Magic: The Gathering’s Secret Lair Summer Superdrop includes classic cards as ink-credible tattoos
Want or needle?
A handful of iconic Magic: The Gathering cards have been reimagined as tattoos for the trading card game’s ‘Summer Superdrop’ of Secret Lair releases this summer.
The Full Sleeves tattoo pack of Magic: The Gathering cards is one of five Secret Lair packs being released over the course of five days next month. As with previous Secret Lair drops, the limited-edition sets are only available for 24 hours.
Full Sleeves includes five Magic: The Gathering cards - Inkmoth Nexus, Pithing Needle, Eternal Witness, Blood Artist and Spell Pierce - featuring new artwork from tattoo artist Josh Howard. The designs are the first time any MTG cards have featured tattoo art.
Full Sleeves: The Tattoo Pack is the first of the Secret Lair Summer Superdrop sets to go live, available on June 1st for $30/£30. That’ll get you both the physical cards, a non-foil copy of each to use in digital app Magic Online and a card sleeve featuring the Pithing Needle artwork for Magic: The Gathering Arena.
The second summer Secret Lair pack, landing the day after the tattoo pack, is the robot-themed Can You Feel with a Heart of Steel? The set includes three full-art foil cards featuring MTG robot creatures Walking Ballista, Arcbound Ravager and Darksteel Colossus illustrated by Bad Flip Productions, Danny Miller and Hector Ortiz.
The trio of cards will come in dearer than the tattoo pack, setting you back $40/£40 on June 2nd for the physical cards, an Arcbound Ravager Magic: The Gathering Arena sleeve and their non-foil variants on Magic Online.
Next up on June 3rd is the planeswalker-packed The Path Not Traveled, including variants of Ajani, Domri, Tamiyo and Vraska that imagine the Magic: The Gathering heroes if they had opted for a quieter, slightly less heroic life. The foil cards illustrated by Yeong-Hao Han, Chris Rallis, David Rapoza and Mike Uziel are $40/£40 for the lot, along with an Ajani Steadfast sleeve in MTG Arena and non-foil copies of the four cards in Magic Online.
June 4th brings a Secret Lair set of four variants of the Lightning Bolt instant spell card, with artists Noah Bradley, Brigitte Roka, Robbie Trevino and Alexis Ziritt portraying a different Magic: The Gathering creature getting zapped. The full-art foil cards make up the Mountain, Go drop - again, you’ll get Bradley’s artwork as an Arena sleeve and non-foil copies in Magic Online alongside the physical cards for $30/£30.
Finally, on June 5th, the Ornithological Studies pack brings together five bird-themed cards from Magic: The Gathering history. The Baleful Strix, Birds of Paradise (which debuted in MTG’s Alpha set), Dovescape, Gilded Goose and Swan Song cards have been imagined as real-life avians by Ovidio Cartagena and Allen Douglas. $30/£30 will get the flock, plus a Birds of Paradise Arena sleeve and Magic Online copies.
The five drops will be available separately during their respective 24-hour slots, or as part of a Summer Superdrop bundle that adds in an extra enemy fetch land for the slightly eye-watering price of $170/£170. That’ll be live from June 1st until the 15th.
The Summer Superdrop cards will find their way to those who pick them up from the middle of August in the US, and the beginning of September in Europe.