Magic: The Gathering Drive to Work Podcast - #1325: Secret Lair with Lindsey Bartell

Episode Date: March 27, 2026

In this episode, I sit down with Senior Director Lindsey Bartell to talk about Secret Lair.

I'm not pulling on my driveway. We all know what that means. It's time for another drive to work at home edition. So I tend to use my time at home to do interviews. And obviously today I have another interview. So I have Lindsay Bartel, who is in charge of the Secret Lair. Yes. Hey, how's it going, Mark?

Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Okay, so we're going to talk all about Secret Lair. We have a lot to talk about. But I'm going to start with the elephant in the room, I guess. So the number one complaint I get when people complain to me about Secretare talks about, hey, why can't we go back to French of demand? Why do we have the current system? So we want to talk a little bit about why the current system exists? Oh, man, no warm up. Just right to

the hard question. Right to the heart of it. I know. That's okay. That's totally fair. I'm ready. Okay. So yeah, it's a really great question. Truthfully, if I don't want to be too precious about wording, but secret layer really hasn't been print to demand, except for like in the very, very, very original kind of early days of it. And at that point, we would post print based on the orders that came in and people would be waiting four or five, six months, or in the case of one infamous commander deck, almost a year, to receive their order. It was pretty universally hated. Everyone was like, why is this so slow? I'm getting my Halloween spooky thing in the middle of April. This is lame. So we have continued to try and iterate and improve things. We then moved to this era that

I refer to as the time box demand era, where basically we gave you two dates. And if you showed up between those two dates, we would honor the demand. In order to get faster shipping times, we would have to pre-print inventory. That was the only way we could do it. So we would just print an absolutely enormous amount of inventory to make sure that we had enough to not run out under any circumstances, because if you have to actually go back to reprint, it's extremely expensive, it's extremely disruptive, and then people, you get the worst of all worlds, then people are again waiting months to get their thing. So I think that's what people are referring to when they say print to demand is the time box era. That era created a lot of waste.

It created just an excess inventory that wasn't sustainable for our brand. So that's why, gosh, it's been almost a couple years now, we transitioned over to what we call the limited quantity model, which is how we've run most of our commander decks. We just do a one-time print run and you show up, first come, first serve. We try and estimate demand as best that we can.

We want everybody to get the thing that they want, but we aren't printing these ginormous print runs of yesterday, and we're not post-printing and making people wait. Okay, so I want to dive into some of the specifics. One of the things I like about this podcast is try to explain stuff for people that might not know. So we're going to walk through some of the dynamics of how Secret Layer works. So let's first, let's begin with the queue. Explain to the audience how exactly does the queue work.

Yeah. So let's start with the very baseline, which is why we have a queue in the first place. Basically, the queue ensures two things. One is fairness, so that it's not just a mad rush of chaos that people actually are added to check out in the order in which they arrive. And then two is stability for the website. So our platform and our payment processor, it can only handle so much traffic and so much throughput at a time.

So the queue helps us moderate that. We've run sale events in the past. I think the most infamous is probably the first countdown kit where we didn't have Q moderation. And if people have been fans of Secret Layer for that long, they probably remember what happened, which was instant website crash. So that's when we started implementing the queue and trying to make things a little bit more stable and predictable.

Okay, so talk about what the pre- queue is. What does that mean? Yeah, pre-cue is a little bit of a confusing concept. So I'm glad you asked about that. You can show up. So almost all secret air events go live at 9 a.m. Pacific time. That's the time that the sale starts. But as early as 8 a.m., you can get onto our website and start loading up your car, get ready, get prepared.

log into your Waz account, just kind of do some of the basic housekeeping so that when the time comes, it's 9 a.m. you're ready to check out. If you show up during that hour before the sale, so let's say from 8 a.m. to 8.59 a.m. once the sale goes live at 9, you are randomly assigned a position in the queue. So it could be completely possible that somebody who got into the queue at 859 and then 9 o'clock the sale started or someone that was there since 801. that the person who arrived at 859 has a shorter wait time. That can totally happen. I can't emphasize the randomness enough.

