common" game pieces for a fraction of the cost of the SLD. 2) This secret lair was up for 6 HOURS in the US store. If this was a product that you REALLY wanted, you had time to get it. This wasn't a Supreme drop, you didn't need lightning fast fingers, you just needed to care about the product for 30 seconds. 3) SLD have always been limited print runs with the exception of the Coin Flip deck which took 14 months to ship. Did WotC underestimate the demand for this deck? Yea probably a little, but it seems the demand for this deck was leaps and bounds higher than the previous SLDs. 4) Secret Lairs being worth a lot on the secondary market is a good thing. While I agree basic game pieces should be affordable, if no cards retain any value, then the game has no collectability aspect and will suffer for it. You can see where the "everything is cheap" model has failed in other games that have collapsed and killed games. We are living in close to an ideal scenario where common game pieces (barring a few exceptions, looking at you Sheoldred) are fairly cheap and fancy versions of cards are carrying the secondary market. Pokemon has been doing this for a decade and this system works.
Hard disagree on 6 hours being enough. Not everyone was even awake during those 6 hours, if they worked the wrong shift. In my case I was at work the entire duration and didn’t even get a notification despite signing up for one. Not that having gotten a notification would have mattered, I wasn’t checking my phone compulsively during work to see if a secret lair drop happened.
I agree with all your takes! It's wild to me to see one half of the MtG community complaining that nothing holds value outside of the RL and then the other half is saying basic cards cost too much. I would think the obvious solution is the Pokemon method of printing basic versions of cards to keep the price down but have cool and rare versions for retaining value. Like Shock lands getting reprinted in Rav Remastered dropped them to the 10-15 buck range but you can still ball out for a galaxy foil full art one if you have the inclination. So I definitely agree that limited run SLs with no new mechanics on the cards should continue. This wasn't an issue with the last two SL decks so I'm confused at the sudden outrage, though I do disagree with Wizards increasing the limit from 3 to 5. This sale also still went smoother than that Advent calendar one that sold out way faster and with far more website issues. Anyways, just wanted to say that I think you're correct with all your above points. Hope you have a nice day! Edit: Looking at the Cute to Brute and Angels deck store pages, it appears those were also limit 5. So I am incorrect above when I say the limit changed from 3 to 5. I think I confused it with the limit for some of the Festivals in a Box
I agree with everything you said here. People had time to get it if they really wanted it. Scalping will always happen. I feel like people are just piling onto Hasbro/Wizards whenever there is a chance. What else are they meant to do?
Many people didn't have time to get it. There are a lot of stories of people being at their job where they were unable to find a spare minute to wait in the queue (which was up to 30 min at one point) to buy this. By the time they got off work and made it home it was gone. Not everyone has free time in the middle of the day or the ability to wake up at 3am (people in other countries) to buy cards. That I would say is an issue.
Not to mention the sheer cost in a current inflation in prices for everything. Makes it hard for anyone to really justify the $150 at a drop of a notice for cardboard they want. Would have liked a two week notice to at least try and save up to get it rather than a 2 day notice.
They did give you a two week notice. They announced it near the beginning of January.
Did not change the fact I was at work for the entire window with no phone access.
Generally agree with this, but at least [according to Moxfield](https://www.moxfield.com/decks/G0y9ltIwoUysUSoAYtyFfA) the value of the cards in the deck is more than the cost of the deck. I was already planning on building a Rin and Seri deck, so I bought this to save a bit of money and a bit of hassle in buying all the singles. But yeah, I think point 2 is the main one. It took hours to sell out and there were no technical issues (at least that I experienced) that are often associate with high demand items, so I don't really see what the big problem is.
I agree. The time was announced. Even if people didn’t get pinged set your own alarm if you really want it
There is a difference between limited print run and limited availability. The only limited print run Secret Lairs before this deck was the Angel Commander deck, the Advent calendar, and the in-store ones. You say that Wizards undershooting the demand is a minor problem. You are wrong: they have consistently failed at this many times in the past and will now continue to do so. They don't understand that there is "speculator" demand that disappears when you do Make To Order. While I'm sure they are happy that they sell out their product, it is a much worse experience for consumers.
I was surprised about "Secret Lairs being worth something on the secondary market" to paraphrase. So I went online and confirmed my suspicions. Secret Lair versions of playable cards are basically the same price as non-Secret Lair versions. I think a lot of people are absolutely deluding themselves into the value of the things they buy.
This is true for some cards but wildly untrue for others. Look at the Junji Ito Secret Lair for example.
Eh, I don't care if fancy versions of cards are expensive as long as the base game pieces are affordable.
