Players Beg for Change After Botched Final Fantasy SLD

Last updated on June 13, 2025

Resentful Revelation | Illustration by Justyna Dura

There are two types of people this week: Those who beat the Secret Lair queue and got a hold of those sweet Final Fantasy drops, and those who tried, and against all their best efforts, failed to secure their product. And not for lack of trying: The Secret Lair checkout system is problematic, and it's time they changed how it works.

Wizards, We Have a Problem

Self-Destruct | Illustration by Liiga Smilshkalne

For a select number of lucky players and collectors, the Final Fantasy Secret Lairs were just a couple clicks and a short wait away. For pretty much everyone else, the process was a complete nightmare, and ultimately resulted in mass disappointment for MTG and Final Fantasy fans alike.

The FF Secret Lairs went on sale early Monday morning, and as with anything this hyped up, it was a race to see who could actually get a spot in line and make it through checkout without having to give up or getting booted from the site due to some crash or error. It… wasn't pretty.

This same issue arose with the Marvel Secret Lairs from 2024, where the website just couldn't support the sheer number of people all vying for their spot in the queue, causing issues with the website itself and ultimately leaving too many people empty-handed.

And it's not just the website either: Between scalpers trying to buy en masse and resell at a higher price, whales who are just eating up product because they have the income to do so, and the lack of a one-per-customer limit, there are a lot of factors working against the common folk who just wanted their favorite Final Fantasy character Vivi on a Lightning Bolt. There's even discussion of potential bots set up to essentially game the sale as soon as it goes live, though it's unclear to what extent anything like that might actually be happening.

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. There doesn't seem to be any way to improve your chances either, even if you're as prompt to the sale as you possibly can be. Either there are just too many people fighting over the same system all at once, there are some sort of bots in place to cheat the system, or the whole system is just fudged and offers potential consumers no recourse when it comes to trying to get the drops they're looking for.

Instead, people usually just aimlessly wait around watching the little queue guy walk in place, only to find out their wait didn't matter, and the item they're looking for sold out. It feels like the olden days of battling internet download speeds, except you're not even guaranteed anything on the other end of the wait.

Community Sentiment

Congrats to those who secured their cards, truly, but the rest of the community is upset about the way everything unfolded. Granted, that's true of any big Secret Lair sellout (Tragic Romance and the Cats vs. Dogs lairs being recent examples), but Final Fantasy‘s gargantuan in comparison. Especially given the nonsense surrounding 2024's Marvel Secret Lairs, it feels like this system shouldn't be as big of an issue as it is.

The community's ire isn't exactly hidden right now. Reddit and Twitter/X exploded with complaints, all echoing the same sentiment that the Secret Lair website just isn't built to handle so much traffic at once.

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Changes Need to Happen

Fear of Missing Out | Illustration by John Stanko

So is there a solution here? This is a repeat problem with larger Secret Lair sales, with no indication of changes coming to the system. The most action we've seen from Wizards of the Coast is a change to Secret Lairs with mechanically unique cards, some of which have been alotted to local game stores to sell directly to customers, and while that's a great incentive, it doesn't help with the vast majority of drops. The Final Fantasy lairs, for example, were all reskins/reprints, and therefore ineligible for the LGS treatment anyway.

“Just print to demand,” say 7inful on Reddit. “Take my money for your stupidly-priced cardboard and spare me having to camp at my computer for an hour.” Early Secret Lairs were print-to-demand, but that's not the case anymore, so there's a finite number of orders that can be placed.

There's also the potential to limit sales to a single copy of any given drop per customer. The limit for most Final Fantasy Secret Lairs was five per customer, and for each person who maxed out that number and made it through checkout, that's at least four other customers who weren't able to secure the same product. There are certainly valid reasons to want more than one of any given drop, but as it stands, the current system mostly just benefits scalpers.

Regardless of what Wizards of the Coast and the Secret Lair website decide to do, it's clear that something must be done to serve the average consumer. Though from the business perspective, it's very possible WotC just sees a sold out product and considers it a success, and as long as the products keep selling out, there's not much incentive for them to change anything. That's not great news for the customer, though you'd hope Wizards listens to the most recent wave of feedback and does something to change the way this system works.