Your mind isn’t playing tricks on you, this is just the latest Magic: The Gathering Secret Lair, and by Bolas’ weird little beard, it’s a fine one. Shown off with surprisingly little ceremony on October 13, Wizards has prepared a fine gimmick for this batch of premium cards. Four artists responsible for some of the most famous cards in Magic history redesigned their pieces for entirely different cards, and the result creates a strange feeling in the brain.
For instance, Mercadian Masques’ Brainstorm piece by DiTerlizzi is reimagined as Thought Seize, featuring a similar mage with rather different headgear doing exactly the same pose. There are even Alpha cards here. Mark Poole’s original Counterspell is now Pyroblast (that poor wizard finally got to cast his spell!), while Sandra Everingham’s Dark Ritual is redrawn for Desperate Ritual.
Tribute to the World Tree sticks out as not really being a mirror of its counterpart from Legends, Phil Foglio’s Presence of the Master. Famously that card has an uncanny resemblance to Albert Einstein, so I kind of wish they’d stuck Marie Curie or Ada Lovelace on the new version. I don’t think this white-haired, white-eyed woman is a reference to any historical figure.
At any rate, this is a great Secret Lair in concept and execution, and the card choice isn’t bad either. All of these cards are worth more than $5, so even though there’s only four of them, the total value still comes out at around $35.
A little frustratingly, this is a Chaos Vault product, which means it’s liable to launch suddenly and with little warning or marketing at a relatively random time. You’ll need to have your eye on the ball to capture this Lair, named ‘Duality Distorted’, before it’s all sold out.
In other SL news, Wizards of the Coast opened orders on its ‘Corn Maze superdrop’ yesterday, and some of the more popular collections are already all gone. Head to the Secret Lair website to scope them out for yourself, or give our October superdrop price breakdown a look – we’ll let you know whether each one is a good deal or a rip off.
Also, yes, Nicol Bolas has a beard, or at the very least a very peculiar chin.
Source: Wargamer