It's completely random. And then from there, it's pretty straightforward. Like you arrive at 9 or you get in there at 901, you're after the 9 o'clock batch. If you get there at 902, you're after the 901 batch. And it's pretty orderly from that standpoint. Okay, so the other thing about it is it tells you how long you're in line. But that number can jump. Why is that?

Yeah, that's also a very good question. This is actually the part that I secretly loathe the most, which is the unpredictability of the queue. So this is the next thing I really want to work on with my partners that help us run this website. But yeah, you basically should stay at your computer for at least the first five minutes of the sale to watch your wait time fluctuate a little bit. We open the queue with a pretty low number of throughput. And that's to really make sure that the website is stable. Orders are coming in from all regions. The payment processor is functioning as we expected so that everything for sure is going to be

stable when we start to open the floodgates. So what you are assigned in the first five minutes of the sale is really your worst-case scenario queue wait time. So if you get on there and you see, oh, my gosh, it's more than an hour. I got time. I'm going to step away, make a pot of coffee, feed the dog, get the paper, whatever. you very well could come back and see your computer and it's your wait time your time is up to check out so make sure you sit there for the dust to settle about every five minutes or so we start to

up the threshold of the throughput of how many people we let through the queue so it's kind of like everything steady okay up it everything steady up it again and we go and go and go and now uh we're letting our throughput has increased really significantly send this time last year, like people will remember, I'm sure. The infamous super drops, Sonic the Hedgehog, our Final Fantasy, even our spooky drop last year, Secret Scare, rather, four, five-hour wait times, absolutely egregious, completely embarrassing, nothing I ever want to see happen again.

We're now moving people through the queue at approximately five times, the rate that we were last year. So our technology has gotten a lot better. Our partner has been amazing at this and trying to kind of catch up with how many fans are coming to our website and going through our payment system. So recently we had an event Dan Dan in the chaos vault. And that's a great example of the first time that we really, really pushed on what our throughput could look like and how fast we could move through a queue. So we printed a ton of inventory of that deck more than we thought actually was necessary. yet everybody moved through or most people move through and the item sold out by 930.

So things are just moving now a lot, lot faster. There's upsides to that for sure. So now if you were previously waiting five hours, you now might only have to wait 15 minutes or 30 minutes or something like that. But also now you really have to get there on time. So it's a double-edged sword. There's pros and cons to both, whereas before, you know, you would show up and maybe maybe it's 10 a.m. and you could still get in the queue. I just want to stress that it's the throughput that has changed

and our ability to process more orders, not our print runs. So we're actually printing more and trying to make our drops and products like Dan Dan as accessible as possible. So I just wanted everybody to realize that that's actually what's happening. Yeah. Let's talk a little bit about how you figure out how much to print. because I obviously bring up Dan, like one of the complaints I'm getting is people who wanted it, but they showed up to be too late to get it. So how do you determine what the print run is? How do you figure that out?

It's so hard. I don't mean for this to be a cop-out answer, but truthfully, when you are secret layer and you're working in a business that is highly experimental, we're doing things that are completely unprecedented before. We don't have comps to look at. We don't have things that we can say, this is exactly how much we're going to need. a lot of the times we're just using the best information that we can get our hands off of and guesstimating to the best of our abilities. For the most part, we get it pretty close. There's been a few times where we've been egregiously wrong that I feel terrible about from the past, but for the most part, we do get it pretty close. Dan Dan was very close.

