Magic: The Gathering releases an awful lot of very bizarre cards these days, but none so bizarre and extraordinary-looking as those in a new set for MTG‘s Secret Lair—the first time the reprint department has ever made booster packs—created in collaboration with Brooklyn art collective MSCHF. Each card in The Zeta Set, as revealed by Polygon, is inspired by the look of the earliest hand-made playtest cards before MTG‘s original launch, except for one: There’s an Eternity Vessel in there that’s depicted as a graded slab of an Eternity Vessel card. And best of all, it was only graded a 6.
Every single card in the set, each a reprint of an older card but with entirely new art (as is the purpose of Secret Lair), is genuinely stunning. Set somewhere in the overlapping Venn diagram circles of blueprint, Biro sketch, photocopy and fanzine, they look like nothing else Magic (or frankly any CCG) has ever seen. Here’s a random selection of the cards, as revealed by Scryfall, to give you an idea.
But surely the most extraordinary card among them has to be the new version of fan-favorite Eternity Vessel, here depicted as a crude, black-and-white photograph of the card inside a graded slab. It is, as people on Reddit were quick to point out, an Eternity Vessel in its very own Eternity Vessel.
Graded cards are those sent off to organizations like PSA to be inspected for imperfections, and then sealed in a plastic slab with a grading number at the top. A 10 is a perfect card, and invariably worth the largest amount. A grade of 6 means the card is not in the best condition, and generally is worth less than the card just loose on its own. Which makes MSCHF’s decision to pick that grading for this card, in which MSCHF is depicted as the grading company, all the more amazing.
The set has yet to go on sale, and given the state of MTG and the grim unavailability of so many of its current sets, you’ll be lucky to get any. There’s an option to be sent a reminder when they are available, which is certainly worth a try.
Huge hat-tip to Paul H.