Hello all, and welcome to Magic Monday, where Avocados can magically gather and talk about Magic: The Gathering. Each week I’ll talk about something Magic-related that’s on my mind, highlight a card related to those thoughts, and offer a prompt for commenting. This week’s column brings the Latin heat.
Sonic the Hedgehog may roll around at the speed of sound, but even he might struggle to move fast enough to snag a copy of his own Secret Lair, which dropped this morning at 9:00 a.m. PST. and has presumably already sold out, because when it comes to their business practices, Wizards unfortunately resembles Dr. Eggman more than the Blue Blur. Secret Lairs at Sonic’s level of anticipation and popularity are by now well understood to be covered in a thick coat of skeeze. I’m pleased to report that your friendly MTG correspondent wasn’t among the unluckiest, having managed to secure a foil Friends & Foes set, but for the most part, anyone who isn’t terminally FOMO-poisoned has largely written them off and conceded them to grifters and scalpers, who get in early, gobble up the limited stock, and flip it at an egregious markup, leaving the average customer in the dust.
But not all Secret Lairs are like that. Some go completely under the radar, like last week’s NALAC drop, which featured new artwork exclusively from Latino artists and gave 50 percent of the sticker price to the National Association of Latino Art and Culture, and which I had not heard a single peep about until I went to the Secret Lair website to get more details about the Sonic drop, probably because it doesn’t make people go WIZARDS MAKE CARD OF VIDEO GAME.
Unfortunately, if you’re learning about this drop in this column, you just missed the window to grab it, but Wizards occasionally does philanthropic drops like this, and if you want to dip your toes in those waters, you can’t hardly choose a better way to do it. Not only did half of the proceeds go to charity, but it was printed to demand like they used to be, and as is often the case with charity drops, it’s actually got a decent card selection, with appearances by a lot of solid green cards in particular, including still-solid old-timer Sylvan Library, Modern stalwart Tireless Provisioner, a chancla-fied version of time-tested commander protector Lightning Greaves, and our Card of the Week, Ancient Greenwarden.
Ancient Greenwarden is a 5/7 Elemental creature that doubles land-based ETB triggers. It’s also a Crucible of Worlds on a creature, and for shizzies and gizzies, it has reach, because why the hell not. All that should make it more than enough to be a big player in landfall decks, the typical color combo of which (blue/green) is maybe the easiest to get shenanigans rolling on. Simic is so free, it’s disgusting. Anyway, I do like this Secret Lair version. Ancient elementals don’t always have to be eldritch abominations. They can make you say “deer god” instead of “dear God”.
COTW Value: Each week, the Card of the Week is rated on a scale of one to five dollar signs (see footnote for values).1 Ancient Greenwarden went from being stuck in 2019’s Zendikar Rising to getting three reprints in the last two years, including this Secret Lair. Still, that hasn’t dented its price too much. Sadly, and somewhat weirdly, reprints of money cards that appear in charity drops tend to be among the least valuable. (For example, there are plenty of Secret Lair Sol Rings, but the cheapest, and in my opinion one of the most beautiful, is the one from the Black Is Magic charity drop benefitting Black Girls Code.) Ancient Greenwarden looks to be trending exactly that way right now, with its Spanish variant tracking at just $6.87 as of this writing. $$
Prompt: If Wizards let you make a Secret Lair, what cards would be in it? Maximum seven.
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