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Hello and welcome to Weekly MTG. I'm your host Blake Rassison and this week we are talking
Secret Layer. There's a couple people who know quite a bit about Secret Layer. So we
have Lindsay and longtime viewers of the show may remember Steve. Probably not. He's pretty
forgettable. Yeah, extremely the most. Steve used to be a co-host but he's moved on to
from the secret layer team.
So we're gonna be spending this whole show
talking about secret layer that includes a reveal
of an upcoming drop.
We're gonna answer some questions about yes,
the sale yesterday, as well as a lot of improvements
and changes that the secret layer team have been making.
But I'm getting a bit ahead of myself
because you may not know who these people are.
Steve's checkered past, so.
So, Lindsay, Steve, what do you all do for the secret layer?
I'll go first then, since Steve seems to be so famous.
I'm Lindsay Bartel.
I am the senior director of Secret Layer,
which means I get to work with the most talented group
of people, Steve included everything from,
oh snap, everything from product development
to business to digital.
Everything Secret Layer is my team that works so hard
to bring you drops in products that we think
you're gonna love.
Hey Chad, what's up?
It's good to be back, Mr. Lot.
My name is Steve Sonu.
I am the senior product designer for Secret Layer.
That means that I get the opportunity to work with Lindsay,
a bunch of our art directors, creative leads,
narrative designers to make cool stuff
and put it out there and we hope that you love it.
We hope that it speaks to you
and we hope that you're able to find
your next favorite art or card with us.
Yeah, we've already got a Steve Siemens
and all-star joking chat.
Ah, we got him.
Hey, nice chat.
Thank you.
But the real star of this show is gonna be the drop
that we're going to reveal in a moment.
But I do see you in chat talking about printed demand,
talking about the sale yesterday.
This is going to be a Q&A show.
We're going to reveal a cool drop right up front,
because it's what a lot of people want to see.
I saw a lot of excitement for the art that we had at the top.
We're going to reveal the drop first,
and then we are going to spend the rest of the show doing Q&A.
We will talk about printed demand.
We will talk about the sale yesterday.
We're going to talk about a bunch of stuff.
We didn't bring them on here just because they're pretty faces.
Definitely not me.
Let's start, though, with this upcoming drop, which, Lindsay,
a little, what's going on here?
Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So I am thrilled to announce today
that on Monday, which is February 9th,
mark your calendars, we have D&D Super Drop coming.
The last time we had a full D&D Super Drop
was back in late 2024.
Fans loved it.
We loved it.
We wanted to bring it back.
This Super Drop is called the Roll for Initiative Super Drop.
And we're super excited about it.
A couple friends from BG3 are back.
And yeah, let's show them some cards.
Yeah, let's show them some cards.
And then Steve can walk us through.
Yeah, the art that people saw at the start of the stream
as they were waiting to come in.
That is Shadow Heart.
This is a Shadow Heart Dark Justice Card drop.
This is the same card that was originally
printed in Battle for Baldur's Gate,
the Commander Legends set.
And you can see a lot of support cards for Shadowheart
there.
You see Black Market.
You see Beseech the Queen, Victimize.
These are all depicting various versions of the character
that in different types of situations.
People that were with us for the last D&D Super Drop
might recognize this product structure a little bit.
We did this for Carlock and Asterian.
It's just a really fun way for us
to celebrate these characters, especially now
that Baldur's Gate has found such an incredible fan
based an audience through a lot of different avenues,
but primarily everybody out there knows
the one I'm talking about.
It's just a really cool way to sort of celebrate
these characters and bring some of these moments
that I know people love in the magic
and help people express themselves
and their love of these characters this way.
Now I gotta ask Steve, it's four black cards
and then a green card.
Now I love some ancient bronze dragon who doesn't,
but it stands out in the middle of this.
What's going on there?
It does and that's a,
I'd say that's a really keen-eyed observation, but looking at the graphic, it's pretty obvious.
It's right there in the middle.
It's in the middle.
Yeah.
So, Ancient Bronze Dragon was really interesting.
During product development, we knew that we wanted to depict Shadowheart's fight with
answer.
That's A-N-S-U-R, not A-N-S-U-E-R.
But answer is, in fact, an Ancient Bronze Dragon.
And we have this card, Ancient Bronze Dragon.
It was a push and pull between what's going to work creatively versus what's going to
work from a storytelling perspective.
and we really decided that given how much we know people love story,
especially associated with these characters,
we wanted to lean a little bit further into story.
So that's why Ancient Bronze Dragon is there.
We wanted to get that fight in there.
If you want to play it, please assign Shadowheart the background Masterchef
and you will be able to play it.
However, we also just think that we love the card, Ancient Bronze Dragon.
It was just a really great fit creatively.
So no, you can't play it if you only play Shadowheart,
but it is a really great story moment.
We wanted it to be authentic and this was the best way we could do that.
All right, well let's check in on the next one in this.
This one, I mean, it's all blue cards, so speaking my love language, but
what else is going on here?
It's blue cards and instants, Blake.
One sorcery, one sorcery, one sorcery.
Gale Watery Prodigy is another card from Commander Legends Battle for Baldur's Gate.
We wanted to, once again, continue the tradition that we did with Carlock and
Mysterion and now Shadowheart with Gale.
So we've got some really great instance and sorceries here in this.
I love that brainstorm.
It's very, very difficult for magic players not to love casting brainstorm.
So yeah, you'll notice the combination of instance and sorceries while it's not an even
split, they trigger off of each other for Gale's ability.
This is a good opportunity for you to take some really great cards with really fun creative
that really emphasize some very specific things
that people like about this character.
I think we actually have a graphic of one of these cards.
Yeah, this graphic didn't properly show Archmage's charm.
So it was the flavor text.
People know what this card does, but the flavor text,
the abs in the background, we knew what we were doing
with this card.
We're just going to sit here quietly.
