The first time I saw “Enchant Creature” printed on a card I owned, I was nine years old, and it was a beat-up Unstable Mutation from Revised that I’d traded a sibling out of using methods I’d rather not get into. I remember turning it over in my hand and thinking the language was strange. “Enchant Creature.” Two words doing the work that later editions would replace with a much longer typeline. The wording was a fossil layer, evidence that the game I was learning had a previous life before me.
I bring that up because the Chaos Vault Secret Lair pair that hit on May 11, Back In My Day, is built entirely around that fossil-layer feeling. Four cards, retro frame, obsolete wording. Wizards reprinted Battle Hymn with the “Mana source” type that hasn’t been printed since the early 90s. Birthing Pod with the old “Mono Artifact” color indicator. Veil of Summer wearing the long-dead “Interrupt” card type. Breath of Fury with “Enchant Creature” as its full type line.
The companion drop, Inked, is doing something different. It’s a five-card reprint of Crypt Ghast, Deathrite Shaman, Ice-Fang Coatl, Burnished Hart, and Mulldrifter, all redone in full-art frames by the Brooklyn tattoo artist Virginia Elwood. Different vibe. Different audience.
Both went up on the Chaos Vault page (Wizards’ new “anything goes” subsection of the Secret Lair site) and nearly every bundle sold out within hours. The only thing still available is the Double Vanilla Bundle, which is two non-foil copies of Back In My Day, sitting at $51.99 on the Secret Lair Marketplace. Everything ships May 13.
If you’ve been holding any of these nine cards in your binder, the obvious question is whether to dump them now before secondary supply gets flooded. Mostly the answer is no, but the reason why is more interesting than “Secret Lair reprint” usually means.
The Chaos Vault print-run wrinkle
Most Secret Lair drops are made-to-order. Wizards announces them, accepts orders for two or three weeks, then prints however many copies got bought plus a buffer. That’s a huge print run when staples like Cyclonic Rift or Skullclamp are involved, which is exactly why the Goblin Storm drop did what it did to existing Goblin singles.
Chaos Vault is structurally the opposite. Wizards’ own writeup says it’s explicitly experimental, the drops launch at unusual times, and bundles are limited-quantity. Back In My Day and Inked both sold out almost instantly, with bundle-only purchasing during a narrow window. The print run is whatever sold inside that window. Full stop.
That’s actually an important detail. In a normal Secret Lair drop, the reprint adds tens or hundreds of thousands of new copies of a card to circulation, which puts real pressure on other printings. Crypt Ghast, for example, has been quietly climbing for over a year. The Ravnica Remastered copy is sitting at $21.62 right now, and the Gatecrash original isn’t far behind. A normal Secret Lair would crater that. A Chaos Vault drop, where maybe a few thousand copies exist? Footnote.
The Inked drop’s actual upside is in the Secret Lair printings themselves becoming collectible, not in cratering the rest of the supply.
What this looks like card by card
I’ll go through them quick. Current Scryfall reference printings in parens.
Crypt Ghast (Ravnica Remastered, $21.62). Quietly spiking Commander staple in black ramp shells. Foils have been a slow climber. The Elwood tattoo version will trade at a premium to the regular reprint, especially foil. Hold your originals.
Deathrite Shaman (Ravnica Remastered, $9.92). Banned Modern and Legacy, alive in Commander and Vintage. The Ravnica Remastered copy roughly doubled in the last twelve months. Hold.
Birthing Pod (New Phyrexia, $15.07, foil $39.14). Of everything in Back In My Day, this is the one where I’d actually think about selling foils, but only because Modern is so volatile right now and Pod’s whole price is tied to whether the deck stays viable. The reprint itself doesn’t move the needle. New Phyrexia foils are a separate animal.
Veil of Summer (Core Set 2020, $6.86, foil $28.24). Still legal where it matters. Foils have been a slow climber. The Secret Lair print stamps the “Interrupt” wording onto it, and I think collectors will actively prefer that version over standard reprints. Foil Veil of Summer might be the most interesting flip target out of either drop.
Battle Hymn (Avacyn Restored, $1.87, foil $19.17). Niche storm card. That foil spread is wild for something almost nobody plays outside dedicated Goblin lists. A “Mana source” type-line version is the kind of cosmetic novelty that pushes the foil secondary higher, not lower.