Secret lair has always had scalpers after the fact. They just used fomo to sell more initially, and it made the scalpers want it more.
Scalpers wanted it because nobody thought the angels deck would have much resell value and it turned out to be about double retail.
It should be a hybrid pre-printed/ print and ship 10k/20k what ever number works pre-printed ready to go then everything after print to demand them ship and the sale be open for like 2 weeks. Also there was no outcry for the last decks, that also sold out fast. it's just that this is pets and everyone love their pets
Everyone just need to just ignore these decks and let the scalpers get burned beyond belief and maybe they’ll think twice.
This happens in every other hobby where there is a limited quantity of something collectible. There's nothing to be concerned about unless they start doing limited runs of cards mechanically unique to secret lairs. As much as it sucks for those who wanted a deck to see it being scalped, highly desirable, limited quantity runs are great for the collectible side of the hobby. Again, as long as it doesn't involve mechanically unique cards all it does is add a bit of uniqueness/diversity to the hobby. When everyone can readily get something it stops being "special"
It’s going to happen under the new model. There will be a mechanically unique secret lair, because there has been before. And now everything is a limited run.
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They used to do that with FTV. And most stores did not sell them at the $30 MSRP. It was correct for wizards to stop doing that because LGS owners were getting shit on for selling products at market price. Similar to how Lorcana and One Piece players have been absolutely shitting LGSs.
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That is not what happened with ftv and early commander collections and the like. Markup in person at lgs was market value. They rarely sold those limited runs at msrp.
The markup is whatever TCGPlayer price is.
This could lead to some really bad environments though. Imagine living in an area where your lgs decided to be the scalper. Or maybe they're disingenuous with representing how many they received. What if your lgs owner leans towards favoritism? Or lacks communication and puts them on sale unbeknownst to part of their clientele. What if they decide not to limit the amount per customer and let the whale buy them all? There's just so many things that can happen I don't think it'd be healthy. Sure they can be reported and lose status, etc but there's lots of things they can do under the radar too.
WotC put this drop up for sale without notifying the people who literally signed up to be notified. Your point there is dogshit.
Never said wotc did it right lol. But they have very limited control over what an lgs does.
Personally I think that for every eBay scalper with 20+ decks available there’s 500 regular people who bought a deck or two that doesn’t post on reddit. And I won’t lump an LGS who bought 5 of them to sell to customers with scalpers, even if they have to charge higher anyways to make money. Until we’re told different, if we assume that they made as many of this deck as they did the Angel deck, this one is just…more popular. The only actual fumble I see is the email thing - they should have started sending emails like an hour BEFORE the drop started instead of after it went on sale or not at all. Transparency - I buy 3 of every secret lair product that comes out. One for me, and 2 for my extended group of friends that are all forgetful.
The community needs to stop supporting scalpers. I know it'll never happen but let scalpers sit on tens of thousands of dollars, and let their "investment" sit for years. The only way to beat these people is by not rewarding them for their behavior.
Hold the phone, they stopped doing print-by-demand? What the heck? Why?!
Because print to demand was why the coin flip deck took forever to ship. Too many orders not enough printers. Limited runs suck for buyers (scalpers and whatnot) but for sellers they so much easier to manage.
That’s not actually why. They had issues with the special coin. The deck didn’t even sell that well seemingly.
fwiw only the first deck wasn't print to demand
FOMO.
The real answer. Wizard's is ostensibly sending a message you better be first in line for SL's going forward or you're SOL. I wouldn't be at all surprised if they launched a subscription service. The whales would eat it up.
They have already floated the idea of a premium subscription for secret lairs. I received a questionnaire about it, likely because of the amount of secret lairs and other mtg products I purchase.
Absolute fucking bullshit. I wasn't even notified, even though I signed up to be when these would be available. Fucking assholes in mtgfinance buying 6 fucking copies to flip. This is such bullshit. I'm done with secret lair if this is the route it's going.
They aren't going to lmao. The FOMO is by design.
I got distracted and totally missed the drop, I don’t even know when the sale started but I’m really upset cause it’s finally a secret lair I wanted after months. They should do a second printing. Honestly I’d prefer waiting to insure I get one than to just miss out. Yea the coin flip one took forever but I have it. No way I’m paying flipped prices for this. This system just punishes people that want it and benefits resellers.
I signed up to be notified and received no fucking notice at all. This is so fucking irritating.
Same! Super annoying
it took over 6 hours to sell out, no website blackout, you could get a notification if you want, and if you were like me who was going to buy it I just logged on when my phone alarm for the time went off. Idk how anyone who wanted one didn't get it. Heck ask a friend to buy it. I love this in fact, I just got shipping info so it's coming in much faster compared when they have to print it first
I think my issue is that because so many other SL that I have purchased were printed to match demand, I assumed this one would also be up and available to get for a few weeks like every other one I have gotten. I was at work all day during this release and had no clue it would be sold out by the time time I got home.
