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Magic: The Gathering's Secret Lairs have been competitive to get your hands on for some time now. Typically, a Secret Lair drop will consist of about four to six cards based around a specific theme or collaboration, the price ranging from $29.99 to $39.99 for the foil edition of the drop. Earlier this week, Magic: The Gathering tried out an entirely new price model for a Secret Lair Chaos Vault drop that diverged from their typical releases, and the fan reaction was strong. 

Yesterday, Wizards of the Coast announced a four-card Prints Charming Chaos Vault Secret Lair drop, noting that, "Chaos Vault is where we like to try new approaches to how a Secret Lair drop is offered. This time, you're going to see a lot of the same drop at a lot of different prices. This is very much on purpose; we promise! All Prints Charming listings, including non-foil and foil editions, offer the same drop at every price point. The only difference between listings is the price, and higher-priced options do not include anything extra." What were the price ranges, you might ask? $9.99, $19.99, $29.99, $34.99, and $39.99 for the non-foil version, and then the foil version's prices beginning at $19.99 and going up to $49.99. 

Today, as part of the WeeklyMTG podcast, Magic's Lindsey Bartell addressed the response that the company got from fans about the Secret Lair drop's "pick-what-you-pay" model. "We thought it would be interesting to kind of try this early bird pricing model, or a choose-your-own-price model, where we established five different price points for the exact same drop, and then we let people pick which one they wanted to have... What I can share is that, well, admittedly, looking at that on the website, I can see how that doesn't look great," Bartell said. 

"What I can say is, intentions were really good there. 95% of the stock was behind the same or lower price points [to a standard $29.99 or $39.99 Secret Lair]. So 95% of the orders that went out the door, people either paid the exact same as what they would pay for a normal drop, or they paid less," Bartell continued. 

"A lot of learnings to be had there. The Chaos Vault will continue to be experimental. There will continue to be times when there's controversy and things that don't always land correctly. That I can almost promise. But what I can also promise is that we'll continue to learn from those things," they concluded. 

It remains to be seen if there will be more pricing experiments for Chaos Vault in the future, but given the commitment that Magic has to Chaos Vault being unpredictable, who's to say that Wizards of the Coast won't give it another shot in the future?

Whether you are a Commander player, a regular at your local game shop's FNM event, or simply love collecting Magic: The Gathering cards, you've landed in the right place. From Universes Beyond to the furthest reaches of the Magic Multiverse, we've got you covered here at Popverse. 

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