Magic: The Gathering has revealed the bonus cards in the Sonic the Hedgehog Secret Lair, and it looks like the sales model has been pushed to a whole new level of hideousness.
These bonus cards include a version of Command Tower rebranded as the Master Emerald Shrine and a Lotus Petal reimagined as a Chaos Emerald.
Obviously the second of these cards is much more desirable than the first. One is a land that shows up in every MTG Commander precon deck, the other is a Legacy and Vintage-playable card that costs $25 at its cheapest, with rarer variants going for hundreds of dollars.
And while no information has been provided about the cards’ scarcity, it looks like Wotc is doing the Chocobo thing from the Final Fantasy MTG set again, with multiple versions of Chaos Emerald available in different colors.
We currently have no idea what the distribution of these cards will look like, but it seems reasonable to assume that Command Tower will be more common, Lotus Petal will be much rarer, and the colored versions will be even rarer still. Perhaps we’ll find out more on July 14 when the Sonic Secret Lair goes up for sale, but given how transparent Wizards usually is about this (i.e. not at all) I’m not getting my hopes up.
I find this enshittification of Secret Lairs infuriating. They’ve become super expensive booster packs, the exact opposite of what they were originally supposed to be.
It probably wouldn’t grind my gears so much if Secret Lair hadn’t slowly and consistently gotten worse. It’s crazy to think that in just a few years we’ve gone from a print-to-demand model, where anyone who wanted to pay extra could get guaranteed premium cards, to a limited print run system that explicitly uses FOMO in its marketing, with high ticket bonus cards in an unknown percentage of items.
Of course, Secret Lairs have had bonus cards for a while, but at first these were a fixed card everyone who bought the same lair was guaranteed to get, and not typically something super rare either. Until recently they weren’t even advertised, being a surprise extra for the buyer to discover.
Nothing this time is exactly unprecedented, however. Early last year when the Fallout Secret Lair went up on sale, Wizards made a big song and dance about the rare bonus Mana Vault card you had a chance to find. I think I had similar complaints at the time.
But it now looks like this is the new normal, as both the Final Fantasy Secret Lair and the Sonic Secret Lair have followed this pattern (for FF the rare bonuses were the evoke elementals). And with this rainbow of colors available, it looks like Wizards is still finding new ways to persuade players to gamble, paying for a chance at finding something rare.
Secret Lair is now just as much a lottery as opening boosters. I bet we get serialized cards in superdrops next.
Are you going to be getting in line for the Sonic the Hedgehog SL drop? Let us know in the Wargamer Discord. And don’t miss our guides to the best MTG commanders and the MTG release schedule.