Magic’s Stranger Things Secret Lair set the gold standard for crossovers

Released back in 2021, the Stranger Things Secret Lair was one of the very first Magic: The Gathering crossovers to carry the official “Universe Beyond” branding that’s become so prevalent in the game today. Wizards of the Coast did one thing very right when it came to the long-term approach to that drop. So why did they forget about it entirely in the years since?

The Stranger Things Season 5 release has me dreaming of another drop with updated cards, but it’s a fresh reminder that the 2021 Secret Lair, based on the Season 3 era, remains one of the strongest superdrops ever. Unlike other Secret Lairs that simply reskin existing Magic cards, this one offers eight unique cards and a special Clue token.

Mind Flayer, the Shadow stands out as a massively powerful but expensive black enchantment creature that steals cards from the bottom of each opponent’s deck, and it only becomes a creature once three or more have been stolen. If you could cheat it onto the battlefield early using some other effect, you can turn your opponents’ permanents against them. And at a full Commander table with four players, it’ll become a 9/9 creature very quickly. The design flavor here is spot-on in the way it represents the Mind Flayer controlling people against their will.

Image: Wizards of the Coast

The other seven cards have strong potential as Commanders in their own right. Hopper, Dustin, Lucas, Max, Will, Mike, and Eleven each have wildly different abilities that reflect their identities in the show. They also all have “Friends forever,” a unique variation of Partner that allows any two of these cards to both serve as your co-Commander.

Eleven, the Mage winds up the most powerful card in the set with tons of flavor. She ups your hand size to 11 as opposed to the standard seven. Whenever she attacks, you draw a card and lose one life (essentially your nosebleed for using your powers!). Then, if you have 11 or more cards in your hand, you can cast an instant or sorcery without paying its mana cost.

This is already fantastic for a deck that focuses on noncreature spells, but because of Friends forever, you can add a secondary commander from this bunch. Max, the Daredevil gets haste, and whenever you cast your second spell each turn, you untap a creature and create a clue token. (She’s the “Zoomer,” remember?) If you want to focus on artifacts, Dustin is your guy since he taps to generate two colorless mana you can use only on artifacts. If you’re playing with three opponents, Lucas presents a huge tactical advantage, goading a target creature into attacking another player next turn.

Mike, the Dungeon Master is the real standout: for two mana, he can tap to return a creature who just died to the battlefield tapped. And since he’s green-white compared to Eleven’s blue-black-red, that means their shared Commander deck gets access to all colors.

Each of these Stranger Things Secret Lair cards is easy to find on TCGplayer for under $10 each, but Wizards did something interesting with the approach to this drop. At the time, the company was still trying to figure out how to handle Universes Beyond. Fans were furious about mechanically unique Secret Lair cards, a controversy that first arose with The Walking Dead crossover in 2020. The same week that Wizards announced the Stranger Things Secret Lair, it also promised that any Secret Lair card with brand-new mechanics would eventually be reprinted with a new name, art, and flavor roughly six months later.

“The goal is not … to hold back mechanical expressions and game pieces from players who don’t purchase through our direct-to-consumer channel,” reads a blog post detailing the plan. “In other words, we want to give you options for finding the game pieces you want to use.”

Image: Wizards of the Coast

Image: Wizards of the Coast

The promise was called “Universes Within,” and Wizards delivered reskins for all nine cards in 2022’s Streets of New Capenna as part of the “The List,” a now-retired and curated pool of cards that occupied a small bonus slot in booster packs. If you track down some of those packs, you just might find Eleven as Cecily, Haunted Mage or Mike as Othelm, Sigardian Outcast.

Wizards followed through on the Universes Within promise with the Street Fighter and Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves Secret Lairs that came later, and even retroactively reskinned the Walking Dead cards as well. But as the company pivoted to focus more on Universes Beyond with entire sets dedicated to crossover properties, the plan shifted.

Eventually, in 2024, The List was scrapped entirely. Magic designer Mark Rosewater said on his Tumblr in February 2024 that “there isn’t a large enough group that wants Universes Within cards.” Wizards didn’t expect them to sell well, so they stopped making them. In January 2025, Wizards confirmed that official Wizard Play Network game stores would receive a limited quantity of non-foil Secret Lair drops. But this doesn’t solve the problem outright. It just makes it a tiny bit less worse.

The problem is still affecting recent sets, too. What’s going to happen with the massive PlayStation Secret Lair Superdrop that launched in October? Some of those card bundles are sporadically in stock on the Secret Lair website, but that won’t last forever. Right now there’s no Universes Within plan for cards like Kratos, Joel, Ellie, or Nathan Drake. In fact, the PlayStation Superdrop contains more mechanically unique designs than anything since Street Fighter.

If Wizards no longer plans to create Magic-native versions of these cards, then we’re right back where we started in the Walking Dead era: entire playstyles locked behind the paywall of limited-run merch drops. The way Wizards handled the Stranger Things Secret Lair — by respecting Magic’s core flavor and accessibility — remains a model for the right way to do this.