Last updated on October 18, 2025
Demonic Tutor | Illustration by Kieran Yanner
Magic: The Gathering players are up in arms after this week’s Secret Lair drops, citing miserable buying experiences. Multiple Secret Lair drops (including an Iron Maiden drop, and a Kieran Yenner drop) sold out within minutes despite fans waiting in online queues for hours.
Many are calling it the worst Secret Lair release yet, a perfect example of corporate greed, and demanding that Wizards of the Coast goes back to the old “print-to-demand” model to give everyone a fair chance at these Secret Lair drops.
Frustration at Long Queues and Instant Sellouts
The Battle of Bywater | Illustration by Tomas Duchek
The latest batch of Secret Lairs went live last Monday. It featured several pop-culture themes (Iron Maiden, Jaws, The Office), an Artist Series featuring Kieran Yanner’s art… and several reasons for calling it one of the worst ever.
“This secret lair drop has once again been ruined by scalpers, lack of print numbers, people abusing the line system, and WOTC's awful webdesign,” fumes u/TheGrandCannoli in one of several reddit threads complaining about the SL experience. “My wait time went UP 3 separate times – items sold out in 40 minutes – the Eddie [Iron Maiden] drop sold out while at checkout, literally hit continue to payment and it was removed.”
Adding insult to injury, one of the most sought-after cards (a Demonic Tutor from MTG artist Kieran Yanner drop) sold out in about 30 minutes… and was nearly as quickly listed for resale on eBay and TCGplayer, for a huge premium:
Source: TCGplayer
The same soon happened with other drops, like Secret Lair x Iron Maiden: Eddie Unchained, which are now listed for roughly x4 their original price:
Source: TCGplayer
Scalpers, Bots, And An Awful Checkout System
A major source of anger among Magic players is the belief that scalpers and bots are gaming the system.
“Wish I knew how to skip the line,” lamented u/Fomdoo. “If we could beat the scalper to the punch. I just wanted a copy. I just cancelled my entire order. Not going to buy anything if the one thing I really wanted was instantly sold out.”
And, to be certain, it was not just a specific glitch or bug about these latest drops: Players have been complaining for months about waiting in extremely long queues only to find out their desired drop is sold out… while also learning they've probably been “outplayed” by bots:
“For a select number of lucky players and collectors, the Final Fantasy Secret Lairs were just a couple clicks and a short wait away,” reported Tim back in June, when the Final Fantasy SL was turned into a complete nightmare. “Even people who snapped off their order as soon as humanly possible reported getting put into queues of an hour, two hours, 3-4 hours long, only to be met with an update that basically everything had already sold out.”
When this week's complaints look like a copy-paste of those from June this year, and those are pretty much the same as those from the Marvel SL a year ago…
… you know there's a clear, ongoing problem.
Should Wizards Take a Step Back?
Counterspell (Jace vs. Chandra) | Illustration by Jason Chan
Interestingly, the reason we’re in this situation at all is because Wizards of the Coast did try to address earlier complaints… just not in the way players hoped.
Back in January last year, WotC announced that Secret Lairs would “shift from a print-to-demand model to a limited-print-run model” for most drops going forward. According to the official announcement, the goal was to “expedite shipping and reduce wait times” so that buyers wouldn’t have to wait weeks for their cards.
Source: WotC
Given that the most coveted drops drain out in a couple of hours or less, and the massive negative backlash from the community, it does look like WotC's aim may have been a bit shaky.
Even some well-known voices in the Magic community have acknowledged the backlash. Mark Rosewater, Magic’s Head Designer, responded to a fan question on his Blogatog about the Secret Lair fiasco. The fan asked if we could hear from the Secret Lair team about what they’re doing to improve things. Rosewater replied that he’d be willing to help set up a Q&A, prompting fans to tell him what questions or topics they’d want addressed
Should WotC go back to print-to-order Secret Lairs?
“Just print to demand,” says 7inful on Reddit. “Take my money for your stupidly-priced cardboard and spare me having to camp at my computer for an hour.”
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7 Comments
I do not understand why it stopped being print-to-demand in the first place. What were the “problems” that that was supposed to solve? Seems to me the best of both worlds’ solution would be to have an initial ready to go print run that is special in some way (foil or specially marked) then after those are sold out, print to demand for the rest of the orders.
Basically a “first 1000 customers get a prize” type of set up without a cap on how many customers you can sell to since setting such a cap would seem to limit how much money you could make (which I thought was hasbro’s goal).
This is why I quit playing paper. They let the scalpers and bots run wild then rip off people on ebay… Scalpers, Wizards, or Hasbro hasn’t got any of my money for several years years now, never again.
It’s definitely been an ongoing issue, especially with Secret Lairs.
All I know is that until I can get them without paying through the nose to scalpers, I don’t want them.
Totally fair.
I will never buy a Secret Lair again. I used to get at lest a little something from every one of them but, no more. What a hassle, just to try and give them hundreds of dollars. Jeez…
I used to buy them all early on, now I basically never bother, and hardly pay attention to them outside of writing about them.
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