Secret Lair x MSCHF: The Zeta Set Value Report

Last updated on August 27, 2026

Blood Moon | Illustration by MSCHF

If you didn’t think 7 sets was enough in 2026, it seems that Wizards agrees with you. The Zeta set, Magic’s first Secret Lair set that will be sold in booster packs, was just announced out of nowhere. Zeta was created in collaboration with MSCHF, a Brooklyn-based art collective that’s worked with Wizards on a previous Secret Lair drop back in 2022: 

Set Zeta Price Details

Players can purchase packs of Set Zeta through the Secret Lair Chaos Vault on September 2 at 12 p.m. ET, with a maximum of 12 boosters per person. Each booster costs $19.92 and contains 7 cards:

• 3 commons
• 2 uncommons
• 1 rare or mythic rare
• 1 wildcard

Project Zeta has 121 cards; of them, 90 have been spoiled at time of writing on Scryfall. Each card was designed after the playtest cards Richard Garfield printed during the development of Alpha, though the reprints include cards throughout Magic’s history, including plenty of modern cards. Each card comes in three treatments: Photocopy, Photocopy Negative, and Color Banding. 

What Are The Most Expensive Cards?

The most valuable card is Chrome Mox, stylized here as a disco ball. While different printings have different values, they’re all north of $150 dollars, with little reason to suspect this edition will have a lower price.

Mana Echoes has received two scant printings that have kept the price around $60 because it’s an absurd typal support piece that makes more mana than your goblin deck can spend. Unless your Zeta booster also had Fireball.

Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth also hugs that $60 price point despite having quite a few more printing than Mana Echoes.

Darksteel Monolith is a fairly powerful Commander card with only one printing in Commander Masters that boasts a decent $25 price tag.

Land Tax typically pushes $20, depending on print, and has a variety of uses as card advantage and a shuffle effect.

Another card pushing that $20 mark, Oboro, Palace in the Clouds sees lots of play in Commander landfall decks, which always have a land drop as long as this is in play.

What Are the Strongest Cards?

Obviously the above cards are very powerful, as there’s generally a high correlation between price and power, but plenty of cheaper cards in the set that are worth playing.

Baleful Strix is a great little card with ample synergy: It trades well for death triggers, it’s an artifact, it has a solid enters ability so you can happily flicker or sacrifice it, and so on. Most decks can more from this than the textbox.

Skullclamp is one of the best draw spells ever printed, and sees play in token and sacrifice decks.

Life from the Loam is similarly important to lands and self-mill strategies, especially as gravebreak becomes more prevalent.

Price of Progress is scary in Commander because players have so much time to play so many lands, and the high land count often means they play more nonbasics. Most burn spells don’t cut it in a format with 40 life, but this is an exception.

Are Project Zeta Packs Worth It?

These are an absolute gamble, no two ways about it. The common slot, which is at least half of your pack, maybe most of it if your wildcard is a common, is especially suspect. Genuinely played cards like Baleful Strix and Wild Growth buddy up with cards I would never want in my $20 booster, like Sengir Vampire and Merfolk of the Pearl Trident.