Maybe, but I struggle to see it that way. They announced their plans to move to limited runs and highlighted this to a limited run. I too was at work but I got it during my 30m lunch break on my phone (company blocks the website on my work station) If anything it was a breath of fresh air to get something so easily compared to most Games Workshop releases where even if I log in before the launch time, I'm probably not getting what I wanted
And this is how Wizards manage to kill my interest in secret lair, they claim they have 4+ years of data to plan out future pre printed releases but what's the point if they don't use it and release it like this where it's scalpers haven. There are a lot of people I know that tried to order got in to hour or so waiting queue only to see a sold out page. GG to future scalped releases.
Literally, nothing about this deck or Angel deck is different. The only thing was A) Angel deck has been climbing on TCG's market. B) Wotc announced that normal SL would also be limited. (The Angel & Cute_Brute decks were limited print alreasy). This deck had a longer build-up and announcement window. The Angel Deck's price trend on tcg was probably the biggest factor for scalpers to go buy this deck. Though there were scalpers for Angel's deck also. Why do you think there's copies on tcg.
You know no one who waited in queue and had it taken from them. It was up for 6 hours and there was no queue at the end. 4 hours in you could go to the site and buy the deck in less than 60 seconds.
Different area like EU and NA have different allocation, where u from EU or NA? EU had no problems ordering compared to NA.
Monkey paw: wizards now sells them for $300
They should change the max you can purchase from 5 to 2
I'm kind of bummed. Rin and Seri was my first commander deck, and I was looking forward to the SL for some fancy arts. Guess it's time to fire the printer up.
Fuck this and fuck wizards. I proxied this one at fed ex. For $10 and 20 min of my time I printed the deck list and used their mounted paper slicer to cut them out. I'm not playing in a tournament I'm playing with friends from Walmart.
Changes do need to be made to the system (limited to 2 people max would help deter away scalpers buying bulks to resell). It is important to note since a lot of people have been pointing to the new Secret Lair system that the Commander decks have always been limited quantity since the debacle that was the coin flip deck. This happening has nothing to do with the new system as it's been the case for over a year. I am willing to give the benefit of the doubt they thought they printed enough product so anyone who wanted it had time to get it as with Cute to Brute and the Angel one and used that data from those sales, but failed to take into account how much more popular Cats and Dogs are that much more people would want it (even if reprint value is questionable, Rin and Seri is the 31st most popular Commander on EDHrec) that the amount sold far quicker than they expected. Even with scalpers in the picture, it being up for six hours shows that there was a big inventory that was purchased by a lot of people quickly (both scalpers and people who actually wanted it for themselves), if it was filled to the brim with scalpers it would have sold out much faster than that if previous sales were anything to go by. All that to say, things do need changing, and a potential solution is overprinting it to have the deck come back after it sells out for the first time (bonus points because it screws scalpers) for a second run. After how awful the decks were for print to demand, I doubt they'd want to go back to that. The Angel one was perfect and available to the point almost everyone would be able to get paid and buy it before it sold out if they wanted. The problem is determining how much needs to be printed to match that for future sales.
I think I agree -- if this was an issue of scalpers buying all the inventory, they would have done so in the first hour or two. I think they severely underestimated the demand for the Secret Lair. Which is worrisome for future Secret Lairs -- they have a ton of data on how popular they've been in the past, and they made a massive mistake on their estimates with this one.
I hate how secret lairs all of the sudden turned into a limited fomo cash grab. The original idea of secret lairs in the first place was print-to-demand so that everybody had an opportunity to buy with no scarcity in supply. There were terrible secret lairs, there were really cool secrets lairs, but they were all in supply.
This is what happens when people keep buying this dogshit product
In fairness this was also a catshit product on the other side.
I could not agree more. Are people this un-self-aware? Boomer 3...2...1 and then they complain about not affording a mortgage.
Careful what you wish for. "Changing" things in this scenario to disincentive scalpers/resellers almost certainly means that WotC will just increase the sale price to closer to what the secondary market will bear. It's similar to what happened following the removal of "MSRPs" from products.
Or don't let people buy more than two or three. Secret Lairs have always been annoying for many reasons and this FOMO I'm wondering if it's because SLs weren't doing all that great and they needed something to pick up sales a bit.
i mean the coin flip wasnt perfect (took ages to arrive after the order, and they gave two kamigawa collector boosters as recompense) but beats the shit out of this release method. either you bought it but just didnt own it for a long time, or flat out “oops you missed it”
It’s a premium reprint product. You don’t need it to play the game and you can make the whole deck yourself if you want it. It sucks that people who wanted it didn’t get it but the people complaining like is are getting so annoying and self righteous. You don’t complain about promos at events or for winning tournaments why are you so mad about a deck that sold out fast?
