So, if we all agree that slow shipping isn’t really that big of a deal, do you think we can get Wizards of the Coast to reinstate print-to-demand for Magic: The Gathering’s Secret Lair? When WotC announced at the start of the year that Secret Lair would be switching to a limited-print-run model, that was the reason it gave for the change. “One piece of feedback we’ve overwhelmingly heard is that you want to have Secret Lair drops in hand more quickly,” the announcement said.
After how miserable this last year of Secret Lair drops has been, it’s hard to believe that was ever an issue for people. Is getting your order faster better if you can’t even get an order in the first place? I think it’s obvious that limited-print-runs have been a catastrophic change for Magic, as this week’s Marvel drop demonstrated once again.
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If you blinked and missed it, Wizards revealed a collection of Marvel hero Secret Lair drops at New York Comic-Con last month. These five bundles, featuring characters like Iron Man, Captain America, and Black Panther, are Magic’s first foray into the Marvel Universe before the highly-anticipated Spider-Man Universes Beyond set debuts next year. The sale began at 9AM PT Monday morning, and as expected, everything went wrong.
Buying a product should not be an anxiety-inducing experience, but if you wanted to get your hands on these coveted Marvel cards, you were in for a stressful situation. Many waited in a queue for over an hour just for the site to crash. Some things sold out almost instantly, and, within the first four hours, every single bundle was gone.
Even worse, those who joined the queue straight away would find even the Arcane Signet promo sold out before they had the chance to check out.
If you had anything else to do at 9AM on a Monday morning, like, say, go to work. You were out of luck. Have fun playing scalper prices loser, I guess you should have rearranged your life so you could spam refresh the Secret Lair website all morning.
It’s beyond frustrating that this is what Secret Lair has become, especially when you look back at that original announcement from January. “While popular Secret Lair drops may sell out fast,” it says. “We now have four years of Secret Lair sales to base our print-run numbers on, and we’re aiming to get as close to overall demand as possible.” There’s no way to be charitable to WotC here: that was a lie.
We know this because this Marvel drop isn’t the first Secret Lair whose print-run numbers aren’t even remotely close to overall demand. July’s Monty Python drop went pretty much exactly the same way, selling out in a matter of hours and prompting a backlash so severe that Magic’s head designer Mark Rosewater personally responded to it. We know this because Hasbro’s CEO told investors last month that he was expecting each Marvel mini set to “immediately sell out.” We know this because WotC sent out an email to everyone with tips on how to checkout as fast as possible.
It isn’t that Wizard’s is getting the estimates wrong here, it wants this to happen. It wants to create FOMO by limiting supply. It wants to create chaos and headlines about how high the demand for Secret Lair is. Worst of all it wants its customers to be disappointed, or at the very least it doesn’t care that disappointment is a byproduct of this system.
In an investor call ahead of the Marvel Superdrop, Hasbro CEO Chris Cocks said that he expected the Secret Lairs to “immediately sell out”.
If anxiety and despair are the main feelings you have when trying to buy something from a company, that company has done something horribly wrong. Our own Card-Boy-in-Chief Joe Parlock essentially gave up hope of getting any Secret Lair drops after the Monty Python fiasco, and I see that same sentiment shared by many.
I hate how reductive it sounds to say “just print more cards”, but there’s a really clear and simple solution to this problem: just print more cards. The fact that this keeps happening shows that WotC doesn’t think this is a problem that needs to be solved, and until we hear otherwise, you should expect this to just keep happening.
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