Just let it marinate.
We're going to let kind of react, yeah.
Enjoy.
All right.
OK, now we can move on to the next drop.
If you want to go back to that, feel free to pause.
Or head to dailymtg.com after this,
so you can see all the cards.
All right, this drop takes a little bit of a detour, Steve.
Yeah, so one of the things that we did last time,
we had two drops for each of the holders, Xanathar
and Karazacar.
And those really, really played in more of the space
that I think people are associated more with secret layer.
Cards that are really out there,
cards that have a wilder art style,
things that make you reinterpret
what can a magic card look like.
That was a very weird sentence, I should have said it better.
What does a magic card look like?
What's the potential for a magic card
in terms of artistic expression?
And this is in the tradition of that.
So these are sort of like black light posters.
The drop is called Black Lights and Dark Dungeons.
It's a, Sephiroth of the Hidden Ways,
Commander, we'll say like starter kit a little bit.
This is one of my favorite commanders.
I love this commander.
And one of the cards that really makes this deck sing
that's never had a cool booster fun
or art lifted treatment is Tortured Existence.
That's a card that I love in that deck.
It's really great.
It makes the deck work.
But we also put some really incredible other staples
in there for you.
Displacer Kitten is a card that I know a lot of people love,
goes in a lot of different types of decks.
Handlander Playable, seasoned engineer too.
I had to give my mirror too.
You have to give my, it's my at least one reference.
It is not a preview season unless Blake Rasperson
calls out Canadian Highlander in some way
in the fact that he plays.
So I'm glad that we got it in here.
We got it in.
I love this drop.
The art style really, really speaks to me personally.
Our art director Jacob Covey did such a great job
with this at making sure that that aesthetic
really shone through.
in a way that to me really does feel authentic to, you know,
what would these posters look like for dungeon
and high fantasy if interpreted through the lens
of a black light poster.
I really love it.
Super cool.
All right, what's our next one?
You thought we were done with Dungeons and Dragons Commanders.
We were not.
This is Prosper Tomebound.
It's Prosper Tomebound.
We're bringing them back.
This one is called, I wanna make sure
that I get the name right, Shadows Overbalders Gate.
And it is a, like I said, similar to the last one,
a commander starter kit kind of drop.
You have Prosper Tomebound and three cards
that go really, really well into that shell.
Prosper is an incredibly popular commander.
Again, this is a card that I've played a lot in commander,
one that I know is very, very popular amongst our fans.
I have a very clear memory from a magic con years ago
where at a secret layer panel, somebody asked us,
hey, when are you gonna do a Prosper Tomebound?
I would love to see that.
So for that one guy that asked that question,
this is for you.
I bet it's for more than that one person.
Prosper is pretty, Prosper is extremely popular.
So it was really cool to be able to have the opportunity
to work with the D&D team
to get some of these new interpretations
of these cards out there.
They were really great partners for us
to make sure that we could do this authentically
in a way that would be really cool
and still keeping in secret layers DNA,
but also getting more of these cards out there
into the hands of the people
that we know are gonna love them.
I'm a big believer in the card Zorn.
I do love that card.
I think it's wonderful.
And, you know, Prosper Tomebound,
nothing really feels better than triggering that card
more than once a turn.
And this grouping of cards for you Prosper and Jorahs
is gonna give you a chance to upgrade the art in your decks
to really reflect some of the cooler aspects
of the character and some of these other cards.
Very cool.
All right, what's next on the docket?
Oh, we're not done yet.
We're not done yet.
because you cannot have Dungeons and Dragons without the dragons portion of it.
This is a Miriam Sentinel Worm, Commander Starter Kit type of drop,
and you can see there are some pretty heavy hitters for dragons decks here.
Miriam is another incredibly popular commander that never got a borderless treatment.
This is actually Miriam's first borderless treatment. That's true Prosper as well as true Sephora.
So the fact that we were able to go back and do this and really bring a different look
and interpretation that's still keeping in the bounds of that high fantasy tradition.
Again, really, really huge shout out to Jacob Covey who's the art director for Secret Layer.
He crushes this every single time.
He finds the best ways to interpret these things and to really put great art in the
hands of fans that want it.
If you were Miriam and Joyer and I know there are a lot of you out there, this is the drop
for you. You're gonna get an incredible Miriam Sentinel worm, but you're also gonna get that
Dragonborn Champion, that Clout, and just because we love putting more cool counterspells out
there, you have to get a really, really cool counterspell in there as well. It's a very
cool counterspell. All right, we've got two more, two more. I believe two more. All right,
let's see the next one. Yeah, we got some Strahd in here. We got some Strahd from, and
some Castle Raven Law representation in here. This is the Vampires Drop. Vampires have
a long tradition in Dungeons and Dragons as well as Magic. We wanted to try to get a little
bit more of that in there. That's something that, you know, we always like to try to do
in different ways. You might notice that this is a little bit different from all the previous
drops in that we used the alt name treatment here, so that you have Castle Ravenloft as
Veldar in a state because we had a whole set about vampires that some people might remember
from Innistraud. So, yeah, you'll see the Devil's Straud here as Strepon and the
festivities and cast-off consort as bloodletter of Aklazots. This is a drop
that's really fun, really cool. If it speaks to you, you should pick it up. If
you're a vampire, enjoy or pick it up. If you enjoy Straud and that whole story
line and want to relive a little bit of that particular moment that's depicted
here, fans know what I'm talking about. I'm not gonna call it out. Spoiler alert.
But if this is something that speaks to you, we really hope that you love it, and we hope that you enjoy it when you get your hands on it.
Yeah, I mean, it's perfect for anyone who has, I mean, whether your commander is, you know, now the Devil's Strod, or just another vampire commander, this fits in pretty well.
All right, I believe there is one more in this Super Drop.
Yeah, so we haven't done one of these in a while. Your eyes don't deceive you. These are basic lands.
