Overview
- The Zeta Set sale, which went live Sept. 2, paused its online queue about 30 minutes in, stayed frozen for roughly 90 minutes, then resumed and sold out within minutes.
- Wizards of the Coast called the drop “a disaster,” issued a public apology and said it is investigating whether the failure was caused by internal systems errors or external tampering.
- Customers reported checkout failures, missing or duplicate confirmation emails, and items flipping to out-of-stock while queues were frozen, and Wizards asked affected buyers to contact Customer Support for help.
- The product was a first-of-its-kind sealed-booster Secret Lair with explicit rare-variant odds, a design that increased scarcity and made the drop an obvious target for scalpers and bots.
- The incident revived long-standing player anger over Secret Lair’s move from time-limited print-to-demand toward limited runs and is likely to spur renewed calls for broader print windows or other anti-scalper protections.