He-Man and Hatsune Miku Are Both Getting Secret Lairs This Fall

Wizards of the Coast spent MagicCon Amsterdam emptying an entire year of Secret Lair announcements onto the table at once, and the result is a fall calendar with two collaborations that could not be less alike. A Hatsune Miku Commander deck and a Masters of the Universe Superdrop are both coming, and the gap between them says a lot about where Universes Beyond is headed.

The Most Powerful Superdrop in the Universe

The Masters of the Universe Superdrop hits the Secret Lair website September 14. It is the first official collaboration between Magic and the MOTU franchise, bringing He-Man, Skeletor, and the rest of Eternia into Magic as Secret Lair cards with exclusive artwork.

MOTU is an unusual pick even by Universes Beyond standards. It is a property with enormous brand recognition among people in their forties and fifties and comparatively little among the twenty-something Commander audience. That is not necessarily a miscalculation. It is the same nostalgia demographic that drives the highest-spending segment of the sports card market, and Wizards has clearly noticed.

Secret Lair Commander Deck: Hatsune Miku

The Hatsune Miku Commander deck was revealed at the same event and is a fundamentally different product from a Superdrop. A Secret Lair Commander deck is a full preconstructed deck, not a three-to-five-card art drop, which means a substantially higher price point and a much larger design footprint.

Miku is also the opposite bet from MOTU. The vocaloid fandom is young, extremely online, and has a demonstrated willingness to buy physical merchandise at premium prices. Wizards has run Miku Secret Lairs before, and they have consistently been among the fastest-selling drops in the program's history.

Running MOTU and Miku in the same season is Wizards openly hedging across two non-overlapping audiences. Neither product is aimed at the Magic player who buys Standard boosters. Both are aimed at people who buy Magic because of what is printed on the card, not what it does in a game.

The Rest of the Slate

Amsterdam also produced A Marvelous Mathoms, a Hobbit-themed drop timed alongside the Middle-earth set that hits August 14, and A Perfectly Normal Superdrop. The Superdrop of the Moonlight Jellies, the Stardew Valley collaboration, already went live July 27 with three themed drops covering Stardew-inspired lands, characters, and tokens.

That is five distinct Secret Lair events in roughly eight weeks, which is the most compressed Secret Lair calendar Wizards has ever run.

What This Means If You Collect

• Print-to-demand is the whole game. Most Secret Lairs are printed to order during an open window. There is no scarcity during the window and a hard cutoff after it, which is why secondary prices on closed drops move sharply and immediately.
• Budget for the window, not the drop. Five events in eight weeks is a lot of money if you buy reflexively. Pick the two you actually want.
• Commander decks and Superdrops are different assets. A preconstructed deck has playable value and a wider buyer pool. A three-card art drop is closer to a collectible print.
• Watch the foil treatments. The MOTU drop is expected to include a distinctive foil treatment, and treatment scarcity has driven most of the aftermarket premium in recent Secret Lair history.

The Bigger Picture

Magic released a record quarter earlier this year, and Universes Beyond is the engine behind it. Secret Lair is where Wizards tests properties cheaply before committing to a full set, and a schedule that includes a 1980s cartoon and a Japanese vocaloid in the same season is a company running experiments in public.

For local game stores, the tension is unchanged: Secret Lair sells direct to consumers and skips the shop entirely. Every drop that succeeds is revenue that does not pass through the counter of the store running your Friday night Commander pod. If you play at a local shop, buying your sealed product there is what keeps the tables open.