I have a Secret Lair problem. Not a hoarding problem, an opinion problem. Every time WotC announces a new drop my brain goes “this one’s different, this one will actually hold value.” Then four months later I’m staring at my filing box wondering why I paid $30 for five cards that the market values at $12 combined.
So when Wizards revealed three Garfield Secret Lairs on May 15, my first reaction wasn’t excitement. It was “wait, am I going to buy these?”
(Reader, I might.)
The three drops launch June 15 as part of the Cats Are The Best Superdrop, the big June 2026 sales event that came out of last year’s Cats vs Dogs Chaos Vault. Each Garfield drop is five cards. Non-foil is $29.99, foil is $39.99. Standard pricing, standard format. Spend $199 in a single order and you get a limited-edition Foil Food Token promo.
What’s not standard is the reprint math. I ran the numbers on every card across all three drops, and the spread between them is rougher than I expected.
As Intended: the playtest-art drop
This is the one getting the most attention online, and I get why. It’s styled after the original 1993 playtest cards, where the art was clipped from newspapers and magazines because Magic literally didn’t have art yet. Five Garfield strip clippings cropped into the old square art window. As a visual gag it’s funny. The Counterspell with Garfield going “NO” in a panel is the kind of thing I’d actually want for a meme deck.
But.
Swords to Plowshares: $1.21. Counterspell: $2.53. Dark Ritual: $7.15 in its Masters 25 printing, less in older ones. Earthquake: about $0.60. Fog: pennies.
You’re paying $30 for somewhere around $12 worth of cards being generous. Maybe $15 once Secret Lair tax pumps up the new variants. That’s a 50% premium for the art. Fine if you love the art.
The other thing bugging me about this drop is there’s no Fatal Push in the lineup, even though the Garfield-flopping-on-a-table panel would have been the most perfect Fatal Push art in history. Instead it’s on Swords to Plowshares, which already has the world’s nicest art on its standard printing. Choices.
Motivationally Challenged: the one that almost makes sense
This one I’d actually buy.
The lineup is Rin and Seri, Inseparable; Orim’s Chant (“Talk to the Paw”); Ponder (“Hang in There”); Beast Within (“I Hate Mondays”); and Sol Ring. The Sol Ring is throwaway value because basically every cube draft chaff box comes with one. Rin and Seri alone carries this drop.
Rin and Seri sits around $26.75 in her existing Secret Lair printing right now. That’s almost the whole purchase price of the drop on its own. Add Orim’s Chant ($5.99 in its Modern Horizons 3 printing), Ponder (a couple bucks for any recent printing), Beast Within (about $0.50), and you’re at $35-40 worth of cards in a $30 drop. The rare Secret Lair where the math actually works.
The catch (and there’s always a catch) is that Rin and Seri is now on her third Secret Lair printing. Three SL versions plus the original M21 means the chase-foil-art premium gets diluted every time. The 2023 SL printing peaked at $43 foil; the 2025 one is at $26.75 non-foil. The 2026 version might land somewhere in between, but it probably won’t carry the “rare premium SL only” pricing of the 2023 one.
If you want Garfield-themed cards for a cat tribal Commander deck, Motivationally Challenged is the clear pick. If you’re a flipper hoping to crack and resell, the math is tighter than the headline number suggests.
Our Only Thought Is to Entertain You: the weird one
I have no idea what to make of this drop.
It’s leaning into the surreal corner of Garfield fan art. The Gorefield stuff, the “Garfield in psychological horror” memes, the spaghettification thing. The cards are It That Betrays, Maddening Cacophony, Maddening Hex, Hunter’s Insight, and Molten Collapse (where the molten lava is repainted as marinara sauce, which is the kind of joke I respect).
Value-wise: It That Betrays is the anchor at $14.27 (Commander Masters) or $11.64 (Rise of the Eldrazi). Maddening Cacophony is $7.64. The previous Secret Lair It That Betrays peaked at $37.50 foil, so if this new art lands well it could push $20 on its own. Maddening Hex is around $2. Hunter’s Insight is a $0.40 reprint that appears in 130,000 Commander decks per EDHREC. Molten Collapse is essentially bulk.
Best case: It That Betrays and Maddening Cacophony together clear $25 in the new printings, and the drop is roughly even. Realistic case: $18-20 in total value, so a $10-12 art premium.
Worth it if you specifically want surreal Garfield art on your cards. Less of an obvious yes than the one above.
The thing Stranger Things did that Garfield doesn’t
The Secret Lair drops that historically held the most value (Stranger Things, Walking Dead, Fortnite) had mechanically unique cards. Eleven, Hopper, Rick Grimes. You couldn’t get those cards anywhere else, so the drops had to carry the secondary market price of “the only printing of a card people wanted to play with.”
Stranger Things non-foil was $180 at peak. It’s now floating in the $75-150 range three years later, and most of that value is still anchored to people wanting Eleven for their Commander decks.
The Garfield drops are 100% reprints with alt art. Nothing mechanically unique. They’ll behave like standard alt-art SL drops, where the value floor is whatever the reprinted cards are worth, plus whatever premium the art commands, minus how many copies WotC prints.
That’s actually a reason to be more patient. Reprint-only SL drops tend to soften 6-12 months after release because there’s no card scarcity driving demand. If you want Motivationally Challenged for the Rin and Seri, you can probably get it cheaper in October than in June. The exception would be a banlist change spiking one of the cards, like what happened with Lutri, but none of these look like obvious candidates for that.
Sorting at 2am, again
Last summer I was going through my Secret Lair box trying to figure out which ones I actually used and which were just sitting there. I had a stack of the original Secretversary cards from 2020 that I’d never sleeved or played. Beautiful art. Zero deck appearances. I sold most of them off and recovered maybe 40% of what I’d originally paid, which was fair given they’d been sitting in a binder for four years doing nothing.
So yeah. Secret Lairs. I keep buying them. I keep regretting some and loving others. The pattern I’ve finally clocked is that the ones I love are the ones I actually shuffle, and the ones I regret are the ones I bought “for the collection.” You’d think after a decade of this I’d have learned. I haven’t.
That’s the thing I try to remember now when these announcements come down. Do I want to play with the cards or do I want to own the art? Both are valid reasons, but only one survives a proper value audit.
If you’re buying Garfield for play purposes, sleeve it up and put it in a cat deck, Motivationally Challenged is the buy. If you’re buying because Garfield is your guy, then all three. If you’re buying as a value play, just grab the singles when the prices settle in October. The same advice probably applies to the Goblin Storm SL and most of the other reprint-only drops from this year.
I’m probably getting Motivationally Challenged. Maybe Our Only Thought Is to Entertain You if the marinara Molten Collapse hits right in person. As Intended I’ll skip and grab the Counterspell as a single if I ever spot one cheap. That’s the plan. Ask me again on June 15 at 9am PT when I’m in the pre-queue and my judgment goes out the window.