The latest Magic: The Gathering Secret Lair has received a ton of criticism for its poor card choices and inexplicably high price. While Adventures of the Little Witch, released on April 22, features undeniably gorgeous artwork, that doesn’t seem enough to make up for its pitfalls, at least judging by the reception it has received online.
The Adventures of the Little Witch collection is part of the Chaos Vault, the home for Magic’s one-off, experimental Secret Lairs that are released with little fanfare. Apparently, one of those experiments is a $20 higher price for foils, as the regular version of this drop costs the usual $29.99, while foil copies are double that, an unprecedented $59.99. That’s a significant hike over the $39.99 we’ve come to expect.
Adventures of the Little Witch features cards with whimsical watercolor art by Finnish illustrator Heikala. It has four cards in total, in the Selesnya MTG color combination. But if we break down the cards by price, we see something pretty interesting.
- Secret Rendezvous – $0.29 non-foil / $0.46 foil
- Serenity – $4.88 non-foil / never printed in foil
- Realms Uncharted – $16 non-foil / $60 foil
- Esika’s Chariot – $0.50 non-foil / $1.35 foil
So that’s a barely passable $22 of value for non-foils, but just over $60 for the foils – plus the first ever foil version of Serenity. That’s pretty telling, isn’t it? Wizards of the Coast usually claims to ignore the secondary market, but the pricing of this Secret Lair drop tells another story. The fact the cards are worth more in foil is surely meant to make up for the boosted price for the foil version of the drop?
However, even if this new price point makes theoretical sense, it’s understandably been criticized harshly by fans, who see it as a cash grab. While we’ve had costly Secret Lairs in the past (Deadpool for instance was $40/50) this is the highest price tag for a small pack of reprints yet. I fear that if The Adventures of the Little Witch sells well, we could easily see it become the new baseline.
And it doesn’t help that the more valuable cards in this Lair aren’t particularly good. Serenity is a somewhat playable Legacy card, but doesn’t have a place in the Magic: The Gathering format’s best decks, while Realms Uncharted only works with very specific landfall MTG commanders, so it’s pretty niche.
I notice Wizards has been kind enough to provide a Legacy deck in the product description, a way you could theoretically use all four cards in the same list. That’s a fun detail, and I love it when Secret Lair cards work together. But it stings a little that that description also includes phrases like “least-terrible” and “how hilarious would it be?”. It’s hard to see that as anything other than a tacit acknowledgement that they know the cards are crap.
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Source: Wargamer