So, you know, I recognize that not everybody got it that wanted to. People thought that it would be in stock a little bit longer than the 30 minutes. certainly, or thought they could show up a little bit later and it would still be there. And I'm so sorry for everybody that missed out on that. But, yeah, it's a difficult business to predict. That's for sure. When your whole brand identity is tied up in being experimental and unpredictable. Yeah, the story I know that really hammered it home to me, I just want to show this one is,

so when we were doing the very first Marvel drop, we called it Sugar Plum, but I don't know, the actual meeting to the public. I know you guys were trying to figure out how much to make, and it was hard. We'd never done anything like it. And so you guys figured out what you thought the right number was. And then you said, we're just going to double it. We're just going to double what we think the right number is

because we want to make sure that we have enough. And so you picked the number you thought was right. You then doubled that number, and then it was nowhere close to what was needed. Absolutely. And even then, the baseline assumption was we looked back at The Walking Dead, and Street Fighter and some of those other drops that had mechanically unique cards in them and where you be and were highly coveted and highly successful.

So we use those as a benchmark and then we were like, just double it. Just double it. We want to make sure that this is a success that everybody gets it. Could not have been more wrong. And yeah, none of us saw that coming. Yeah, I mean, it is just to stress the, I, I, have a similar job to years in the sense that I have to sort of come up with things that we don't have precedent for and I have to sort of do I think players will like it or don't I think players

will like it. You know, there's there's a certain amount of guesswork that goes into like when you do something that you've done before, it's a lot easier to figure it out. Okay, I'm going to do a kicker mechanic. Well, we've done infinite kicker mechanics. Oh, but now I'm doing some brand new we've never done before. And like one of the challenges I know on our end in the design end of things is, you know, oh, we, we thought we'd be fine with this. We thought we understood it. And man, we did not understand it. And then you get like, or the saga or different things in which, you know, we thought we sort of understood something and that in retrospect, we did not understand. And so I am sympathetic that it is. And the other thing for the audience to realize

is, just for a timeline, if something sells, how much before it's selling are you choosing that number? Oh, at least nine months. You know, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, our lead time is not short, and that's, you know, not to say anything negative of our vendors or suppliers. But yeah, at least 12 to nine months is really when we're picking that number. But honestly, like, yeah, if we could pick it a little bit closer, it might be a little bit more accurate. That's probably true. But also, there are just things that it doesn't matter. Like, if you would have asked me the day before Secret Scare last year, how much Dwight Shrewt on a magic card was going to sell, I would have not had a good answer for you.

That was one where we were like, we just got to pick a number and just hope that we are close. That one we knew would be very divisive. We knew some people would love it. Some people would loathe it. And those are the ones that are just impossible to predict. Okay. So the whole idea of this new process is to get things quicker, right? Yes.

So let's talk a little bit. Sometimes things aren't as quick. You know, people want. the roll for initiative drops or whatever. Talk a little bit about why it isn't always so blisteringly fast. Yeah. So one of the best benefits of moving to the limited quantity model has been that, you know, in excess of 90% of the orders that we shipped have gone out within a day

or two of the sales starting. So people, for the most part, are getting their stuff incredibly early and as soon as we can possibly get it out. starting like I would say last summer late last summer we started to have a shortage at one of our suppliers of a key raw material that became incredibly difficult to replace so that delayed everything in the supply chain through the end of last year and unfortunately we're still living those knock on effects through the early this year so that's it's mostly affected at one of our suppliers there's another supplier that's less affected so that's why you've seen things like Dan, Dan shipped perfectly on time, and you've seen turtles ship perfectly on time, but then Fallout, for example,

was embarrassingly late. And then Roll for Initiative has also been embarrassingly late and changing by the week. And those are, you know, we're not sending the quantity to the printer any later than we normally would have. These are purely manufacturing-driven delays all from raw material shortage,

and then vendors being so over-capacity that they are trying to catch up and they're just not all the way caught up. So you can, unfortunately, I'm already getting word that for the next couple events, we will continue to see some delays. We'll issue comms and we're going to try and be as transparent about people, to people about what to expect. But, you know, I will just emphasize that it is our goal to ship within a day or two of the sales start date, always.

