Three weeks ago I wrote that the artifact drop in the Hobbit Secret Lair was “where I’d expect actual money to show up,” and then I hedged it into nothing by the end of the paragraph because I didn’t have the cards in front of me yet. Typical. I do this every time, promise a follow-up, and then the follow-up arrives and I have to admit the hedge was the wrong call.
So here’s the follow-up. A Marvelous Mathoms Superdrop went live August 17 at 9 a.m. Pacific, all five drops at once, and it’s been six days. I pulled Scryfall data on every card in all five drops this morning. I was not ready for what came back.
Smaug’s Spoils is the one I called, mostly by accident
Smaug’s Spoils turned out to be Fellwar Stone (renamed “Erebor Heirloom”), Lightning Greaves, Liquimetal Torque, Sol Ring, and Thought Vessel. Five mana rocks, basically, dressed up as dragon treasure. Boring theme, I said it would be the money drop, and technically I was right, though not for the reason I gave. I thought the risk was these staples getting diluted by more supply. What actually happened is the opposite: the new printings themselves are already commanding a premium on their own.
Sol Ring alone. You can buy a Sol Ring for about a dollar and a half in a dozen different Commander precons, that’s not new information, everyone who’s built more than one deck knows this. I bought a second foil Sol Ring off a previous Secret Lair drop two years ago because I was convinced I’d traded my first one away at a Grand Prix, and then found the original sitting in a trade binder I hadn’t opened since. So I own three Sol Rings I have no real use for and I’m apparently the target market for this drop specifically. The new Secret Lair printing is already selling as a single for $16.70 non-foil and $17.82 foil, six days after a $29.99 pack containing it went on sale. Add up all five cards in the drop at their current single prices and you get $51.20, for a pack that cost $29.99 with four other cards attached. Against the cheapest normal printing of each card, the same five cards add up to under twelve dollars.
I don’t fully trust that $16.70 number yet, to be honest. Six days is not a lot of sales volume to build a market price on, and Secret Lair singles are notoriously jumpy in their first month before the market settles, the same way a serialized card’s price can swing wildly on a handful of early sales before it finds a real number. But even if it corrects down thirty percent, you’re still looking at a card that cost about a dollar in every other printing selling for real money because of the art and the frame it’s wearing.
Desolation is worse, in the good way
Desolation is Defile, Diabolic Intent, Dread Return, Mirkwood Bats, and Read the Bones, all done in a stark black-and-white ink style that I’ll admit looks genuinely great, better than most Secret Lair art direction gets. Diabolic Intent was already a real card before this, $15 to $18 depending on which older printing you’re comparing against. The new Secret Lair single is at $20.30 non-foil and $30.23 foil already.
Mirkwood Bats is the one that actually surprised me, because Mirkwood Bats was never a card anyone was excited about. It’s a two-mana flyer from the first Lord of the Rings set that does a small amount of nothing. Cheapest existing printing is $1.47. The new Secret Lair single is $27.31 non-foil, $39.98 foil, which has nothing to do with the card being good and everything to do with the art being wanted on its own terms. That’s a much less predictable kind of value to plan around than “the card is playable.”
Four of the five cards in Desolation have price data right now (Read the Bones doesn’t yet, still shows null both ways), and those four alone add up to $87.59 as singles against a $29.99 non-foil pack price. I want to sit with that number for a second because it’s not a small gap, it’s basically triple.
The tokens. I need to talk about the tokens.
So back in July I did the math on Second Breakfast and Beyond, the seven-Food-token drop, and landed on “probably fine, maybe slightly underpriced” after comparing it to some other Secret Lair tokens that were going for eight to eleven dollars each as singles. I remember specifically writing that I’d talked myself down from “obviously underpriced” to “probably fine.” I want that sentence back.