This is called Lands of the Forgotten Realms.
These pieces all depict different locations in the Forgotten Realms.
So the plains depicts water depth, the island depicts moonshade aisles, the swamp is the
underdark, the mountain is never winter, and the forest is the tomb of annihilation slash
the jungles of the chulps.
So lots of really great deep cuts here, but also just gorgeous illustrations that really
feel at home on a basic land.
I think that's one of the things that Secret Layer can do really, really well is try to
figure out what are some of the cool locations that people might recognize or are deeper
cuts or just things that people want to see more of and we're able to put that into what
is arguably the most frequent card that you see in Magic, which is the basic land.
It's the building block of any deck, it's a basic land.
The thing that I really love about this is the graphic design of those pin lines with
that forgotten realm.
Oh, it's gorgeous.
Yeah, around the edges with the dragon at the top, yeah.
And you'll be able to see more product details about all
of these for the Roll for Initiative Super Drop,
like you said, on Daily MTG after this.
But I'm sure there are many people that are diligently
screen-shotting the livestream, posting them to social media
and other platforms as we speak.
We thank you for that.
Thank you.
Yeah, we should have the article up in 15 or so minutes.
I told them 10.30.
I didn't know how long this would take us.
So, Lindsay, you said this before, but when does this super drop land?
Monday. So, February 9th, 9 a.m. is go live time. You can go to secretlayer.wizards.com, sign
up to be notified, and yeah, you can get there as early as 8 o'clock to start in the pre-queue,
add anything that's available to be added to your cart, and you will be then added to the
checkout process in the order in which you arrive. All right, and we're going to talk more about that.
We're going to talk more about that.
We're going to talk more about the Q-Layer 2 and then pricing, normal, secret layer pricing.
Yeah, normal, secret layer pricing, $29.99 for non-foil, $39.99 for foil in the US.
Yep.
That's also my transition.
I'm not exactly in frame here.
That's also my transition to the next topic.
You haven't been doing this for like eight years or anything like that.
Get out of my frame.
Yesterday we had a sale that became the topic of the day on the internet and so
I thought we would start by talking about that. We will then move into people
talking about print demand. Printed demand as well. But I want to start with
for those who aren't familiar what was the sale yesterday that got so many
people talking. Yeah totally. So as you all know that are watching this and have
have been secret layer fans for some time.
Secret layer is the experimental hub of magic.
It's kind of the skunk works, little sub-brand,
which is just a corpo way of saying we're part of magic,
but we also have a very distinctive handwriting,
and we like to be experimental and provocative.
We try new print treatments, we try new frames,
we try things that might ultimately end up
in a collector booster down the line, it might not.
But that's been the DNA of Secret Layer
ever since it has started.
Then we started thinking, what is secret lair's secret lair?
And that's where the chaos fault was born,
where we wanted to have something that was decoupled
from these big super drops, these big events
that are kind of clunky, and a place
where we could just launch one thing and see what happens
and see how people react, see if they like it.
So it's where you've found things such as us releasing
basic lands in a different way instead of what we call
a cycle, we release them in what we call stacked,
to see if people like that better.
We had the now infamous cats versus dogs
vote for the best pet, the undisputed best pet.
I mean, I dispute it still, but you know, that's fine.
Yeah, I know.
Dogs, dogs, justice for dogs.
Anyway, so you never know what you're gonna get
in the chaos vault.
There was a hat in there, fairly recently, also weird.
And so along with that comes different ways of administering a sale or pricing a drop.
We've had a couple experiments where we did a $1 flower power drop.
The fans will probably remember.
We did a $25 drop, which was the fairest drop of all, little which we put out there for,
I believe it was $10 higher in price.
So we've done some things in the past that have experimented with price, but largely
through the history of secret layer.
That has been the one thing that hasn't changed.
We've been really, really consistent on our pricing.
For this sale, we thought it would be unexpected.
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.
There were two that were lower.
There was one that was exactly the same as what you would normally pay,
and then two that were higher.
What I can share is that, well, admittedly,
looking at that on the website, I can see how that doesn't look great,
how it looks like.
It's like, oh, it doesn't feel good.
But what I can say is intentions were really good there.
95% of the stock was behind the same or lower price point.
So 95% of the orders that went out the door, people either paid
the exact same what they would pay for a normal drop
or they paid less.
We honestly were fully mentally, emotionally,
and financially prepared to not even sell the 5%
that we're sitting in the higher price buckets
and also feeling a little bamboozled that we did.
So yeah, I think, you know,
a lot of learnings to be had there.
The chaos fault will continue to be experimental.
There will continue to be times when there's controversy
and things that don't always land correctly.
I, that I can almost promise,
but what I can also promise
is that we'll continue to learn from those things.
And that we'll always try and endeavor to make
our explanation as transparent and clear
as possible of what to expect.
So whether that's, you know,
explaining in the email what's happening,
that's putting it on our product detail page
as many places as possible,
putting it on socials just to really make sure
the people are clear what's happening,
will always bias for transparency there.
So I just want to make sure that I caught that part.
So the intention was you were looking at,
like, can we do an early bird pricing discount?
And then you didn't even expect to sell the higher ones.
OK.
Totally.
I imagine the team's going to have some conversations
about why did the top ones sell and what?
Yeah, OK.
OK, and then you also said, did I hear the number right?
Was it 95% was at the normal price or below?
Yeah, 95% was at normal or below.
Actually, 50% was at below.
So the majority of it was, you know,
or half of the entire inventory pool
was at the reduced price point.
And then the other 45% was at the exact same price point.
So I know I'm like, maybe this is a complete overshare,
but I want people to feel assuaged that, you know,
we really did want this to be a win for the customers.
We wanted everyone to have another kind of flower power
moment of like, we just got it.
We just paid $10 for a drop.
That's amazing.
We wanted that, and we did not achieve that.