And we are not passing off quantities any later than we usually would have. This is all purely manufacturing. Okay, so you talked a little bit about how you're increasing the through, on the technical terms here. Yeah. But something else that I know you've done, that one of the complaints I get a lot is about bots, resellers, bad actors. Do you want to talk? And you guys have done a lot of work on that. Do you want to talk about that?

We have, yeah. One of the first things we did, not exactly like rocket science here, we just took our cart minimums down from five to two. We were like, you know what, let's just make this a little bit more difficult. on some of these bad actors. And the fans responded really positively to that, and we didn't see it materially impact our forecasts or expectations. So win-win, and that's been something we've really continued to stick with. And I don't see us deviating from that anytime soon.

The other thing that we've done is similar to how we've upped our game in Q throughput. We've also upped our game in terms of protections on the website. So we've closed loopholes like Q bypassing through reuse tokens. We've closed a lot of those gaps. Our website provider ran some analysis for us. And the numbers that they had, I want to preface this was saying the only acceptable number is 0%. But the number of orders that we suspect are from bots or bad actors is 0.5% of our total orders. So, again, not zero percent, and I'm not happy until it's zero percent, but relatively small in the grand scheme of things.

So I hope that assuages people's fears a little bit. Yeah, I mean, one of the things that from talking to you that I learn a lot about is how often you guys are constantly trying to improve things. And I know it can be frustrating when something you're unhappy with, but a lot of you guys have been going through a lot just to try to speed things up and, right, make sure that the magic players, are the ones getting it and not other people. Yeah, absolutely. Like, we want fans to get our products. We don't want bad actors and people with nefarious intent to get our products. So that's our goal always and to get their things as soon as possible.

We want them to be in the hands of people who love them as soon as we possibly can. So one thing that I don't know if everybody realizes, but my team pours over the content and all of our social. channels. So be that Reddit, be that X, be that Instagram, Blue Sky. We read everything that you're telling us. We understand the frustrations. We're taking notes. We hear you. My team takes it, you know, extremely hard when we're disappointing fans. We never want to do that. I never want people to wait weeks for their role for initiative order while Dan Dan is shipping out, you know, the next day. That's, you know, not an experience I want to duplicate. I never want to,

see a wait time of five hours. That was just wild. And I never want things to sell out in two seconds before people can get, you know, a reasonable shot at getting it. Those are not desirable things. And I hear you when you're upset about them and my team hears you. So yeah, keep the feedback coming. We'll keep reading it and we'll keep striving to be better all the time. I'm not going to claim that we'll achieve perfection anytime soon. But I will promise you that we will continuously be iterating and trying to improve. Okay, so one of the things that I, where I find some common bond between what you and I do is you guys also like

experimenting. I love experimenting. Yeah. So let's talk a little bit about new things that you're trying. Yeah. It's charming chaos ball. Do you want to walk through some of the new ideas that you're playing around with? Oh, man.

Okay. So I did go on weekly MTG a few weeks ago and talk to Blake about this. So if you want more of a deep dive, please go there. Or if you want to see the face attached with this voice, go there. You'll get to learn a little bit more. And hopefully I'm hitting everything here too. But yeah, the chaos vault is answering the question if what if Secret Layer had a secret layer? So that's our place where we try new products, new pricing, new sale models, things that are a little bit different, a little bit weird.

And it's a place on our website where we can set. products to our fans that aren't necessarily part of these huge, like, marquee super drops that are a little bit clunky and inflexible. So usually it's one drop at a time. It's a weird price or it's administered in a weird kind of sailway. Or it's a hat. You never know what's going to be in the chaos fault. But that's what it's for. And we had a experiment with a drop called Prince Charming, beautiful drop that was right around the time that Lorwin came out. And we thought we were having another like high five moment with the fans. We thought everybody was going to love this. We did a choose your own pricing model, kind of like early bird pricing where we had price points that were below what you normally pay, the price points that you normally pay, and then price points that were above what you normally pay. And we were like, of course they're going to be, you know, fans are going to think of, look at

this and be like, Secretare, you idiots. of course no one's going to want to pay more than what they normally pay. So we only put 5% of the inventory there. It was mostly because we thought it would be funny. We thought it would be a joke. We absolutely missed the mark on that. It read as really misleading to fans, even though we tried to put it as many places as we couldn't explain what we were doing.

