“One step forward, two steps back” seems the best way to describe Wizards of the Coast’s approach to Secret Lair, Magic: The Gathering‘s limited-run product line. Just one day after the Secret Lair director praised the Hatsune Miku Commander deck drop, which was released with a print-to-demand window, the Chaos Vault drop for The Zeta Set was such a disaster that it prompted the company to issue a formal apology.
The Chaos Vault is a special branch of Secret Lair products described as “experimental” — whatever that may mean. The most bizarre Secret Lair drops fall under this category, including Secret Lair x MSCHF: The Zeta Set, a collaboration with art collective MSCHF that calls back to Magic‘s earliest playtest cards. When orders went live Sept. 2 on the Secret Lair website, however, fans discovered the true meaning of the “chaos” in Chaos Vault.
Wizards of the Coast apologizes for yet another disastrous Magic Secret Lair drop
Image: Wizards of the Coast
“For everyone that showed up for today’s Chaos Vault sale of The Zeta Set — it was a disaster,” the Secret Lair team said in an official statement. “There’s no other way to say it. We’re incredibly sorry for the experience, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it. We are in the process of investigating exactly what went so very wrong and will share more as soon as we’re able to untangle the mess and understand the root cause — be it an internal systems issue or external tampering.” But what happened exactly?
“This was an awful drop, was on the site an hour before the sale started,” one frustrated comment on X reads. “I waited for about 50 min, then it said I still had a 35min wait… and then the line “paused” indefinitely. I looked around and saw posts that it was already sold out.”
“I was wondering why I was not able to check out,” another hopeful buyer said. “Every time I hit cart, it just told me to log in and when I tried, it just gave me the ‘sign up for the newsletter!’ Over and over again until my 10 mins was up.”
Unfortunately, these issues are not new to Secret Lair. Fans have been complaining ever since the print-to-demand model was abandoned, as these coveted products are inevitably the target for scalpers and bots, who often make purchasing them impossible. The nature of The Zeta Set drop seemed to make things worse. The cards were sold in the form of sealed booster packs, a first for Secret Lair. The packs also included alternate art, with a 10% chance of opening a “photocopy negative card”, and a 5% chance of opening a “color banding treatment.”
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A randomized product with scarce availability and a chance to open even rarer cards became an obvious target for scalpers. Players had warned this would happen, as The Zeta Set felt too much like a “regular” Magic set, but with very limited access to it. Many fans were looking forward to The Zeta Set, too. “This was a really cool product with really poor distribution,” wrote YouTuber Joel Are Magic on X. “Let us enjoy the cards you make!”
“We’re continuing to investigate what happened today and it may take a little while to fully get our heads around it,” Wizards of the Coast’s statement concludes. “For everyone who participated in what can only be described as a frustrating and disappointing experience, whether you made it through the queue or not, we are going to try and make this right.”
What the players and Magic fans out there want is clear, and that’s for Secret Lair to go fully back to a print-to-demand model. While Wizards of the Coast has made clear statements that this is not going to happen, the company has also been experimenting with limited-time print-to-demand windows for recent Secret Lair products, especially Commander decks. We’ll see if this latest disaster will persuade them to expand this policy.