And we heard your feedback loud and clear.
Again, we're going to continue to mess things up
from time to time.
That's never our intention, but my intention
is that we will learn from them.
So yeah.
Let's go to an easier question.
Let's talk printed demand.
one-two punch.
So this is a common refrain.
I saw the comments when we posted that we were doing this
stream.
It's been replete throughout chat.
Why do we not do print to demand?
I know it's a big topic, so I'll just throw the general
topic to you, and we'll dig into it as you talk through it.
Yeah, I think just to go back in time a little bit, the only
time the secret layer has truly been print to demand was in
very early days and fans will remember if they've been along that journey they
were waiting six seven eight nine months to receive their product because by the
time we got the order then we have to figure out a place in the supply chain
and it can be disruptive it's hard to predict when things will be printed so
it was a really inefficient business model customers didn't like it we didn't
like it so then we changed to something that we refer to as time box demand and
And so that's what most people are thinking of, I think, when they're calling for bring
back print to demand.
I think they're really thinking of Timebox, which is where we gave you a start date and
an end date, and we said we would honor all demand during that window.
And we're going to make sure that you get your products as fast as possible.
So what we would do is just pre-print an absolute boatload of inventory.
We would try and forecast the best of our ability, and then we would be like, double
it just to make sure.
going back to reprint is actually highly costly for the company. It's really disruptive to things
like big sets that main set magic is trying to get out to customers, so it's like avoid going back
to reprint at all costs, make sure that we've got it all covered in the first spot. I want to pause
there because I think that that's where some of this gets lost is just in the logistics, which is
not exciting. It's not something a lot of people understand, but I think it's really core to what
what we're talking about here.
Because I think, I'll speak for you a little bit,
I think if we could snap our hands and just make cards
magically appear in people's hands, we'd do that.
But we use the same printers as like,
main set magic or anything.
This isn't, so we'd schedule time, correct?
Yeah, we use world-class vendors.
This is no shade to them, and we have a world-class supply
chain here at Wizards.
It's really just the amount of volume
that those vendors are doing for us to disrupt it
with our little secret layer,
often highly complicated drops, is problematic.
And so we really need to be scheduled
and plan full about when we are doing that.
Cause yeah, there can be knock on implications.
Like the last thing we want is like,
oh, secret layer had to get in there.
So now final fantasy is gonna be late.
Like, we don't want to be that guy.
So yeah, and again, these are world-class suppliers.
They're printing for even more than just magic.
They do a great job, and that's just
the nature of how complex the manufacturing
process is for these little complicated cards.
So then talk a little bit more about forecasting.
Because I mean, no business doesn't.
If we had enough to print to the people who want to buy it,
we would do that.
We would love for them to purchase our product.
But how does the forecasting work as much as you can share?
And what are you aiming for?
Yes.
Great question.
So yeah, to kind of close off on what I was saying a second
ago about Timebox, that really ended us
with a ton of inventory that was kind of like dead stock.
We were just over because we forecasted.
And then we basically upped it so we would never have to go back
to reprint and disrupt the whole machine again.
That was really costly for the company.
It was, I mean, environment.
Like, it just so much.
It was an environment.
I still remember the, there was a reddit thread many years ago.
I'm just like, here's a garbage dump full of secret layer product.
No, so that was broken.
We needed to stop that.
And so that was really when the switch to limited quantity,
which was basically us saying, hey,
the Commander Deck sales are working great.
Those are limited quantity.
That's, we're just gonna run everything
like the Commander Decks.
And so that's what we started doing in 2024.
Why not bring back print to demand?
The short answer, and again, not a sexy one,
is that this one is better for business.
And I'm just being really honest about that.
This has allowed us to do things like fund,
giving the fans a $1 drop, or being able to try a new experimental product that would
otherwise be too risky, that has allowed us to try new experimental partners that we might
have otherwise been like, ugh, too, because it's costly for us to do those and develop
those.
So it's allowed us to do things that we think are net positive for the community and have
been net positive for the secret layer of business.
Okay.
Now, I think my interpretation, I'm not going to speak for everyone on the internet because
everyone is different.
But I think, you know, a large part of the interest in print to demand is how quickly
pop-through drops can sell out and the frustration of wanting to drop and not being able to get
it.
So I think there are a few things that we can speak to there.
We can speak to, again, forecasting and then bots, scalpers, that sort of thing.
Let's take those one at a time.
When you're forecasting, are you still all working on your forecasting models?
What is your sort of, are you aiming to have enough that the first 24 hours sells through?
What's your goal on forecasting?
Yeah, good question.
Forecasting has gained a lot more sophistication and just really a lot larger of a data set.
The problem with forecasting is the nature of Secret Layer, where if you're going to
be highly experimental and try new things that are weird and unproven. Herein lies
the challenge. How do you forecast it? If you would have asked me, you know, nine
months before Spooky Drop or Secret Scare, rather, last year, you know, how many
should we print of Dwight Schrute on a magic card? I would be like, there's no
number crunching that's gonna get me to the correct answer there. If you would
ask me the day before that sale, there was still, you know, no way to really
understand how that was going to be received. So yeah, sometimes we have been really wrong.
I think the fans know the examples of those. I don't need to go through my, you know,
list of shame. And sometimes for the most part, actually, we've been pretty correct. And I hope
that the fans are starting to see with recent drops us, we've taken larger positions on inventory,
Fallout is still available right now, how I always want everybody to get what they want.
Especially if there's a new mechanic in the drop, that's where I really am like I want
everybody who wants that one, I want them to be able to get it. So that's why not only
do we have a lot on the Secret Lair website, the Beyond Vault 33 is an example of that which
has new card designs. That will be available on the website and in WPN stores. So those are the
the ones where I'm like we're gonna go deep, we're gonna make sure fans have
access to this mechanic. And then for the rest of them, yeah, I want, I never want
anything to sell out before the queue is cleared. That's like the ultimate shame
for me. But I want everybody who shows up in good faith for the sale to get what
they want that morning or whatever time zone they are in. So you mentioned fall
out a couple times, still available, most drops, all drops on the website. Most of
that most of the bundles I think there is that an example of how you prefer it to go.
