Seven Food tokens, and every one of them has a time printed on it. Breakfast at 7:00 AM. Second Breakfast at 9:00. Then elevenses at 11:00, lunch at 1:00, afternoon tea at 3:00, dinner at 6:00, supper at 8:00. Somebody at Wizards sat down and mapped a hobbit’s entire eating schedule onto a token cycle, complete with a bundt cake and Gandalf’s shadow looming in the window, and I respect the commitment even while I’m doing arithmetic on whether seven tokens are worth $29.99.
That drop is called Second Breakfast and Beyond, and it’s one of five in A Marvelous Mathoms Superdrop, the Hobbit-themed Secret Lair going live August 17 at 9 a.m. Pacific. Two drops are public right now. The other three get revealed one a week between now and the sale, so anyone trying to decide what to preorder is working from about 40% of the information.
What’s actually in the revealed Mathoms drops
The second one is Over the Edge of the Wild: Cloudshift, Tocasia’s Welcome reskinned as “Quite a Merry Gathering,” Stony Silence, Imp’s Mischief, and Seize the Spoils. $29.99 non-foil, $39.99 foil. Same as the token drop, same as basically every Secret Lair for the last two years.
Price those five against their cheapest printings and you get Seize the Spoils at $0.22 in Kaldheim, Cloudshift at $1.37 from Avacyn Restored, Tocasia’s Welcome at $0.58 in the Secrets of Strixhaven Commander decks, Stony Silence at $0.73 out of Mystery Booster 2, and Imp’s Mischief at $6.58 in Commander Masters. Under $10 for the whole set of five. Price against nicer printings instead and you land closer to $15.
So you’re paying somewhere between $15 and $20 for art. Which is the deal every Secret Lair has ever offered, and if you go in knowing that, fine. It’s when people convince themselves a drop is a value play that things go sideways.
Imp’s Mischief is the only card here that can move
Everything else in that drop is functionally bulk with a nice frame on it. Imp’s Mischief isn’t. It sits at $6.58 in Commander Masters, $7.70 in the Breaking News sheet, and $7.77 for the Planar Chaos original, with the Planar Chaos foil up at $37.25. It’s a black instant that redirects a spell at the cost of some life, it’s played in Commander as cheap protection, and it has been printed sparingly enough that the price never fully collapsed.
A Secret Lair reprint is a softer hit than a set reprint. The print run is capped by however many they move in a sale window rather than by however many boxes a distributor orders, so supply arrives in a lump and then stops. That’s different from what happens when a card lands in a Commander product and craters. But it’s still supply, and $7 cards are exactly the tier where an extra few thousand copies shows up on the graph.
Stony Silence is the cautionary version of this. It used to be a real card. Mystery Booster 2 dumped a pile of them into the market in 2024 and that copy now sells for $0.73; the Innistrad one is $1.52 and the Modern Masters 2017 one is $2.04. All the value that’s left lives in the old foils, $13.60 for Innistrad and $11.34 for MM3. Nothing about a Secret Lair printing changes any of that. It’s already been reprinted past the point where reprints matter.
Seven tokens for $29.99 is not the joke it looks like
I assumed the token drop was the throwaway. Tokens aren’t cards, you get them free in packs, charging thirty dollars for seven of them reads like a prank.
Then I looked up what Secret Lair tokens actually sell for. The four Food tokens from the MAOMOMIJI drop last March go for $10.86, $10.74, $9.84, and $6.68. Three of the four are pushing $10 each, as singles, for tokens. The foil Food token that came out of the Cats superdrop in June is at $8.57. Seven tokens at $29.99 works out to about $4.28 apiece, which against those comparables is the only part of this superdrop where the math is pointing the right direction.
Although I’m not sure that comparison holds as well as I want it to. The MAOMOMIJI tokens were four cards in a single small drop with a distinctive art style people latched onto, and Middle-earth tokens are going to be printed into a much larger, much hungrier market. Universes Beyond demand cuts both ways: more buyers, but also more copies, because Wizards prints to demand on these now. So maybe $4.28 a token is just the correct price and there’s no edge in it at all. I still think it’s the best-value drop of the two we can see, but I’ve talked myself down from “obviously underpriced” to “probably fine.”
Anyway. Secret Lair queues. You add something to a cart at 8 a.m. to get into the pre-queue, and then at 9 the queue randomizes everyone who was already waiting, so being early gets you into the lottery but doesn’t get you to the front of it. Cart contents don’t reserve anything. Free shipping kicks in over $99, and three non-foil drops come to $89.97, so the threshold sits just far enough above three that you go looking for a fourth. Not an accident. I’ve been through enough of these that I now just decide the night before and don’t look at the site again.
The three drops nobody has seen
Wizards teased all five in the announcement, and the three unrevealed ones are described as unseen footsteps in a brand-new foil treatment, Smaug-worthy artifacts, and a few dark things best not left alone under the mountain.
The artifacts one is where I’d expect actual money to show up. Artifact drops are where Sol Ring and Lightning Greaves and Skullclamp end up, and those are cards a lot of people own six copies of across their decks. The dark-things drop is probably black removal or Mirkwood-flavored creatures. Unseen footsteps is invisibility, so something to do with the Ring, in a foil treatment that has never existed before.
I don’t know what to tell you about the new foil treatment. Brand-new treatments are genuinely unpredictable. Some of them carry a permanent premium and some get one printing and vanish, and there’s no way to call it from a one-line tease three weeks out. Anyone confidently pricing that drop right now is guessing.
What you can do before the reveals is write down where your stuff currently sits. If a drop next week reprints a Lightning Greaves you own four of, you can’t tell whether it hurt you unless you know what those four were worth in July. I ran my artifact staples through Eldwyn last night, which took maybe four minutes because they’re all in one deck box, and now there’s a timestamped number to compare against in September. Same logic applies to your LTR singles if you’re still holding those from the first Middle-earth set.
A thing that trips people up here: Secret Lair printings are their own set code, SLD, with collector numbers in the thousands. These new ones run 2545 through 2556. If you log them as the Kaldheim Seize the Spoils or the Innistrad Stony Silence, your collection value will be wrong in both directions, and the collector number at the bottom of the card is the only reliable way to tell them apart once they’re sleeved.
Unrelated, but the Food tokens got me thinking about the LTR prerelease in 2023. Somebody at my LGS brought an actual tray of scones because of the hobbit theme, which was a lovely gesture for about twenty minutes, and by round three there was jam on someone’s draft pool and a genuine argument about whether a sticky Orcish Bowmasters counted as damaged. It did. He got a replacement out of the store’s spares and I don’t think anyone brought food again.
Two drops in, the honest read is that this superdrop is cosmetics. Nothing revealed so far threatens a card in your binder except a modest nudge to Imp’s Mischief. Ask me again in three weeks when the artifact drop shows up, because that’s the one that can actually cost you something.