Something fishy just happened with Magic: The Gathering’s latest Secret Lair drop, a Chaos Vault offering that features a Dandan deck based on the unique 1v1 game format where two players share the same deck. Originally pioneered by Magic player Nick Floyd around 1996, the Dandân (or “Forgetful Fish”) format focuses on the Dandân fish creature from the game’s very first expansion, Arabian Nights. The publisher, Wizards of the Coast, usually doesn’t sell decks as part of Secret Lair, but this latest drop — which went live on Monday at 12 p.m. EDT — is an 80-card deck with 46 gorgeous, borderless foil cards and 34 cards with classic retro frames. Priced at $99, the drop was completely sold out within 27 minutes.
Within about another half-hour, numerous listings popped up on TCG Player and other retailers priced at more than double that price. The current market rate as of this writing — based on listings, anyway — is $242.40. Over on eBay, there are multiple listings priced at $300. It’s unclear exactly how many decks were sold from the Secret Lair shop, but close to 100 listings have since gone live, upselling the product drastically.
The prevalence of bots and scalpers scooping up Secret Lair products has long been a topic of controversy, so much so that Secret Lair senior director Lindsey Bartell appeared on a Weekly MTG episode that aired in February to discuss it with host Blake Rasmussen.
“I always want everybody to get what they want, especially if there’s a new mechanic in the drop,” Bartell said, later adding, “I never want anything to sell out before the queue is cleared.”
Yet over on Reddit, complaints are already emerging from players who had the Dandan deck in their cart only to have it removed due to it no longer being available.
In that same conversation, Bartell said that, historically, only about 0.5% of orders come from “bad actors” and that other precautions have been made to prevent them from scooping up all the Secret Lair product. The website has seemingly grown more efficient at weeding out bots, but tracking actual scalpers who hop in the queue first, buy a product, and then immediately list it for sale elsewhere at almost triple the initial price is presumably quite a challenge.
Bartell described Secret Lair as a unique branch of Magic that tries to be “experimental and provocative.” Chaos Vault is, according to her, “Secret Lair’s Secret Lair,” a model that experiments and provokes even more. Those weird experiments don’t always work. Back in February, Secret Lair offered a Chaos Vault drop called Prints Charming with a choose-your-own-price model that had five tiers. Early birds paid only $9.99 for the non-foil drop as opposed to the typical price point of $29.99 or the inflated rates of $35.99 or $39.99. As these price tiers sold out over a brief period of time, the only option was to purchase the cheapest version that remained available.
According to Bartell, 95% of the orders were paid at a typical price or cheaper — but the remaining 5% still sold at higher price points. “Looking at that on the website, I can see how that doesn’t look great,” she admitted, doubling down to confirm that Chaos Vault would continue to experiment.
“There will continue to be times when there’s controversy and things that don’t always land correctly,” she said. “That I can almost promise, but what I can also promise is that we’ll continue to learn from those things, and that we’ll always try and endeavor to make our explanation as transparent and clear as possible of what to expect.”
Mere weeks after the last Chaos Vault controversy, a new one has begun swimming in the Secret Lair waters.
