Last updated on April 1, 2025
Deadpool, Trading Card | Illustration by Justine Cruz
An ultra mysterious Secret Lair (known for now as “Secret Lair: Redacted”) was announced yesterday, with much of the preview page just being redacted text. However, the contents of that Secret Lair Drop were just announced today! And who better to lead off an April Fools joke than Deadpool himself…
Here's the thing: Wizards attempted to hide the contents of this drop ahead of time. The only concrete facts they lead with were that the Secret Lair would contain five cards in total. And the contents of the drop were displayed as such:
One redditor (Nvenom8) took this as a challenge, and attempted to code break the Secret Lair with a program of their own design. This redditor “made a script in R to convert all the card names in magic to a sequence of zeroes and ones where ones represent spaces and zeroes represent all other characters.” They then “converted the card names given in the official announcement into the same form and ran a search for matching patterns.” This produced a list of possible card names before the actual Secret Lair contents were announced. But did their work check out?
Uncovering the Mystery
Their labor yielded a huge list of potential results for the Secret Lair, so they released a trimmed version with just rares. That list was ALSO huge, so we trimmed it down to showcase the bangers we could possibly get:
- Raiyuu, Storm's Edge, Balduvian Trading Post, Hazoret's Undying Fury
- Deadly Rollick, Elanor Gardner, Emmara Tandris, Exotic Orchard
- Blasphemous Act, Viridescent Bog
- Braingeyser, Comeuppance, Metalworker, Saw in Half
- Omniscience, Opalescence, Ophiomancer, Vandalblast
Of note, that first category of cards doesn't seem to include anything that'd be particularly exciting for a Secret Lair drop, but there's a reason for that. As confirmed by the Deadpool reveal today, that's because the #1 slot was a card whose card name didn't exist until today! That card is the mechanically unique Deadpool, Trading Card.
Some players had already extrapolated the possibility of the “new card” being a Deadpool reference, with the possible name of “Deadpool, Foolish Merc” being thrown around. Not a bad guess, it would seem!
What About the Rest of the Drop?
While it was completely within the realm of possibility that WotC was just trolling everyone here, it seems like Nnvenom8's code actually panned out! Aside from Deadpool, the rest of the cards in the drop were in fact represented in the code. Those remaining cards are:
This also answers the question of the upcoming Marvel Secret Lair with mechanically unique cards. At least partially, since there could be even more beyond just this Deadpool drop. Regardless, Nnvenom8's decoding was a cool piece of detective work that actually panned out, even if the answer wasn't hidden for all too long.
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