There’s a phrase showing up in eBay listings this week that I can’t stop looking at. “Presale confirmed.” Three or four words, sometimes in the title, sometimes buried in the description under a photo of a Secret Lair product page screenshot. It’s doing an enormous amount of work for a phrase that means, functionally, “I believe I bought this.”
The Zeta Set went on sale September 2 through the Chaos Vault and it did not go well. Queue paused about forty minutes in, buyers told to hold their place, roughly eighty minutes of nothing, and then a sold-out screen for a lot of people who’d been sitting there the whole time. Wizards posted a statement that opens with “it was a disaster. There’s no other way to say it,” which is language you do not normally get from that building, and said it was still working out whether the cause was an internal systems problem or external tampering. It hasn’t posted a follow-up since.
Meanwhile the packs are trading. Singles went up in the $70 to $100 range within hours, some listings pushing $150, and twelve-pack lots at $700 to $900 with at least one asking $999.99. Against a sticker price of $19.92 a pack, or $239.04 if you maxed the twelve-pack limit.
Nobody has opened a Zeta Set pack
I want to be precise about this because it’s the part that keeps getting glossed over in the coverage. The ship date on the product listing is November 5. That’s two months out. Not a single pack has been opened, by anyone, anywhere. There are no pull-rate reports, no box breaks, no “I cracked twelve and here’s what I got” threads, because the physical objects do not exist in anyone’s hands yet.
And Scryfall backs that up in the most literal way available. There are 363 Zeta printings in the database right now, which is the 121 cards times three treatments I wrote about last week. Number of those printings with a USD price attached: zero. All of them. The market data on this product is an empty set.
So whatever the $100 pack is priced against, it isn’t sales data, because there is none.
What a pack could plausibly hold
You can build a rough ceiling from the reprint list, though, and I think it’s worth doing because the ceiling is lower than the resale suggests.
Seven cards: three commons, two uncommons, one rare or mythic, one wildcard. The mythic tier is where the actual money is, and it’s a short list. Chrome Mox is the headliner at $154.05 for its cheapest existing printing in Eternal Masters. Urborg, Tomb of Yawgmoth is $55.78 in Time Spiral Remastered. Mana Echoes sits at $55.75, Mycosynth Golem at $50.51 in Fifth Dawn, Sensei’s Divining Top at $42.26, Chromatic Orrery at $33.99.
Then there’s everything else in the pool. Colossal Dreadmaw is thirteen cents. Grizzly Bears is twenty-two. Hornet Queen is thirty-five cents. Skullclamp, which is a genuinely great card, is $6.04.
Your rare slot is one card out of seven and it is far more likely to be a Skullclamp than a Chrome Mox. The three common slots are, by pool composition, mostly going to be things worth under a dollar in any normal printing.
Which is the caveat I keep running into, and I don’t want to skate past it: these aren’t normal printings. A Secret Lair exclusive treatment carries a premium over the plain version, sometimes a big one, and the Zeta cards are genuinely striking objects. The crocheted bird. The disco ball. If the Photocopy Negative treatment turns out to be the one everybody wants and it’s a 10% pull rate, some of these singles will be worth multiples of their base card. I can’t rule that out and I’d be lying if I said the math above settles it.
But you’d need most of the pack to break that way, consistently, to justify paying $100 for seven cards. And the honest read on a limited-print-run Secret Lair is that the treatment premium lands hardest on maybe fifteen cards out of 121.
The other thing you’re buying
Here’s the bit that actually worries me more than the pricing.
Wizards’ statement lists four different states a buyer might be in. You completed an order. You think you completed an order but you’re not sure. You got two confirmation emails for one purchase. You got no confirmation email at all. Support was told to sort out the last group, and the queue over there is, by Wizards’ own admission, buried.
Now go back and read “presale confirmed” on an eBay listing with that in mind. The seller is in one of those four states too. Some of them genuinely have a confirmed order. Some of them have a screenshot of a checkout page and a confirmation email that Wizards has publicly said might be a duplicate glitch. If Wizards’ investigation turns up orders that shouldn’t have processed and starts unwinding them, the person who paid $900 for a twelve-pack lot is holding a claim on someone else’s possibly-void order, and their recourse runs through eBay rather than Wizards.
Most of those sellers are almost certainly honest people who got through the queue and decided to cash out at 5x. The problem is that you can’t tell which ones from a listing, and you’re paying a 400% premium two months before delivery for a product whose ownership record is, by the manufacturer’s own account, currently a mess.
Sorry, brief tangent
So this reminds me of Grand Prix Vegas. Not the sale part, the queue part. I was there for the 2015 Modern Masters one and I stood in a line for a vendor table for I want to say ninety minutes, because they’d advertised playset pricing on fetchlands and I needed Windswept Heaths. Got to the front. They’d been out for an hour. The guy running it hadn’t updated the sign because he was, and I quote, “busy.” And there was this whole thing where people behind me in line were arguing about whether he should have to honor the price on whatever he had left, which, no, obviously not, but I understood the feeling. You put ninety minutes into a queue and it starts feeling like you’ve bought something. You haven’t. You’ve spent ninety minutes.
Anyway.
If you were in that queue
Write down what you think happened, today, while you remember it. Not in your head. Somewhere you’ll find it in November.
The specific things worth recording: the time you checked out, the order number if you got one, whether you received one confirmation email or two, the amount charged, and the card on file. Then check your bank statement, not your email, for whether the charge posted and whether it posted twice. Email confirmation and actual charge are different systems and this failure clearly hit at least one of them.
The reason this matters in November and not now is that a Secret Lair envelope arriving two months late, in a year when you’ve probably ordered three or four other things, is exactly the kind of item that gets logged wrong or not at all. I keep what I paid alongside what a card’s worth precisely because I have a bad track record with this. Last year I found a Secret Lair still in its shipping mailer behind a stack of storage boxes, unopened, about five months after it arrived. I had no memory of ordering it.
If you didn’t get through and you’re now looking at eBay: the Masters of the Universe superdrop lands September 14, which is nine days after Wizards said it would investigate its own storefront. Whatever else you do with that information, don’t pay resale prices for a sealed product nobody has opened when the actual singles will hit TCGplayer within a week of November 5. They always do. And singles you can price against something real, which is the whole difference between a number you can act on and a number you feel good about.
Or buy one pack because the disco ball Chrome Mox is funny and you want to open it. That’s a defensible reason. Paying $900 for twelve of them isn’t.