Wizards of the Coast continued to receive heavy backlash from fans on social media over the botched Magic: The Gathering - Secret x Marvel DTC ordering process.

WotC seems to have knack for steering their ship directly into Drama-storms these days (see "Chris Cocks, Dungeons, Dragons, AI and Wall Street" and also, "Plagiarism"). And, the Secret Lair x Marvel DTC rollout was yet another complete disaster in the eyes of its fan base. After going live at 9am PST on November 4, 2024, the ordering queue was paused six minutes into the process due to technical problems. That ordering queue stayed down for several minutes, then was reopened to prospective customers seeing an expected time to get to an ordering screen at over an hour.

In general, the queue took 2 to 3 hours for several customers that got in line at exactly 9 am PST to process their order. At 11:26 AM PST, the Arcane Signet promo card sold out, which was added to orders for each $199 spent, and fans who claimed to be in the queue at 9:01 am PST were unable to take advantage of this offer. As this train wreck continued on for several hours, fans reported an inability to sign into their WotC accounts to buy, posted screenshots of empty carts once they had gotten to ordering screen, and getting to the ordering screen after waiting for 5 to 6 hours just to get a message that the drop sets had sold out.  

Needless to say, fans took to Secret Lair's X account to lambast WotC (see thread below). The X post declaring that the drop sets had sold out garnered 700+ comments, which were almost all negative or spam ads. Noted Magic community members, such as Saffron Olive, also commented on X:

"Yesterday was the perfect example of why releasing exclusive cards in time limited Secret Lairs is horrible for players. The promise to quickly reprint the cards is gone and the Marvel drops/cards are already selling for $100+ on the secondary market. What a disaster."

WotC has yet to publicly address the issues with this particular Secret Lair, but a few things are very clear based on the responses from fans. For one, WotC seems to have completely underestimated the popularity of a crossover between the Magic and Marvel IPs. As noted in yesterday's article (see "Line Queue Pauses"), simple math and projections based on recent Marvel movie attendance would've revealed that there are, in fact, millions upon millions of Marvel fans. And, even if only a fraction of those fans also collected Magic cards, producing a highly-collectible Marvel product in very limited quantity would leave more fans angry than satisfied.

Secondly, fans want cards that they will actually play with available to them readily. There has been a long and drawn out "Magic Cards Should be Game Pieces" vs. "Magic Cards Should be Collectible Assets" argument going on in the Magic community ever since the Fireside Chat happened (see "Hasbro 'Fireside Chat'"). The argument, itself, is sort of a moot point of contention because there is room for both sides of the equation in game as collectible cards don't also need to be playable cards. However, WotC and most fans still seem to treat the subject like an either/or proposition.

In this case, WotC exacerbated fans' furor by giving the Marvel hero Magic cards in these sets unique mechanics that fans can't find anywhere else (for now), but then also limiting the available quantity of these game pieces to enhance FOMO.

The bulk of Commander players were obviously going to be unhappy about not being able to play with these unique cards, and that was inevitably going to come back on WotC in the form of negative feedback. It would've been a much better move to just put these sets into the hobby channel as normal boxed sets, and let the Magic community obtain the sets they wanted from FLGS. The secondary collectible market would've just sorted itself out, like it always does, from that point and fans would've been less displeased.