Last Wednesday was supposed to be a celebration for Magic fans, as they could preorder the highly anticipated Secret Lair x MSCHF: The Zeta Set. This is the latest collaboration between Wizards of the Coast and the art collective MSCHF on the Secret Lair online retail platform.
However, the release led to faulty queues and frustration, as fans couldn’t use the preorder site, culminating in the Secret Lair team posting on X to announce a temporary stop due to technical issues. Frustrated fans reported canceled orders, frozen queues, and missing confirmation messages. The Zeta set quickly sold out once the sale reopened on the Secret Lair website.
Wizards of the Coast put out a statement calling the sale “a disaster. There’s no other way to say it. We’re incredibly sorry for the experience, and we’re trying to get to the bottom of it.”
They also highlighted several website issues and promised to make it right.
As we investigate, you might have experienced a number of possible issues.
- If you did complete an order, thank you for sticking with us through the wait.
- If you’re not sure if you completed an order but think you might have, we’re working through those.
- Similarly, if you received a duplicate confirmation email, don’t be alarmed.
- If you don’t receive a confirmation email within 24 hours but think you did purchase The Zeta Set, please reach out to our Customer Support team, and they’ll help get it sorted. We’re getting a ton of contacts there right now and are going through them as fast as possible.
Many fans have pointed to Secret Lair’s shift to a limited-time printed-run model, meaning Wizards of the Coast only prints these for a limited time, and the number of orders is only manufactured once the sale is over. This creates scarcity and rarity, and skyrockets prices in the second market. Perhaps this set will be even more valuable because of this technical hiccup by Wizards of the Coast; the cards are pretty cool looking on their own.
The Secret Lair x MSCHF: The Zeta Set is meant to evoke a DIY vibe from early Magic card sets, when images were cut, taped, and xeroxed onto the card. The rarity and kinds of cards embrace this theme with Photocopy, Photocopy Negative, and Color Banding cards in the set.
Not every card will come out of the printer looking the same—and that’s part of the charm. Most cards will appear in this classic black-and-white photocopy treatment. But 10% of the time, you’ll find a photocopy negative card, flipping the colors for an even more striking look. And 5% of the time, when the printer decides to get really temperamental, your card will have this jittery CMYK look that we’re calling the color banding treatment. It turns out that even an unreliable library printer can contribute to an artistic masterpiece.
Wizards of the Coast has yet to specify what the technical issue was but promises in the statement to “come back and share as much as we can.”
