MountainMountain | by Wizard of Barge

Controversially—not exactly for the first time—Secret Lair has released a product that has everyone dredging up conversation about the elusive "print-to-demand" model of the early years.

The Goblin Storm Secret Lair sold out nearly instantaneously. Not in the way other Secret Lairs have. Pre-queue patrons who waited in line for an hour found that they wouldn't be receiving this sought after release.

Naturally, the Magic Community was very upset. Conversations about scalping, false scarcity, and the print-to-demand model have resurfaced.

When one of my close friends lamented not getting his favorite Magic artist's Secret Lair, I got pretty curious about this whole process.

I wanted to dissect everything behind getting a Secret Lair into players' hands, scrutinizing all elements.

In order to talk about if the process for making Secret Lairs is customer friendly, we have to talk about the whole process from a customer's perspective.

The Announcement

Let's talk about the Chaos Vaults for a second. I promise it relates to how players feel about how Secret Lair does its announcements.

The Senior Director of Secret Lair, Lindsey Bartell, has stated that "What if Secret Lair had a Secret Lair?" is the design philosophy for Chaos Vaults. It's an experimental space even more experimental than Secret Lairs themselves.

There have been many Chaos Vaults like the notorious $1 dollar Flower Power Secret Lair. Even more recently there has been a Two Scoops Secret Lair that allowed a player to buy two Secret Lairs together for a slight discount, but you had to commit to buying both.

In my experience, most players are somewhat ambivalent about or happy with this concept. However, there is one divisive Chaos Vault that I think falls squarely in line with the problem players have with Secret Lair announcements.

The Secret Lair was Charming Curiosity. Secret Lairs are announced on Magic's socials and on the Magic official website. It'll tell readers about the contents, design philosophy, and date of release for the Vaults.

It clearly says in the Charming Curiosity's announcement that, "All Prints Charming listings, including non-foil and foil editions, offer the same drop at every price point. The only difference between listings is the price, and higher-priced options do not include anything extra."

However, that's not how it unfolded for a lot of buyers. They saw a low cost Secret Lair and jumped in the queue only to find they had to pay the normal price or in some cases, more than normal prices.

When pressed about this topic Bartell said that the higher prices were a joke. Less than 5% of the stock for the Secret Lair was at a higher than normal price. She completely understood the backlash and urged that Chaos Vault will never attempt this type of joke again.

To the point about the announcement, the information was communicated in various locations for buyers to know what they were buying. It's even available in the description of the item on the purchase page.

I was unable to find the social media posts about it, but I'm sure it was communicated there as well, since they seemed to be trying to communicate it everywhere else.

There were still talks in the Magic Community about inflating prices with false scarcity and FOMO through this process from fans. I can understand why people would think this. I understand our fear of corporations trying to psychologically push and pressure people into buying less thoughtfully than they should.

There is a ton of research on these kinds of addictive practices, but I'm dubious about if that's what's going on here with Secret Lair.

I don't know the inner machinations of Secret Lair, but from how much they pulled back on this because of the clear ire from fans, makes me doubt they understood how all of this would go over.

I don't think introducing this as a Chaos Vault was an indication of how they wanted to structure sales in the future. We didn't think that way about the $1 Secret Lair and we shouldn't think it now.

Chaos Vaults are meant to be weird, experimental, and unique. I doubt they'll try to make this a new way of purchasing Secret Lairs.

The Queue

Before we move on, I want to state that a lot of my quotes from Lindsay Bartell comes from the Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast episode #1325. She breaks down the queue pretty effectively in this interview.

If a player wants a Secret Lair, they first have to decide how much time they can devote to it. At 9am PST players have the ability to join the queue. An hour before that, according to Bartell, players can join the "pre-queue."

They can put their checkout details in and put items into their cart for easier check out. If you've entered the pre-queue then at 9am PST you are randomly put into the actual queue.

Bartell stresses that the pre-queue to queue orientation is random. Someone who joined the pre-queue at 8:55am PST could be first in line to the actual queue.

Then there is what Bartell calls the "unpredictability of the queue." The number that is listed as your wait time isn't how long it will actually take.

This time adjusts as the buyers load is assessed by the system. It shows you initially, the worst case scenario, the longest amount of time it'll take for you to receive an opportunity to buy.

At least that is the intention. As more people are checked out, the floodgates ease open ever so slightly, trying to quicken the pace of checkout.

This means you might get up from your queue listed at one hour to it jumping to several minutes wait. You can't just walk away from it to pass the time. You have to keep an eye on it.

There are live updates about the quantity in stock. What has sold out is on the waiting screen as well, to inform fans of what they'll have access to as it becomes known. "The Infamous Superdrops Sonic the Hedgehog, our Final Fantasy, even our Spooky Drop last year, Secret Scare last year rather.

Four or five hour wait times," Bartell said in the interview. It is no wonder fans would be upset with this prospect. Secret Lair drops are happening in the early to middle of the work day.

Not everyone can sit for an hour or two, let alone five hours for one. Bartell agrees calling this standard, "Absolutely egregious. Completely embarrassing. Nothing I ever want to see again."

Waiting for an hour for a Secret Lair feels good in comparison to five hours, but I know at previous jobs I couldn't take off an hour or two to buy one.

Mondays and during the work day are rough times to buy a Secret Lair due to the time commitment. Bartell says that over the last year people are moving through queues five times the rate they used to.

This shows that Secret Lair understands this is a concern and is trying to course correct. This also means that Lairs sell out faster than ever, especially with the demand for Secret Lairs going up more and more. This cycles into the next big talking point or concern: stock.

Actually Getting a Secret Lair

If you get to the check out area, then you'll have a period of time—roughly 10 minutes—to check out. After you've completed your order, you're charged. According to Bartell, one to two days later your order is sent to manufacturing to fulfill.

