Bleary eyed and hungover, I scream along to PUP’s Doubts in a cramped university basement. It’s 2016 and I’m a journalist with nothing but condiments and beer in my fridge.

By the end of August 23^rd, 2026, I’ve lost my voice. A crescendo to one of the busiest weekends of fleeting two months off from school, with a wedding, a long overdue graduation dinner and thousands calling out for connection. Summer is the time when I try to burn the candle on a campfire, doing the most and often paying the price. I can’t do it like I used to.

In my monastic reprieve, Wizards of the Coast rolled out spoilers for a surprise, reprint-only, Secret Lair exclusive set, the Zeta Chaos drop. In collaboration with Brooklyn art collective MSCHF, the release stoked all sorts of opinions and takes, even before its disastrous roll out on September 2nd.

Twelve packs allotted per order, the customary endless line, which was only exacerbated by tech issues; truly this drop had it all. At least it wasn’t another media crossover. Instead, Wizards aimed to create a set with a “look like it was pulled from the copier in 1992.”

I was one of the untold number who waited in line to pick up some packs. Seven minutes remained on my timer before I received the update that all Zeta packs had been allotted. Sorry for the inconvenience, better luck next time. To pass the time, I commiserated with a friend who began the customary cycle of grief after missing out on another drop. I slipped my phone back into my pocket and headed out to grab a coffee. We’ve all been through this before and besides, these weren’t authentic playtest cards, right?

All summer, Toronto alternates between thunderstorms and heat waves, the effects of unchecked growth and half-measure toward climate change come calling. On my way over, I noticed the concert venue has been renamed once again, surely to be claimed by another corporate sponsor in the next decade. The current owners had to contend with a deluge of rain the evening before and the forecast promised; but despite the concerning weather reports, the show went on.

The Secret Lair initiative was well underway by the time I came back to Magic, in their previous print-to-demand model that I’ve experienced in the occasional charity drop. As the game’s popularity reached unforeseen heights, and the aesthetic boundaries of a card have been pushed to their limits, SLDs became another pillar of the yearly release schedule.

Aside from mechanically unique cards, a gross practice underpinned by artificial scarcity, Secret Lairs are among the recent endeavours by Hasbro that have fallen into a growing miasma of apathy. Cool art for playable cards; as far as methods to draw more profits from players, I can’t complain. This is all preference, of course. SLD offers a truly mind-numbing range of aesthetic style, ideally for playable cards, but if they don’t suit your preferences, they can be forgotten. Like many sets in Universes Beyond, most drops fall outside the aesthetic bounds of my collection. I’m not the only one with this opinion. Descend into the conversation during any of the experimental releases and you’ll read the same refrain.

“It doesn’t look like a Magic card.”

Repeated ad nauseum, this claim has stretched the bounds of accuracy since the first drop. Alternate arts of all varieties have broadened the aperture of ‘a Magic card’ until the argument falls apart. Anyone unconcerned with uniform legibility for competitive play is apt to bling out their cards, and the gamer’s premiere social format provide a grand stage for players to show off their shiniest pieces of cardboard. My Henzie deck, a mindless end-of-the-night menagerie of Jund was built with this ethos in mind. A Magic card is a trading card used in a game of Magic: the Gathering. A tautological resolution expanded to any design Wizards feels fit to print. As lucrative as innovation can sometimes be, it never hurts to appeal to a half-remembered yesteryear.

Retro borders, white borders, future frames, there’s no aesthetic experiment left untouched in our age of nostalgic fracking. My opinion of Zeta’s playtest inspiration has oscillated since the initial reveal, conflicted between the appeal to DIY construction and repelled by its flat, xeroxed commoditization. Growing up amidst piles of magazines did irreparable damage to my aesthetic sensibilities and led me to my local punk scene, where I found communion among pasted up posters and second-hand guitars channeled through blown out amps. I’ve aged into a reasonably competent English teacher who shattered his voice at a PUP concert, an ideal customer. If only I could shake the feeling of seeing the Viletones hawk insurance during the Super Bowl.