People were moving quickly. They were making decisions quickly and they missed that it is truly the same product, no matter what price point you pay. So, yeah, that was a humbling moment for us and just a good reminder that, you know, the joke doesn't always land. We have good intentions, but this one definitely didn't land. And that's not an experiment that it's in no way indicative of what the future holds. It was really us trying to have a moment with fans of like, we're going to give you actually the majority of the inventory below what you would normally pay or at the same price as you would normally pay. And that just wasn't transparent enough. And yeah, didn't land. So one of the things that's really interesting is how do you guys even determine, like, how you make a secret layer? You want to talk a little bit about how do you come up with the ideas?

Because you have a lot of weird ideas and weird things. Where does the genesis that come from? Yeah, absolutely. So we have a ton of really talented people on the secret layer team and within the building on the magic team in general. Ideas can come from anywhere. They come from my team. They come from people around the building. And we pour over, you know, what kind of creative we would want to do.

What's an artist that we would really love to work with? What's a property or a world that would be really interesting? What's something completely unexpected? And, yeah, we go through kind of this brainstorm iteration process. Ultimately, everything comes across my desk and we, you know, decide if that's something we want to move forward with. And that is a very simplified way of going through. but is a long and multi-step brainstorming process. But we have some really great talents on the team.

Steve Sunu is on the weekly MTG live stream with me, or now not live, obviously. But if you want to go watch that, he is well known in the fan community, and he does a great job designing the products. We have great talents like Jacob Covey, our art director, Sam Strick, our creative lead. everybody cares so much about this product,

about secret layer, about the artists that we work with, the properties that we do, and then they are all made with a lot of love. They are not for everyone. That's not our goal. Every drop is not made to be for everyone. But if they delight somebody somewhere, then we've done our job.

You hit upon something that I talk a lot about in design is, like, when we make a card, what we've learned is if you try to make for everybody, for nobody on some level, like pick your audience. That's a great way to say it. And if other people don't like it is, okay, that's not, the card's not for them because it's for somebody else. And that, you know, one of the things I really enjoy looking at Secretal layers,

how much you experiment, how much you try things. I remember in your alphabet thing, demonic consultation, the little New Yorker cartoon, that was one of my all-time favorite ever executions of anything ever. I love to hear that. I love to hear that. Yeah, I mean, one of the things, that's really fun is whenever you guys try something, I hear for, like, I talk to the players all the time and that, you know, people get very excited and the thing that one player might go, eh, another player's like very excited because you guys do a really good job of like tapping into specific artists or specific treatments. And that's, there's a wall at work that called the secret layer wall and you guys post things up on the wall. Yeah. I'm coming. Yeah. When I walk back to the bathroom or my desk, it's like, right, I have to walk by that wall. So I get to see it all.

Yes, my team loves that. They love to show off the things that are in flight and get the building excited because so many people that work in the building are such fans. So, yeah, I'm glad to hear that you're one of them. Yeah, it's the experimental nature of Secret Layer is a really, really fun one. It's, you know, we have to sometimes take our licks and know that, you know, not everybody likes the thing that we put out. But again, if it delights somebody somewhere, then we're happy with that.

and we just will constantly try and strive to be better and better. We like reaching fandoms that are underserved. I think Sonic was a great example of that. Sonic fans don't get a ton of product. And we saw the results with that. People really loved our Sonic drop. So when we can hit that perfect kind of cross-section of something that is exciting and resonant with fans and also is a fandom that doesn't get a lot of attention,

that's a really exciting sort of cross-section for us. By the way, tip the hat to Corey Bowen, who is the designer that designed the cards. I thought they were super fun, super fun designs. Okay, so we talked about this a little bit, but maybe we go in a little more depth of, I really want the audience to understand the amount of change that has happened

over the last couple years. And so we talked about the through, I keep forgetting the words for it, but the through the, the throughput. Yeah, you got it. We talk about bots. So what else? Let me just talk a little bit about what else, just so the onus might not be aware.

