Since their inception in 2019, Secret Lair drops have offered bespoke, limited-time collections of Magic: The Gathering cards featuring artists and IP in ways that have never been part of the game’s history before. From Street Fighter to Stranger Things, and Jaws to The Office, Secret Lair has tried to offer something for everyone, Magic player or not.
At MagicCon Amsterdam, the Secret Lair Reveal-A-Thon panel offered a look into the immediate history of Secret Lair, with over a dozen drops and nearly 80 new cards shown off. After the panel, we sat down with Secret Lair’s principal product lead Steve Sunu to talk about every drop revealed during the hour-long event.
From Miku to Marvel, Stardew Valley to the Masters of the Universe, there was a lot to take in.
The Secret Lair philosophy
If there’s one word you’re going to hear out of Sunu’s mouth more than any other when talking Secret Lair drops, it’s “authenticity.”
“From a Secret Lair perspective, the biggest thing for us is authenticity. How can we do this, in a very small collection of cards, in the most authentic way?” Sunu says. “Our goal at Secret Lair is always to have that level of authenticity to make sure that we’re honoring the fans of the Universes Beyond IP that we’re working with, but also honoring the fans of Magic, and having it be that incredible intersection that you can only get when people that love this thing are working on it.”
This applies to every project the Secret Lair team takes on, even the ones those outside the team will never see. “There are projects that I’ve worked on that will never see the light of day, and I will not tell you what they are,” Sunu said. “They got to a certain stage, and we looked at it and said ‘No, it’s not quite right, it’s not really what we want, it doesn’t meet the bar that we had for what we wanted from this project.’ You’ll never see the art, you’ll never see the cards, and that’s okay.”
As for projects that do see the light of day, Sunu says Secret Lair is at its best when it’s an eclectic mix of IP and ideas. “We want to try to find different places, different communities, different interests, and pieces of pop culture and fan communities that can speak to a lot of different people,” Sunu said. “It’s why you see such a mix of things on the Secret Lair website, because it’s not just one voice in the Magic community. There are a lot of different voices with a lot of different interests.”
The MagicCon Amsterdam Secret Lair panel exemplified that, as Sunu and company showed off 79 new cards from over a dozen new drops.
Hatsune Miku Commander deck
The first piece revealed during the panel was a Hatsune Miku themed preconstructed Commander deck, with new art featuring the popular vocaloid singer found on multiple cards in the 100-card deck. The commander is Miku, Song of the People, a reskin of Trostani, Selesnya’s Voice, and we also saw her featured on Miku, Voice Over All (a reskin of Shalai, Voice of Plenty), Archangel of Tunes (a reskin of Archangel of Thune), Song of the Worldsoul, and both Plains and Forest basic land cards.
Sunu says this deck is a direct result of the success of the previous Miku Secret Lair, which were themed around the seasons. “We knew that there were Miku fans out there that would be very excited to have Miku on Magic cards,” Sunu said, “but we we didn’t know how excited they would be, and getting to do those four seasonal drops was a really great opportunity for us to see that firsthand.”
The preconstructed commander deck, in Sunu’s eyes, is a simple way for a Miku fan to sit down and play Magic, even if they’ve never played before. “If you have a friend who is a Miku fan that’s on the cusp of getting into Magic, this will give you something that can allow you to have a little bit of an easier time convincing them to do so,” Sunu said. “Or, if you are a Miku fan, this is something that’s going to be able to help display your love of this character in a way that feels very authentic.”
Stardew Valley
Next up at the panel was a trio of drops focused on popular farming sim Stardew Valley, which is celebrating its 10th anniversary this year. Sunu says that Zakeel Gordon, product architect Zakeel Gordon, led the design for these three drops, saying that Gordon is “very, very, very good at his job.”
Gordon tells us Stardew Valley was one of many running ideas for a Secret Lair project. “We have a whiteboard list of IPs that we’re excited about, but Stardew Valley was one that I and a couple people in particular were just very passionate about,” Gordon said. “The developer [Eric] ConcernedApe [Barone] living in Seattle, where we’re based, was awesome, so we reached out.”
The collaboration was originally going to be smaller than the three announced drops, but Gordon and the team had bigger plans. “We were only going to do a single drop, and he was only going to illustrate the new [mechanically unique] card [Stardew Valley], but after talking with him, I said ‘Come on, man, you should just do a whole drop yourself,’ and he was super into it.”
Two of the drops feature artwork directly from Stardew Valley, with a unique frame emulating the game’s user interface–a frame which Sunu calls a “perfect encapsulation of what we can do in Secret Lair.” The third, however, depicts scenes in a more traditional art style for Magic, and Zakeel Gordon says ConcernedApe was on board immediately.
“A lot of fans have only ever seen Stardew Valley through his aesthetic, which is superb, but our being able to show what we do in that fantasy style was a really nice complement to his designs,” Gordon said. “He was very, very receptive and just amazing to work with the entire time.”
The Hobbit
The panel then shifted to a set of drops all themed around The Hobbit, which is the next full expansion for the game. While multiple drops were teased, only one full drop was revealed: A set of seven Food tokens, each depicting one of the seven meals in a Hobbit’s daily routine.
Tokens are commonplace in Magic, and some may argue that creating an entire drop of them isn’t worth it. For Sunu, however, ideas that make sense within the world they’re borrowing from will always triumph over ideas that simply put value above all.
“It doesn’t matter if they’re tokens or lands or spells; what matters is the level of authenticity and care and passion that our team brings to it,” Sunu said. “Working to bring this to life in a way that’s going to really delight fans of The Hobbit and really delight fans of Magic is always the key thing that we’re looking at. I love that drop because it executed on the concept perfectly; it’s one of my favorite drops we’re doing this year.”