This is why the usual turnaround times for getting a Secret Lair is about a week. But the reason I'm writing this article is precisely inspired by how many people just don't get Secret Lairs at all. There are a lot of concerns surrounding this process.

Concern #1: "Secret Lair is purposefully trying to drive up the value of their product through false scarcity by not printing enough product." I'm not going to lie, I started with this concern because it seems rather confusing to me.

The secondary market means nothing to Wizards of the Coast (WOTC). They make all of their money directly from sales of their sealed product. Things like singles revenue don't make it back to WOTC.

The market gets inflated by distributors who buy and bust this material to sell individually for marked up rates. Collectors and LGSs care about scarcity, not WOTC.

The concern that WOTC wouldn't want to maximize sales by making as much product doesn't make a ton of sense. They want more money so they would make more product.

The problem is straddling the line between how much they print and how much they're going to be able to sell. Ideally they want to get that number exactly right. They want to print just enough for everyone who wants to buy one, to get one, without wasting money on extra product they can't get rid of.

I know what you're probably yelling into your phone or computer screen: Bring back print-to-demand. It's actually not that simple. We need a history lesson from Bartell first. Technically the only time Secret Lair was print-to-demand was in the first six months of its existence.

They would print orders based on what was requested, exactly to the amount needed. No more. It would take 4-12 months for an order to be fulfilled. "It was pretty universally hated," says Bartell.

There is some confusion in the community about why this was universally hated. Bartell spoke at lengths in a Polygon article, insisting it was hated because of the long wait times.

Upon reading Riley Hicks's Article about delay of the Heads I Win, Tails You Lose Secret Lair—which a community member helping with my article pointed me to—we noticed that the Reddit poster's unhappiness referenced in this article and others around similar events (Theros Stargazing) were centered on the concern of communication as well.

They hated that Secret Lair made little to no announcements in the way of shipping updates even when delays pushed into month 13.

I worry though that anecdotal evidence might not hold up here, though. When WOTC makes any changes to their structure they've pointed to the data they've collected from the community about their feelings on things. I'm sure this is no different.

When they insist the reason for ire was more about time versus communication, it's likely this is true. With what we've seen in Reddit posts like these, people were definitely upset about both. Either way, the problems led to changes to the system.

Secret Lair then moved to the "time-box-demand" model. Fans were given two days to decide if they wanted a product and then they would be cut off from receiving them beyond that time period.

To increase shipping speeds they "would print an absolutely enormous amount of inventory to make sure we had enough to not run out under any circumstances," said Bartell.

She went on to say that going back to reprint is very expensive and very slow as well. Both Bartell and I think that this is what people mean when they talk about the "print-to-demand" model.

This model ended up being very wasteful. There was an excess of inventory that they would ultimately have to destroy. There have been many people wondering why they had to destroy the inventory. I saw a video talking about this from SullivantheMonster.

I have some evidence as to why they don't. Similar to why they don't reprint cards on the Reserved List, Bartell said, "We are a collectibles business." Putting quadruple the amount of product into the market with no demand is expensive and bad for business.

Some of the fans of the game, distributors, and people who push Magic into its success would pull away from the business if they did. It would be harder to get product if fans lost those avenues of guaranteed purchase. It makes sense as to why this model wasn't sustainable.

The current model is the "limited-print-run" model. Bartell explains that they're printing more product than ever, in an attempt to fill demands. However, "when you are Secret Lair and you are working in a business that is highly experimental...we are doing things that are completely unprecedented before.

We don't have comps to look at. We don't have things that we can say this is exactly how much we are gonna need. A lot of the time we're using the best information that we can get our hands on and guesstimating to the best of our abilities," according to Bartell.

She goes on to say that they have to commit nearly nine months in advance for printing so it's not as simple as just printing more, not that it's even a good idea for the business to print more.

Even in the summer of 2025 print delays appeared due to shortages of a key raw material that is very difficult to replace at certain locations.

It is still affecting printing into 2026. It's mainly from one supplier so it doesn't affect every release. It's why some Secret Lairs came out faster than others.

So, if the current model is so much better than before, why does everyone online seem to still hate it? A big concern for fans is scalpers.

Concern 2: "Scalpers are driving up the prices of items by trying to sell them in the secondary market and Secret Lair isn't doing anything about this." Secret Lair has attempted to solve some of these problems. Cart maximums have changed from five to two, and this hasn't affected how much fans are able to purchase.

They've worked with their website host so as to close loopholes like queue bypassing through reused tokens. And lastly, Bartell says their site provider analyzed the amount of potential scalpers in the buying process, through their internal systems, and they found it is less than 0.5%.

This is hard to accept. It feels so bad to wait in a long queue to get product, waste your time, and not get product, but it's not because of false scarcity, scalpers, or print-to-demand. The nebulous thing about Secret Lair is how successful it will be.

Sometimes something is so popular unexpectedly that WOTC is unable to estimate how much they needed to print. It's hard to toe the line without wasting money for them.

Bartell even mentions that with the agility from the financial successes of the current model, Secret Lair can take bigger risks on what they do like a $1 Secret Lair or even a $10 one.

"We want fans to get our product...That's our goal always and to get their things as soon as possible. We want them to be in the hands of people who love them as soon as we possibly can," says Bartell.

They are trying to accurately predict desire and fulfill those needs. "For the most part we get it pretty close. There have been a few times where we've been egregiously wrong...Dan Dan was very close."

Conclusion

I've always thought that the most profitable thing WOTC can do is keep fans happy. Lindsey Bartell says her team wants feedback. She doesn't want long queue times, people to have long ship times, or for players not to get the product. And as we've seen, WOTC can get better and is transparent when they get feedback. That's my thoughts. I'm @strixhavendropout on everything.