The Final Fantasy Universes Beyond set for Magic: The Gathering isn’t even out yet, and it’s already become the best-selling expansion in the card game’s history. That’s great news for Wizards of the Coast owner Hasbro, but bad news for anyone who actually wants to get the cards. The limited-edition Final Fantasy X Secret Lair drop went on sale yesterday and had fans in digital queues for hours even as the cards they desperately wanted immediately started showing up on reseller sites like eBay.
Secret Lair drops are separate from new expansions and feature classic MTG cards—sometimes very pricey ones—reprinted and reinterpreted with new art and rainbow foil editions. They’re expensive and limited, which is why some longtime fans hate them. But the Final Fantasy crossover has tapped into a whole new fandom passionate about collecting, and the Secret Lair cards looked extra neat.
There were three mini-sets of five cards, each featuring some of the most iconic weapons, spells, and moments from the series, like Heroic Intervention as “Aerith’s Curaga Magic” and Toxic Deluge as Kefka’s Toxic Deluge.” Sword of Truth and Justice, a roughly $36 card from 2019’s Modern Horizon’s expansion, became “Tidus’s Brotherhood Sword.” A full foil version set was priced at $120. Fans were ravenous.
“The Secret Lair website is currently experiencing extremely high traffic and wait times may be longer than usual,” Wizards of the Coast announced just five minutes after the Final Fantasy X Secret Lair drop went on sale. “Please monitor the queue page for real-time updates, including product availability in your region.” Long waits and payment processing bugs ensued. It was enough to make some people want to quit the hobby altogether.
“To get on the site exactly at 11:00am then wait three hours in the check out queue and watch every single thing be bought under me,” wrote one collector on the MTG subreddit. “Then going on eBay and seeing hundreds of scalpers.” Some people were already reselling full Final Fantasy X Secret Lair sets for $400 on eBay. Some are calling it the worst Secret Lair drop yet.
The result has been renewed calls for Wizards to just print Secret Lair drops on-demand rather than essentially line a bunch of middlemen’s pockets. “I’m mostly annoyed by how much time this shit wastes,” wrote another collector. “Just print to demand, take my money for your stupidly-priced cardboard and spare me having to camp at my computer for an hour.”
Others will just buy proxies from third-parties because all they really care about is the art. It’s worth remembering that Wizards doesn’t make any money from the second-hand market. Outside of wanting to gin up FOMO to artificially inflate demand, there’s no reason for the company not to just print as many cards as people actually want to buy.
That seemingly sound logic doesn’t appear to be applying to the regular Final Fantasy Universes Beyond set either, at least not yet. Officially launching on June 13, there’s no word on when re-prints for the best-selling expansion ever will start pouring back into stores. Rumors have suggested as early as July while others have suggested a worst-case scenario of Final Fantasy MTG cards being sold out until the mid-fall. Maybe by then the scalpers will have moved on to other sets.
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