Yeah, that's actually a great example of how I prefer things to go. I want that mechanically
unique drop or the drop that contains new card designs rather. I can't be unique. It's kind of
like our like inside baseball term. Yeah. I want people to if they see that at their game night
or they hear but I want people to be able to have access to that. So strategically I wanted
of that one to be around and the fact that the rest, I think only one or maybe two now,
one was low stock yesterday, last time I checked, I've sold out. That's a good cadence for
me. I'm pretty happy with that. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. So now let's move on to the second
part of that as bots, resellers. There's a lot of frustration and a lot of assumptions
about, oh, this sold out because bots or resellers or what not.
It's a big topic.
Where would you like to start with that?
Yeah, so that's something that is top of mind for us on SecretLayer and in working with
the partner that hosts our website.
We are all over that as are they.
It's our top priority and we're highly vigilant about it.
I'm not going to claim that this was like the silver bullet, but immediately when we
we started sensing bad actors or outsized demand
that was potentially nefarious.
We immediately took the cart limit down from five to two.
So it's not a highly sophisticated move,
but it was something that I know the fans appreciated
and it was an easy thing for us to be like,
let's just add some friction here
for people that are trying to be bad actors.
So that was step one.
And then from there,
we've added a number of other protections.
People had found ways to share their cue tokens.
We've closed all of those loopholes and tightened everything up, and our website partner has
been very vigilant about making sure that they are absolutely using the best technology
and making sure that they're doing everything that they can to thwart those attempts.
Okay.
Yeah.
Do you all have a sense now of how much traffic are bought to resell these?
Yeah.
Okay.
So yeah, we were able to crunch some numbers on,
I think this was like one of our later sales of last year
and statistically kind of irrelevant.
Point, like the only acceptable number here is zero,
like let me just preface with that,
but 0.5% of orders came from bad actors.
So while it is admittedly, again,
the only acceptable answer is zero
and we endeavor for it to be zero,
it is a very small portion out there
that is behaving in this way.
Okay, all right.
Let's move on to,
you mentioned earlier in the show, cues.
Yeah.
The cue is work.
You've kind of talked here and there
about different ways to enter the cue
and then interact with the cue.
What are the changes that you all made to the cue later?
Yeah, I mean, I feel like question zero
is like why even have a cue?
And I want to emphasize that the queue is really there
to maintain order and fairness.
It's there to help our website stay stable.
In the past, we have had sales that didn't have queue
moderation.
And again, I won't name names, but the website could put.
Immediately, we have to have a queue there to help moderate.
Otherwise, the platform and the payment processor
become overloaded and equal site crash.
So the queue is there to ensure that people
are moving through at a way that we can kind of like control
the flow through the payment processor,
also maintain fairness and order.
So that's why we have it in the first place.
The changes that we've made to it,
I hope that again, people are starting to feel these changes
because last year we had some highly embarrassing moments
with Q8 times.
It is never okay for me for people to be waiting five hours
for their drop, that's like absolutely does not meet my standard, was absolutely embarrassing
and not something I ever want to see again.
So by comparison now based on working closely with our partners, we have moved from, what's
the most, what's the most one of the more embarrassing ones, Sonic the Hedgehog.
Without getting too deep into the actual technical jargon and numbers, we have more than 300%
increase on the amount of users that were pushing through the queue and the speed at
which we're going with throughput from Sonic Superdrop to now what we're doing with Fallout.
And I hope that people felt a meaningful difference on that.
For the most part, people when they got in the queue experienced wait times with under
an hour.
A couple people got them more than an hour at the beginning and we should talk about
why that changes.
I was really happy with that and I hope that fans were also pretty happy with their wait times there
When you show up and you get into the queue and when we start actually when the site
Goes live at 9 a.m. And we start processing orders
You will get a wait time that is higher than what your actual wait time will be so
You know, that's the time where I'm like looking around on socials and everybody's like more than an hour wait secret layer
You idiots, you did it again.
And I have to assure you that it's not
going to be more than an hour at that point.
I can see it on the back end, but I can't tell you that.
We have to start low because we have to make sure
that the site is going to stay stable.
When you say low, you mean the number of people?
The number of people that can be processed through,
that can go actually through to the payment stage.
And we have to make sure that the payment processor is stable.
That's the thing that if we overrun that, crash, burn.
Marvel Super Drop was a perfect example of that.
So yeah, we start to do that.
And as soon as we start to see stability,
every five to 10 minutes, we increase the number of users
that we're pushing through.
So that's where you'll start to see your wait time
drop and drop and drop.
I personally loathe that customer experience.
Although I understand why we're doing it, of course,
because I'm watching it in real time,
I would like it for our fans to be able to,
like plan their morning and just like be able to show up and be like oh cool it's
gonna be 15 minutes I'm gonna go make a pot of coffee and whatever and then I'll
come back and they might come back and their turn is past or whatever so I I
don't love that experience we're still trying to hone it and make it better but
the thing I really want to emphasize is that we're moving a considerable amount
of people through that we weren't moving through back in the days of Final Fantasy
and Sonic and some of those really egregious wait times of last year.
When something that may help people plan how
How long do you wait to see stability before you start turning that number up of people that can go through?
Five to ten minutes five to ten minutes, okay
So if people are watching their times after five to ten minutes
That's when they should start see it going down if things are going well, right?
And then occasionally they'll see it go back up and what happens what what's going on when that happens is
is it could be a variety of things.
It means that something has gone wrong,
essentially, on the back end.