Breath of Fury (Commander 2016, $22.23). Wait, that one’s higher than I thought it was. Yeah, low supply Commander 2016 card that sneaks into a couple EDH combo lines and has been climbing for years. Never been reprinted since C16, which is shocking honestly. The Chaos Vault printing is the first reprint in a decade. Hold the C16.
Ice-Fang Coatl (Modern Horizons, $1.78). Bulk-adjacent. Sees play, you can get copies anywhere.
Burnished Hart (Foundations, $0.28). Bulk. Was meaningful in 2014. Power-crept into obscurity.
Mulldrifter (Lorwyn Eclipsed Commander, $0.35). Bulk. Reprinted into the floor.
So most of the Inked drop is bulk, which is normal Secret Lair math, just not what the marketing wants you to think.
A tangent. I bought a Ravnica Remastered Crypt Ghast last fall for $9 because I was throwing together a Mono-Black ramp deck and didn’t realize that what looked like a fair price for a recent-frame card had quietly become a steal. Six months later it had more than doubled. That kind of move happens with Commander staples that haven’t been reprinted in a while, and it’s the reason I distrust the “this Secret Lair will crash the price” reflex. Prices move in real markets, not theoretical ones.
The obsolete-wording thing is a bigger deal than people think
Back to Back In My Day, because I keep coming back to it and I think people are underestimating what it actually is.
This isn’t just retro frame. The retro frame has been everywhere since 2021’s Time Spiral Remastered and shows up regularly in Special Guests and Universes Beyond stuff. What’s different here is the full reproduction of obsolete wording from earlier eras of Magic. Card types and color-line conventions that haven’t been seen in print in 25+ years.
“Interrupt” was a card type from Alpha through 5th Edition before being rolled into Instant. “Mono Artifact” was how artifact cards listed their non-color before the modern frame consolidated everything. “Enchant Creature” was the typeline for what we now call Aura. The “Mana source” type was used for a handful of cards in the very earliest sets before getting deprecated entirely.
If you’ve collected long enough to have stuff from Antiquities or Legends sitting in your binder, you know why this is spicy. It’s not an old card with new art. It’s a new card pretending to be an old card. The design team built these to look like artifacts of a Magic that doesn’t exist anymore. For a certain kind of collector, that’s a more interesting object than any normal Secret Lair drop.
I scanned a friend’s Time Spiral Remastered binder a few weekends back, going page by page through his retro-frame Aether Spellbomb playset and his Avalanche Riders and his eight different versions of Disenchant, doing an insurance baseline for him. The thing I noticed, scanning everything to get the value running total, was that the retro-frame versions of even commons had a small premium attached on Scryfall that the originals didn’t. Niche market, but it’s real. The Chaos Vault cards live on the same shelf.
I’ll waver on this for a second. There’s a counterargument that the obsolete-wording stamp is gimmicky and that any sufficiently weird Wizards experiment becomes the next normal within eighteen months. Last year I’d have said exactly that about the Star Wars holo stamp misprints, and look how that turned out. So the read could be that this is the start of a whole “alternate-wording” sub-category that loses scarcity fast. It could. I still think the very first run of it is the one that holds the most.
Should you have ordered one?
If you saw it in time, probably yes. The Double Vanilla Bundle at $51.99 for two non-foil Back In My Day drops works out to roughly $6.50 a card. Battle Hymn foils elsewhere sit at $19.17, so a “Mana source” type-line foil, when those eventually clear on the secondary, probably hits that easily. Veil of Summer foils at $28.24 baseline means the Interrupt-stamp foil clears higher.
But also, and I’m going back and forth on this honestly, Chaos Vault is volatile by design. If Wizards decides to run six more obsolete-wording drops in the next year, the novelty dilutes fast. There’s no guarantee these stay scarce. The bonus card slot is randomized too, which is its own variance.
For collectors who like weird printing history, treat this drop like a small wager. If you bought it for the cards themselves, the math works fine. If you bought it expecting to flip, slow down. Real upside lives on the foil secondary, and that depends entirely on how many copies got ordered, which we don’t know yet.
For everyone who missed the window, the question is whether to buy individual singles off the secondary when they show up. My honest read: wait two weeks past the May 13 ship date for prices to settle, then make a call on individual cards rather than chasing the whole drop. Foil Veil of Summer with the Interrupt type? Interested. Non-foil Mulldrifter? Skip.
So yeah. Retro wording, weird typelines, tattoo art, sold-out bundles, Chaos Vault chaos. May 13 ship date. Probably another drop a month from now, knowing how Wizards is pacing this thing.