Every single one of the seven Food tokens is currently priced between $28.98 and $29.98, individually, per token, and Scryfall doesn’t break out which art corresponds to which mealtime clearly enough for me to tell you if Second Breakfast itself commands a premium over, say, Elevenses. Add all seven together and you get $204.64 in individual token value against a $29.99 non-foil pack. It’s tokens. Tokens are the thing you get a stack of for free in every draft and leave in a shoebox.
So yeah. Two hundred and four dollars. For tokens. I had to just sit there for a second after pulling that number, because I wrote the sentence about them being “probably fine” three weeks ago and, well. No. Not fine. Extremely not fine, apparently, just not in the direction I was worried about.
I genuinely don’t know what to do with that number. Part of me thinks it’s a market that hasn’t settled, thin sales volume on a handful of early listings that’ll come back to earth once more of these hit TCGplayer. Part of me thinks Universes Beyond collectors specifically wanted these because of the flavor text mapping a Hobbit’s entire eating schedule onto seven cards, and that demand is real and durable. I don’t think I can tell you which one it is yet. Ask me in another month, I guess, and this time I’ll actually commit to an answer instead of hedging in the last sentence of the paragraph.
He Who Walks Unseen is the one nobody’s buying yet
The fifth drop, the one with the new foil treatment I said back in July was “genuinely unpredictable,” turned out to be Arcane Heist, Contentious Plan, Curiosity, Solve the Equation, and Windfall, sold only in a foil-only $59.99 “Out of Sight” edition. Silvery ink, apparently meant to trace Bilbo’s outline while he’s invisible, which is a nice idea for a treatment.
Three of the five cards, Contentious Plan, Curiosity, and Windfall, have no market price at all six days out. No listings yet, nothing to compare. The two that do have data, Arcane Heist and Solve the Equation, are at $27.99 and $24.99, which sums to $52.98 against a $59.99 pack for less than half the cards in it, so on the two cards where I have information the pattern from the other four drops holds. The silence on the other three is its own data point. When singles show up in the market within days for four drops out of five, the fifth one going quiet usually means the buyer pool skewed toward “unopened for the art” over “cracked to sell the cards,” or the print run was smaller, or both.
The collector number is doing all the work now
If you bought into any of these five drops, or if you’re holding the cards these reprint under their original names, the collector number is the only thing standing between you and a wrong number in your binder. I said this in July and it matters more now that real prices exist: Seize the Spoils out of Kaldheim is worth about twenty-eight cents. The same card, same name, same oracle text, printed as collector number 2556 in this Secret Lair, is at $8.99. That’s not a rounding error, that’s a thirty-times difference sitting on the exact same card name.
I scanned my own five singles from Smaug’s Spoils into Eldwyn the day they arrived, mostly out of habit, and I’m glad I did, because the app pulled the SLD printing automatically off the collector number on the card rather than defaulting to whatever printing of Sol Ring I already had six copies of. If you’re tracking these by hand in a spreadsheet, double check that you actually wrote down 2557 through 2571 and not just “Sol Ring, Fellwar Stone, Diabolic Intent” with no set attached, because a spreadsheet doesn’t know which Sol Ring you mean and it will just guess wrong.
Unrelated tangent, but the $199 spend threshold gets you a promo Arcane Signet called “Heart of the Mountain,” and I did not hit $199, so I don’t have one, and I’m slightly annoyed about it in a way that’s out of proportion to a card that’s probably worth twenty bucks. Secret Lair thresholds are very good at making you buy a fourth thing.
I don’t think there’s a clean lesson here. The reprint math I ran back in July undersold basically every drop, the tokens most of all, and I’m not sure I’d have called any of these numbers if you’d shown me the card lists back then without the sale data attached. If you’re deciding whether to chase the singles now or wait, what I’d actually watch is whether these prices hold once more of the initial print run works its way through TCGplayer over the next month. Early Secret Lair prices are usually the highest they’ll ever be. Not always, but usually, and I’m not confident enough in any one of these numbers to tell you which drop is the exception before it happens.