It means that either we have a skew that is selling so fast
that we are at risk of overselling the inventory,
so we have to basically pump the brakes
on how many people we're allowing to go through checkout
because we have to take that particular skew offline.
That's the most common reason why that happens.
Or, pardon me, we're seeing bad actors
that we need to take care of, or we're seeing
platform instability somewhere,
that's when we'll start to be like,
okay, we need to throttle back the queue for a second.
And that's when we try and put a message on social,
we try and put a message in the queue it,
and be like, you know, we're experiencing, you know,
an issue, we'll pause the queue,
or if you start to see your number go back up,
that's what's happening.
Generally, you'll very quickly,
within the next 10 to 15 minutes,
start seeing your wait time go back down.
That's usually how long it takes us
to resolve those kinds of things.
But yeah, that's another reason that it's,
I recognize it's so hard to predict
what your actual checkout time will be.
Yeah.
Okay, so for the rest of the show,
we have about 20 minutes left.
I want to take questions directly from chat.
Love it.
It does help me chat.
As some of you are already doing tag at magic
at the front of your question,
that'll help me identify it.
A number of you have already done that,
which is awesome, you're great,
your veterans, I appreciate it.
Because it's a special view on his phone.
Yes, I got magic.
So we're going to do that while I gather some of those questions
and while you all get your questions in chat.
Let's take the foot off the pedal a little bit.
What are you looking forward to?
And not that you can reveal anything,
but what are you sort of looking forward to in Secret Layer
right now?
We have a number of exciting things
coming to Secret Lair this year.
What I hope that fans will take away
from when we were talking about the Chaos Vault earlier.
Please don't write off the Chaos Vault.
The Chaos Vault will have fun and exciting things
coming to it this year,
and I really don't want people to miss out on those.
We have, for example,
everybody's been really excited about the Dan Dan deck.
That's gonna be coming to the Chaos Vault next month.
And that is something that,
I just, I don't want people to be like, I hate this,
I've unsubscribed from chaos fault emails,
you know, because they're not all gonna be like,
if you didn't like this one, I understand that,
but they're not all gonna be like that.
There's gonna be some really great stuff to come.
And speaking of the Dandan Deck,
I wanted to address late last year,
there were definitely calls for it
and for us to release it.
We actually, to pull the curtain back,
had planned to release the Dandan Deck late last year,
but we delayed it because we realized,
too late in my opinion,
that it was really important for us to involve Nick Floyd,
who is actually the creator of the Dandan format.
So we purposely delayed the launch
so that he could get really involved
at the end of last year.
He's gonna be coming here to Wizards in a couple weeks,
and we're doing some really fun stuff with him
that I can't talk about right now.
But yeah, I'm really excited for that deck.
And again, it's coming to the Chaos Vault.
So if you have written off chaos fault in your mind,
you will potentially miss that product.
So please don't do that.
And then, yeah, lots of exciting stuff.
There's a score to settle with cats versus dogs.
So that's going to happen at some point.
And yeah, overall, I think, yeah.
Oh, and Countdown Kit.
I announced at MagicCon last year in Atlanta
that the countdown kit is now back as an annual program.
It came back last year.
That was something that was obviously highly desirable,
more desirable than we expected actually.
And that will be coming back again this year.
It'll look different, it'll have a different creative,
but that's now an annual program
that you can look forward to every holiday season,
even though it's definitely not an advent calendar,
it's not.
It's not.
It's just, it just happens to be counting down
and it just happens to be around the holidays.
From an excitement perspective, there are so many great things
that the team is working on day to day that kills us
that we can't talk about.
It was a mistake.
I've gotten a lot of questions.
It was a mistake putting me on a live stream.
That is what I'm saying.
I'm just going to read off some of these,
and then you can not answer them.
But before you do that, I'll say that the thing that I am
most excited about, I joined the Secret Layer product team
last year.
So a lot of the things that I've been talking about
and the things that we've been putting on for sale,
I didn't even work on yet.
I worked on it a little bit into my old role in marketing,
but some of the stuff that I personally worked on
with the team that this new team has worked on,
because we have a lot of new people on the team,
that stuff isn't gonna be coming out
until mid-to-late this year.
So I'm really excited about some of the Settel line stuff
that I've gotten to work on so far.
I'm really excited about some of the core magic stuff
that I've gotten to work on,
because that's where my heart really lies.
I love the core magic stuff.
So really excited for people to see that
and get more reactions about what people are liking,
what people aren't liking,
so that we can continue to do better
and make more cool stuff that people want.
I'm just gonna read off some things that people want.
Great, yes.
Great, take it as you will.
I'm trying to.
Write it down, chat.
This is not a full list of everything people have asked for,
but a Kibo monkey or ape secret layer.
Hold on, that's an interesting idea.
that's something that you would like to see?
You don't have to do that for all of these.
OK, great.
Expedition 33.
I would also love to see something like that.
It's just the idea of Blake.
Is that something you would like to see?
Wait, did Blake write this list?
Kibo's not mine.
On the sadder note, Kaibude.
Kaibude dropped for those who don't know.
Kaibude passed recently.
And there's some wonderful tributes to him over the weekend.
Kingdom Hearts.
Here's a that segues into this. Do we have any updates on the monster hunter drop? Oh, yeah
That was something really unprecedented that we did. Yes, year
And yeah, I'm actually surprised. We haven't gotten more like questions about that topic
Yeah, that was a really difficult decision that we made last year
It was not our proudest moment, but I am proud of us for doing the hard thing
It would have been very easy for us as the secret lair team to just go ahead and release
Monster Hunter as it was designed, which we had done in close partnership with Capcom.
They've been wonderful partners for us.
That would have been the path of least resistance, even though our fans were telling us that
they really didn't appreciate it.
So instead, I really wanted us to go back to the drawing board because I believe that
my team, especially we've got a lot of new people as Steve mentioned in the mix, could
just do a better job with it.
So I am happy to announce that it is on the calendar for this year.