What else have you guys been doing behind the scenes to just make a better experience? Yeah. You know, we constantly are striving to improve the customer experience and navigation of our website. So I have somebody on my team, Jeff Malloy, he has been instrumental in trying to make our website as easy to navigate as possible. He's also on the front lines of working with our partner who runs our website. and trying to make things better at all times. Faster processor, better payment processor, more stability, less bots. Like he is definitely grinding on that front.

We also have just tried to make better products that people love. So we've done more and more, we've done a little bit more UB year over year. I think the fans have noticed that. We've taken some swings at things that we in the past would not have. one of the benefits that we see from the limited quantity model and not printing all of this excess inventory that was very costly and very wasteful has been that we're more agile so we can do things like have a $1-dollar chaos vault event and try a property that you know we have again Dwight Truton magic Furby on magic who's to say how that's going to perform right we can take some of those

risks now because we have a little bit more of a stable and profitable business model going. So we will continue to push boundaries and to continue to try new things. They will not always land. I can promise you that, but I also will promise you that we will try and do better all the time. I don't want people to write off the chaos fault. That was something new that we developed last year. and there are some really awesome things coming to the chaos vault this year. Dan Dan was just the beginning. There's even more to come. So if you were really turned off by it during the Prince Charming event,

I get it, I hear you. And I really am sorry about that. But please don't write it off because you could potentially miss some really awesome products and some things that we haven't sold before. Okay, so before we wrap up for today, I know that it's called a secret layer. So by the way, do you know where the name for information? Just curious, a little trivia question here.

Do you know where the name secret layer comes from? This was before my time for sure, but wasn't it, it was the area of the building where R&D used to be in the old building? Is that what happened was R&D had a little area, and we made a little play area where we would playtest. And so there's a card from an unset from a, glued, called R&D Secret Lair. And so I put the card up at that spot.

And so we started calling the R&D Secret Lair spot because I put the card up. And we just called it to the R&D Secret Lair spot. And then Mark Hagen, who created Secret Lair, he took the name from that. So Secret Lair is named after an uncard for those people they don't know. I love it. Okay. So Secret Lair has secret in its name. So my final thing is, are there any secrets you're allowed to tell us about Secret Lair?

Secrets that I can tell. Let's see, I am in the mood to share a hint or two. I obviously can't say a lot, but I think that our fans should really pay close attention to what's coming up at MagicCon Las Vegas, in particular, the Secret Layer redacted play event. Very much. Very much so if they should pay attention to Secret of that.

I might be very involved in this product, so I'm very excited. I was just about to say. I'm kind of winking at you right now on the camera. Like, you might be excited about this one, too. It's very different than the last one. The last one we did was, of course, Dan. This will be something, it's not that.

It's a completely different thing. Let's see. There's probably, you know, Magic on Las Vegas, you know, keep glued to that. You know, you never know what kind of cats we might let out of the bag. And then I will leave you with this. thought. We have, last year, we only released one Commander deck. This year, we have more than one. So we love Commander at Secret Layer. We know our fans love Commander. So if you love our precons, we have some exciting news for you. There will be multiple Commander decks coming

this year. And then the last thing, I will say, I'm not going to tell you where it's going to show up or when, but we will be printing finale of devastation this year. Oh, very cool. Okay, well, Lindsay, thank you so much for being on a podcast and sharing all the news about Secret Lair. It was my pleasure. Thank you so much for having me. But, guys, I can see my desk. So you all know that means, this is the end of my drive to work.

So instead of talking magic, it's time for me to be making magic. So I will see you guys all next time. Bye-bye.