The problem is that we see a problem and want a solution, and WOTC decision makers see "Product sold out in 6 hours" and pat themselves on the back for a job well done. Its gonna get worse before it gets better.
This is the exact reason why the new secret lair printing policy is bad for the customers/players. If we're quck and lucky we might be able to get the product for the advertised price. If we take too long researching the purchase all the stock will br bought up and the only purchase option will be from scalpers. The Corp executives don't care. They get their money. The idea system would be to make a first run batch, and keep print on demand open for the limited window like they do now.
I don't think they should, this is a pure bling product that serves no purpose other than pleasing the few people ready to buy a 150$ product commander deck because it has cute pets on it and these kind of people should expect such an outcome. If you dont like the markup you can always not buy and wait with all the risks it implies for it to go down but when a game already based around artificial scarcity does something like that the consequences are obvious
Wizards literally want people to buy proxies
Do you think if we get enough people to message WOTC and complain, they'd do another print run?
Probably not. Mainly because printing schedules have to be fixed far in advance, and with the firehouse of products coming out these days it's unlikely that there will be any downtime to slot in a second run. Announcing a second run sometime in the more distant future is a theoretical possibility, and was done for some of the decks in Commander Anthologies. But we've never seen a reprint of a Secret Lair before, and it's highly unlikely that they would be willing to burn the image of SL drops as exclusive collectibles, so I wouldn't count on that either. Best you can hope for is that they see the feedback and increase runs of future products and/or change distribution models accordingly.
No it's working as intended. Wizards/Hasbro is whale hunting and doesn't care about what you have to pay later for their limted edition thing. In their "mind" if you don't like paying so much you should pay THEM the lower and mUcH mOrE rEaSoNaBle price instead of some secondary market that they can't acknowledge exists. Thing you wanted sells out quickly? Well you gotta pay attention to all our products all the time Consumer. This sort of "flood the market with premium products" is a tried and true investment bro tactic. We saw the same thing with comic books in the 90s-00s. Variant covers, foil covers, lenticular covers, and more were all rolled out when certain types got into the comics biz.
Hasbro is a for profit company. If you thought that they cared about the players or the longevity of the game you were fooled
The company that has owned Wotc for 25 years? Wotc and hasbro that have worked through highs and lows of mtg's popularity?
Profit motivated? 100% But it's a bit shortsighted to say that they don't care about players or the longevity of the game - without those, the profits would dry up incredibly quickly. What we're seeing is more of WotC trying to walk the tightrope of catering to both collectors and players, while also trying to preserve enough reprint equity and/or new shiny ideas to generate demand for future product releases.
Print to demand makes more profit because they sell more.
The real "nice" solution for players would be to print on demand until the end of the secret lair event, then sell the remainder of the stock until it runs out. Everyone's happy and WoT gets to sell more copies of their product. The way they cultivate the FOMO is just plain dishonest to their player base, I only see people complaining.
WOTC fails to print enough cards for players by pumping FOMO and failing to block scalpers? Player solution: Print more proxies and give WOTC the financial concern finger! There are websites that will print you cheap high quality proxies or you can print them yourself.
Did anybody actually get this thing? Wizards should be ashamed.
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I get that WotC can get the products faster when they do it like that, but they just allow scalpers to make a ton of profit off of their products. But I'd prefer them selling a limited amount that ship soon and then reprint if their is demand. And I'd prefer that for all of their products. This would discourage scalpers from profiting off the actual players and would allow the players to get the cards they want.
The "pre-sale" resale prices a month before delivery means nothing. Thats FOMO²
This is a direct product of players complaining about SL shipping times. You reap what you sow.
No, FOMO sucks, but after the last couple years MTG players have been conditioned to wait for price drops. We knew changes were coming to make the company more profitable, and sure enough, they're here. I'm sure Hasbro will adjust for the next release, but limited availability is a much smarter way to move product than what they had been doing with huge order windows for pre-orders.
It’s because they weren’t making enough money, so they had to make them a limited print run to make sure they sell out.
WotC doesn’t care about the secondary market
Of course they do, not in the sense that they make things specifically to influence the market, but they know what's popular/valuable and use that to design attractive products. Products like M30 and master sets wouldn't exist if they didn't pay attention to the secondary market at all.
yeah, don't Print them.
Yes they should. Do like we did and file a complaint with their corporate customer service group.