It will be happening this year.
I can't give you the exact date because we're still ironing out all those details.
Capcom has been wonderful about helping us to expedite things and get things approved
as quickly as we can.
But yes, we are making every attempt to get that out as soon as possible because we know
clearly there's demand there. When the announcement happened, people were like,
yes. And then as soon as they saw the cards, they were like, no. So we know that you love the
property. We are going to do right by it. Steve's been heavily involved in it. And I think you're
going to like it. So yes, coming soon, ish. All right. Rapid fire list of other things people
want just because there's so many. And then we'll get to some questions. Retro frame,
Count me on again. That's part of Blake's list as well. All right, secrets of manna dead by daylight Zelda warhammer discworld
Xenomorph power Rangers Witcher
But but but a
Star Wars near autumn a
Matamata at a moda chat. I got drums are Elden Ring like a lot of things
So people what I'm hearing is that people like a lot of different diversity people like a lot of different things
So here's what I'll say about all of that.
And first of all, all the things that you all listed
are things that we really like to.
I think you'll find at least one, probably multiple,
super fans of every single thing on that list
in this building.
The great thing about Secret Layer in particular,
and I'm going to talk right down to the line.
I'm going to talk right to you, Chad,
is that we have a lot of opportunity
to do a lot of different things.
So the things that you're looking for
are many different things from that list.
The fact that Secret Layer exists
is part of the reason that we have the opportunity
to do that in Magic in the first place.
Not everything is gonna be able to get a main set.
Not everything is gonna be able to get
a full suite of commander decks.
But a lot of these things have the potential
to have some sort of activation in Secret Layer.
And one of the things that I work on very hard
alongside many different people in the building,
subject matter experts, people from so many different teams,
not just the Secret Liar team, we've worked with comms before, we work with social, we
work with game design, is to take a look at all of these wonderful ideas, these things
that we all love, and figure out how we can do them authentically in a way that you're
going to love, in a way that fans that maybe have never heard of Magic are going to love.
But most of all, something that we're going to be excited personally to be able to play
and express at the table.
So understand that there are a lot of things on that list that I personally want, there
a lot of things on that list. I know Blake personally wants. There are things that I
know Lindsay personally wants. And there are so many more people on our team that want
those things too. So the fact that Secret Layer exists means that we have the opportunity
to hopefully do as many of those as possible. So keep them coming, keep hoping for it, keep
asking for it. We read this stuff, we see it every day. I love when I go to MagicCon
and people come up and they're like, oh, when is this Secret Layer drop going to happen?
is like, I'd love to see us revisit this world in magic.
What can we do that in Secret Layer?
It's like, yeah, maybe.
We're never going to know until we try.
So I know that we're trying a lot of different things.
We are putting a lot of different creative things
on the table.
Shout out to our creative lead, Sam,
who brings some really amazing ideas to the table
from a lot of the things that maybe were listed there
and maybe a lot of things that weren't.
So and I also really love the retro frame.
Shad, I'm a big fan.
Yeah, I love some of those ideas too that aren't just
IP and partners. We have an amazing emerging business team that has brought
maybe a small subset of some of those, as well as many, many more to the table. They work tirelessly
to do that. But it's also really important to Secret Layer as a brand to be releasing
not our own IP, our own magic IP, and putting our own Secret Layer spin on it, working with
big name artists, working with local artists, working on the most unexpected art styles you
could ever imagine. So you'll be seeing more of that too.
Next question is for me. Why did you ask chat for questions and then move on to talking about new potential collaborations instead of addressing our concerns?
Because that was the most common question I got and so I answered them and had them answered in bulk.
Never changed, John.
Yeah, people can ask happy questions too.
All right, let's go to...
I believe no one's interested in heated rivalry, John.
I was really, I was bracing for that one.
Okay, we had a number of questions about the basic land drops because as you mentioned,
we tried the chaos.
Yeah.
Stacked.
Yeah.
We just announced a D&D one where it's, what did you call it?
Cycle.
Cycle, where it's a cycle.
That makes sense.
Have you heard of cycles in magic?
I've heard of cycles.
So there were a number of questions in various forms about why the cycles, why not stacked
or different versions.
What are your thinking around basic land drop?
Oh, if you didn't show up and vote with your wallet for the stack, so that's really the
main answer.
We tried that and I personally was a big believer of this.
I'm like, yeah, I find it baffling these cycles.
I'm not sure who wants these or uses these in this way.
And yeah, so I really thought stacked was going to pop off.
It did not.
Maybe we'll run it back.
It was one of the first experiments
that we ran in the chaos vault.
So maybe we'll give it another try
and see if people will tell us that that is truly what they
want.
But yeah, we did a whole Mark versus Nate bit
because Mark was team cycled, Nate was team stack.
And unfortunately, Mark prevailed in that one.
So, yeah, I'm open to trying it again,
but that's how we got to where we got.
Speaking of the Chaos Vault, are there any plans
to adjust when and how the Chaos Vaults
are communicated to players when they drop?
It's frustrating to get home from work
just to find out that a drop that I would've been interested
in is already sold out.
In terms of like, they're not getting to use those.
Unimicating the Chaos Vault, yeah, yeah, yeah.
I mean, the best way to, yes, first of all,
yes, there is opportunity to look at that.
The best way to make sure that you're
going to know about the sale is to make sure
that you're signed up specifically for the ChaosFault email
address.
So you have to go into the ChaosFault section of the website
and sign up at that notify me at the bottom.
So you might think you're signed up
because you're already just on the general secret layer
mailing list.
So it's a separate mailing list.
It's a separate mailing list.
We didn't want.
When ChaosFault started, we thought
that people might feel like it was spammy
and that we were over communicating and over emailing
them.
gave them the choice to either be on one or both, or neither.
So yeah, make sure you're signed up for that,
because email is the way to really get a proper heads up,
instead of just learning about it on if you happen
to go on social, or you happen to go to our website.