Revisiting the preview list leading up to the release, beloved communist and Magic thought leader Spice8rack echoed my unease about the DIY trappings of Secret Lair x MSCHF: The Zeta Set.

Living through the swing in public sentiment on pop punk and emo, the mounting hype into a fervent backlash after the sound got compartmentalized and sold back to us in a glossy, corporate approved package, Spice nailed it. These aren’t cards cobbled together by fanatics at the University of Pennsylvania, iterating and iterating to create a game; far before the game’s decades spanning legacy and all the corporate considerations piled on in the intervening years. The craftsmanship of original playtest cards was haphazard, not some calculated appeal to DIY principles and resonate with consumers who crave authenticity; they were the genuine article. These cards were works in progress, made to be shuffled, creased, and edited on the fly as designs were tweaked until they were satisfied and sent to a proper printer. Zeta promised multiple versions of each card, the rare ones amongst the collection will no doubt be slabbed before long.

The first time I saw PUP, my editor bought me dinner so I could stick around the university campus in Guelph, Ontario. They were on a tour for their sophomore album, The Dream is Over and instead of taking notes at the show, I crashed into the rest of the crowd. The floor was slick with booze and our bodies ricocheted off each other in the pit, my hangover briefly forgotten in a spike of adrenaline and sweat.

In 2026 I wonder if the squelching mud is going to seep its way into my insoles. Check my driver’s license, this is the same man in the crowd, but years pass and people change.

The intent of Zeta, as WOTC laid out ahead of the release, was to emulate the look of the original play test cards, rough hewn and with the seams, scan lines and clipped corners on display. The booster pack is randomized, seven cards each and sold for a fitting $19.92 — a clever enough price tag ruined by the necessity of conversion rates to the reference-less price of 27.57 CAD.

I was caught surprised by the general enthusiasm for Zeta, though maybe I hadn’t been playing close enough attention to the product or the audience. The Duelist has been out of print for ages; would we welcome it’s return if it were sold with an eye-watering price tag for only the most devoted collector?

Every year, Wizards proffers a release to players who pine for the days of block sets and a less porous multiverse, and a consideration for formats outside of Commander. Erroneously, I thought Zeta would go over slightly better than Magic 30, another tone-deaf and cynical regurgitation of the game’s early years. Why put all your efforts toward creating new accessible avenues into a scene when those who have stuck around have easily exploitable bank accounts and nostalgic feelings? I hate how this has become the parlance of our culture and how often it works. I’ve been eying the arcane signet for my bird deck.

Stefan Babcock was less chatty behind the mike than usual, thanking the audience between songs but committed to playing the Dream is Over through as if we were still in 2016. He promised us a good heart-to-heart after Pine Point, when we could get on with the rest of the hits. PUP is a whole-hearted collective, approaching with a brutal honesty that nearly tips into adversarial if you allow the tone to overpower the message. The crowd roared for DVP and Morbid Stuff, but equaled the volume in support of Trans Rights, a Free Palestine and for Premier Doug Ford to go fuck himself.

I hold out hope that what draws us to art is authenticity, a realness, an ineffable feeling that lays outside of a company’s market research and production forecasts. With all the handwringing about industry plants, algorithms and AI, there hasn’t been a convincing case that cynical art by committee has the same longevity and resonance. We want shit that lingers.

Magic wouldn’t be as totemic without the honest passion behind it. There is obvious care put into Zeta by both sides of the collaboration, even if I feel the well-intentioned message was lost in an ecosystem that WOTC has allowed to fester as Magic slowly turns into a scalper’s game. For those of us who exited the queue with an empty cart, there’s always the option to proxy, reinterpret those designs to find a look that is authentic to you. After all, they’re only pieces of cardboard and ink.