Last week, Wizards of the Coast surprised us all with a Deadpool Secret Lair drop on April Fool's Day, with the Merc with a Mouth featured across a five-card drop. At first I thought this was an elaborate joke, I mean, it was April Fool's Day after all and as someone who covers tech and gaming, that day has become an insufferable mess of trying to sort what is real and what is not.
However, it was all too real as a few of my fellow MTG Salvation writers made clear, and once the rest of the internet caught up to this fact, the Secret Lair site was going to be utterly slammed. I don't normally order Secret Lairs - I was burned by trying to order the Monty Python set a while back and have really not kept up with them since. However, Deadpool is one of my favorite characters of all time, and the cards looked pretty flavorful for this one-time set. I had to have this.
The biggest issue, though, was that I was currently 37,000 feet in the air, on a plane to New York for a Nintendo Switch 2 event for our sister site, MMORPG.com. Given all the issues with even getting the site to load and then braving the queue, relying on flaky airplane WiFi was going to add even more difficulty into an already fraught system.
Philip highlighted the myriad issues with the current way Secret Lair orders are conducted. Instead of printing to order, Wizards of the Coast a while back shifted their Secret Lair model to a limited supply system, no doubt to raise the collectability of the cards and, in a way, helping to inflate their value on the secondary market. Instead of a Secret Lair someone could head to the site, order and be assured they were getting cards, every drop feels like a mad dash to the page to secure a spot in the queue to order, and even then it's not a guarantee that there will be any stock left when you find yourself at the front of the line.
This is exactly what happened to me during to Monty Python Secret Lair drop. I spent over an hour in a queue only to be told once I was through it that stock had run out. It's a terrible feeling, especially when you know the simple solution to this problem is to go back to a print to demand model.
So as I sat in my seat in a tube hurtling through the sky, I wasn't expecting to even get the page to load, let alone find myself in a queue. And once in that queue, I had to hope that the spotty JetBlue WiFi would not let me down somewhere along the way. And what unfolded over the course of the next hour was a mixture of excitement and stress as I watched my position in the queue refresh, all the while expecting my laptop to disconnect altogether once I got near the front of the line.
As our writer Discord kept popping off with reactions to the cards themselves in the set, especially the Deadpool, Trading Card ...erm...card and its implications as a Commander, I was nervously checking the Secret Lair tab on my browser to make sure it was still chugging along. Despite flying from Las Vegas to New York City, both cities that tend to have full flights each way in my experience, this one was not even half full. That likely helped me overall as the plane WiFi wasn't as slammed as it normally would have been. Also, while I was on the plane at 9am, we took off closer to 7am PT, meaning many of us had been up way earlier to get to the airport on time. This meant that a lot of the plane was sleeping, helping to lessen the load on the WiFi system.
All this didn't help lessen my stress, though. I really wanted to Drop, and all I could do was sit on the plane writing up articles and prepping for the next day's event, all while hoping that a drop in connection didn't mean that I lost my place in line. More than once I lamented out loud to myself that if Wizards would just do away with the limited stock approach, this wouldn't be an issue. But alas, Wizards in their infinite wisdom seems intent on continuing this flawed system.
For the next hour and a half I sat checking, with the queue never refreshing the time estimate till I was on the site, despite the little guy at the bottom getting ever closer. It started to make me think that the page's graphics were playing out alright, but that I wasn't actually in the queue. However, around 10:45am PT I got an update: I was about 45 minutes from the front of the line.
It was the first sign since about 9:15 that morning that anything was happening. I was elated. Then I became somewhat panicky: what if this had sold out by then? What if I missed my chance because it took too long for my plane to connect with whatever server Wizards was using to house its queue? What if I get to the front of the line and the page refreshes, only to be unable to reconnect in the end?
I think what made this feel so stressful was the simple fact that so much of the connection between myself and the website was simply out of my hands. At my home there is the reasonable expectation that PC won't disconnect from the hardware connection to my modem for no reason. Air travel is not so consistent. On the same flight back I had maybe thirty minutes of WiFi coverage in my five hour flight just two days later, as an example. As stressed as I was about actually getting the drop, I don't think I would have been angry had I not been able to, though. Sure, the fact that this isn't print to demand would still be an annoyance, but it's not like I took off work or took time out of my day specifically for this drop, much like I did for Monty Python. I was already stuck on this plane for a nearly five hour flight - what else was I supposed to do?
Around 11:15am it happened, though. I got through the queue and miraculously the Deadpool drop was still in stock. Now I just needed the payment to process without any service interruptions. I ordered two of the Foil drops, entered my payment info and prayed to Christ everything held up just a bit longer. We were also about to start our descent into New York, which usually marks the end of WiFi service on most planes - it was a literal race against time at this point.
Yet, against all hope, the payment processed and I had, somehow, secured the Deadpool Secret Lair drop while traveling across the country on a plane. It's not that impressive of a feat, I didn't do anything other than make sure my laptop didn't shut off for some reason, but it still felt like a quasi accomplishment, especially given all the issues I've had when I have tried to order a Secret Lair Drop in the past. As I deplaned I was buzzing with excitement, knowing that sometime in the next week I'd have my new shiny cards, ready to brew Deadpool as my next Commander.
Who would have thought the biggest delay in all of this would be shipping?
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