OK.
Next is a question I know we've discussed in the past publicly,
but it's an offshoot of the printed demand,
and I got it several times.
So the basic question is, would we ever,
would secret layer ever consider reprinting older drops
that may be sold out quickly?
No.
Okay, why not?
No.
You know, it breaks my heart when things sell out so quickly
that so many people missed out on the thing that they love.
There's, you know, tattooed on my brain
are all the examples of this that I beat myself up over.
But it's a promise that I want to uphold and I don't want our promise to fans is
we will never go to reprint. We are collectibles business. It's a one-and-done
situation. We try and get it as right as we can. Sometimes we're really wrong and
I own that and we're gonna try and be better. But I do want to make sure that
we are being clear and true to ourselves as a brand and one of those
promises that we make is that we're never going to reprint. To be clear to
people it's art and design and all of those pieces together obviously the
drop we revealed today are we're all pre-existing cards and they all can be
printed again in other forms but the promise of secret layer is not that art
that it's gonna be correct yeah yeah so no it is not a new reserve list it's
That's not what that is.
Let's see where we want to go.
Here's an easy one.
Why is Region Lock active on checkout as some regions can't order at all?
They do not say what region.
Do we have?
We have company policies that specify which countries we
can do business with.
So it's possible that you live in one of those regions
that we can't.
There are also certain products, like we just
released, dual masters randomly in the chaos
fall to a week or two ago.
That product has its own set of requirements
on which countries and regions can order it.
So everything's a little bit nuanced behind the scenes.
I'd love to know more specifics there
so we can just make sure there isn't something
weird happening behind the scenes.
But if you visit our FAQ on our website,
you will be able to see exactly which countries
we ship to and you can order from.
Okay.
Steve, maybe this is a question more for you
or both of you, but there's been a number of questions
about why some drops have four cards and some have five.
Yeah, great question.
I don't have a good answer for that necessarily, but I do think that all drops are made a little bit differently.
My predecessor, who had this job for a bit, used to describe making a drop as one combination art and science, similar to making a commander deck.
Sometimes a drop just wants four, and sometimes a drop just wants five. Sometimes a drop wants six, seven.
It depends on the story that you're trying to tell and what it is that the product is trying to accomplish
There are very good reasons that different drops are made differently
But those reasons are almost always going to be bespoke. There is no like oh, this is
We're gonna we're gonna do it this way and it's always four cards
Well, there's gonna come a day where someday it's six cards or maybe it's three. Maybe it's eight. We don't
We don't want to limit ourselves just by saying it has to be five or it has to be four or it has to be six
We want to make sure that we're giving
Our artists and our teams and our designers the freedom to be able to craft something that is going to be right for whatever that product is
And that includes the number of cards that are in it
So sometimes it might be a little less sometimes it might be a little bit more
But we're always going to try to do right by the product and what we think that identity should be yeah
Alright, I'm going to read this last question, and it's a little cheaty, because I'm going
to take a little bit of it, and I'll wait for your thoughts as well.
Just because it's not necessarily about Secret Layer, but let me just read it.
With the increasing number of mechanically unique universes beyond card designs available,
only the three Secret Layers and the loss of in-universe reprints on the list, what
are the chances of a modern horizon's style set being made to create in-universe versions
of in-demand, mechanically unique,
guards that are not available anywhere else.
The reason I'm gonna take that is,
one, we haven't announced anything like that,
so we're not gonna say like,
this is our plan at this point.
Two, I know there are plans in action
that we can't talk about yet.
Three, I wanna bring up an example of a thing we could do.
So the Stranger Things secret layer drop
contained a card that eventually got
an in-universe version that ended up in a commander deck.
Yes, yes, it did.
I remember that.
Yes, I forget what the magic multiverse name was,
but we have avenues like that available to us.
Now, do you all talk, you know, secret layers
of smaller teams, do you all talk with the larger studio
about those opportunities and that sort of challenge?
Yeah, my team is super integrated with the game design team, works hand-in-hand with
them.
I will also just not to correct the question, but just mentioned that new starting last
year, anything that was mechanically unique in secret layer would be available on our
website and then the non-foil version was available in WPN stores a number of weeks
later, four to six weeks usually.
So that strategy is still very much in place.
In fact, we've even expanded reach with this latest drop with Fallout Beyond Vault 33.
That's going to WPN and will be available on Amazon.
So we're trying to make those as widely accessible as possible and not just making you have to
come to Secret Layer.
So I just wanted to make sure that everybody was aware of that.
There's definitely a daily article on that strategy somewhere in the archives if you
have questions.
All right.
We are just about out of time, so we're going to call it there.
Thank you all for tuning in, thank you Lindsay and Steve for coming on and answering some
tough questions.
Based on your sponsor names, this won't be the last time we bring the secret layer team
on.
I think you all have some great questions for them, so we'll bring them back sometime.
But not next week.
Except for Steve.
Steve, not all of that.
Hope like to have me back.
Next week is our post B&R show, so we have a banned and restricted announcement coming
Next Monday, the same day as the D&D secret layer drop sale.
So, you know, stop by for the drop, check out the B&R announcement, and then the next
day on Tuesday will be the weekly MTG show where we talk about what happened on Monday
and what we announced.
This B&R is special as a reminder.
We not only have our regular B&R announcement, but we're doing Commander as well.
So we've been talking about the Commander Format Committee for a while.
They've come back with some recommendations and some changes.
So we'll be announcing those next Monday in addition to our 60 card constructed formats.
All of that we're then going to talk about on Weekly NTG on the 10th.
The following week is going to be our debut kickoff stream for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
You'll want to tune in for that.
I won't be here, actually.
I'm going to be in New York from New York Toy Fair, but we're going to have some fantastic
guests and a different host on them. So thank you for tuning in and we'll see you next week.
you