One of the non-Food token cards teased depicts Bilbo in his invisible form, using a new type of treatment Sunu referred to as “silvery ink.” Sunu says that it’s a great example of how the team can experiment with new and interesting treatments, until they find something truly special.
One of the things that we’re doing in Secret Lair that I really love is that we have the opportunity to try out and show off some of the incredible work that our print innovation team can do,” Sunu said. “With The Hobbit, we’re showing some new technology we’re playing around with, a foil treatment that shows that little invisible outline of Bilbo when he puts on the ring. That’s a really cool thing that we got to do here.”
Marvel Super Heroes
A fearsome foursome of Marvel drops hit the panel stage next, with one featuring Hulk and his many forms like Joe Fix-It and Maestro; another showcasing the art of popular comic artist Dan Hipp, and another highlighting Marvel Pets like Lockjaw and Throg. The drop that set the crowd ablaze with passion, however, was the one depicting famous Marvel couples as if they were adorning the covers of romance novels. Rogue and Gambit, Thing and Alicia Masters, and Captain America and Peggy Carter were among the couples getting the novel treatment, and the crowd went wild.
Sunu suspected the romance novel drop was going to be a hit right from conception. “We always have our suspicions, right? But we never know what’s going to land” Sunu said. “That was one where we did feel pretty confident in the concept execution, just because we love these characters and these moments and the history of them, and to be able to depict them in that way, in this new context that a lot of people, I think have imagined themselves, to be able to bring a little bit of that to life was just a privilege for all of us.”
The romance novel card that got the biggest reaction was Grave Pact, which shows Thanos reaching for the hand of Death. This, like the Stardew Valley frame, hits all of the elements Secret Lair is going for, as far as Sunu is concerned. “It is that perfect blend of what the card does in Magic combined with the concept from Marvel, and then you put that Secret Lair sauce over the top, and suddenly it becomes something that you didn’t know you wanted to see until you saw it.”
Lofi Girl
In a hard pivot, the next set of Secret Lair cards featured Lofi Girl–the steadfast, headphone-wearing student whose careful studies on YouTube have been backed by lofi hip hop radio beats to relax/study to.
Lofi Girl will be featured on multiple cards–including Careful Study–that all feature original artwork “created from the ground up” for Magic, despite how close it looks to Lofi Girl’s various videos. “When you want to talk about authenticity, that actually is something that we take a look at, right?” Sunu said. “If people think that it was a screen grab, no. This is what we do. We do it from the ground up.”
Some players may have been surprised to see Careful Study chosen over the highly-played Rhystic Study, but as Sunu points out, there’s nothing “rhystic” about Lofi Girl’s studies–the word “rhystic” was made up for Magic: The Gathering specifically–but there is something “careful” about it. “I think that Careful Study pick was one where we just wanted to make sure that we were as authentic to the character as we could be.”
Artist Series
The last three drops featured in the Amsterdam panel each come from the Artist Series, in which drops feature a specific artist’s unique style. The cards in these drops were drawn by award-winning cartoonist Gene Luen Yang, the debuting Robin Eisenberg whose works have appeared on Adult Swim and Netflix, and Magic: The Gathering vet Ian Miller.
Yang’s drop is themed around Journey To The West, which for Sunu was a unique marriage of two elements that, on their own, would have fit into Magic by themselves. “I think that [Yang’s] style really lends itself well to Magic, and it makes perfect sense that we would do a Journey to the West drop.” Sunu said, “It’s a story that comes up in many pieces that Gene’s done, and the fact that we were able to get him to come in and also write the flavor text, given how good a writer he is as well as an artist, was so very cool.”
Eisenberg’s drop allows a new audience to experience her work for the first time, which for Sunu is just another perk of the Secret Lair format. “I think the coolest thing about the artist series is when you can introduce an artist that players might not know to Magic,” Sunu said. “Something about it spoke to us, so we tried to figure out what would work really well. We took a look at Robin’s style, our team worked to try to figure out what cards and concepts would work really well in this style, and I think the designer on this one really nailed it.”
The final four cards of the Secret Lair panel featured the world of Ian Miller, who has been drawing for Magic since 1996’s Mirage. While with Eisenberg, the idea is featuring the new artist’s work, with an artist who has drawn Magic before like Miller, the discussion focused on what the artist wanted to contribute to the game this time around.
“When we work with artists that have worked on Magic for a long time, the challenge is how we get [that artist] to do the thing that [they]’re passionate about,” Sunu said. “Some want to draw dragons, some want to draw elves, and so we try to figure out what it is that they are excited about and what they would be really into, and then figure out how to build a drop around that.”
Masters Of The Universe
While Miller’s drop was the last set of cards to be shown, it was not the final announcement. That honor belonged to Masters of the Universe, a partnership between Hasbro and Mattel, which teased a few of the art pieces that will be found on cards in the drop. Sunu was coy about the upcoming cards, but he did say that Mattel has been “wonderful to work with.”
“We’ve been very pleased with the partnership and the level of collaboration that they were willing to offer with us,” Sunu said. “There’s not a whole lot that I can say here, but for now, I’m just really excited that we got to show some of that great art. That Jack Hughes She-Ra was just incredible.”
Each of the Secret Lair drops mentioned during the MagicCon Amsterdam panel will be available during July and August on the Secret Lair website. The schedule of releases is below:
- Stardew Valley – July 27
- Hatsune Miku Commander deck – August 10
- The Hobbit – August 17
- A Perfectly Normal Superdrop – September 1
- Features all four Marvel drops, the Lofi Girl drop, and the three Artist Series drops
