At MagicCon Amsterdam, in the early hours of the morning on Friday, previews for the upcoming slate of Secret Lairs started rolling out.

One of the first cards shown to tease the upcoming Perfectly Normal Superdrop featured four Marvel drops, a drop inspired by Journey to the West, and a Careful Study with the iconic Lofi Girl art from the YouTube music stream "Lofi Beats Radio to Study/Relax To."

Careful Study sees fringe play in discard-based Commander decks, but the more popular card featuring studying is Rhystic Study, a ubiquitous staple and Commander Game Changer. This has left many fans wondering why Rhystic Study was not included at all in the drop.

Who is the Lofi Girl?

Jade is her name. She accompanies lo-fi or hip-hop music with a relaxing vibe, intended to be background noise during studying or other reflective activities. The music stream has been running since 2015, originally under the name ChilledCow and currently under the name Lofi Girl.

Before Jade was created, the character Shizuku Tsukishima from Studio Ghibli's Whisper of the Heart was added to the channel in 2018, prior to some legal trouble prompted the redesign in 2020. Around this time, in 2017, the Lofi Girl record label was created by creator Dimitri Somoguy and the new art for Jade was provided by Juan Pablo Machado.

Lofi Girl has become iconic in online spaces due to the ever-present stream providing calming music without additional advertisements beyond those provided by YouTube.

References to the stream have even been made by WotC in the past, alongside the soundtracks for Aetherdrift, Edge of Eternities and Secrets of Strixhaven.

What's Included in the Secret Lair

This is a five card drop, containing the cards Starfield of Nyx, Merchant Scroll, Felidar Guardian, Paradise Mantle, and Careful Study.

Each depicts the Lofi Girl or her iconic headphones and cat (Pocky) relaxing, chilling, or studying. Each of these cards has applications in niche decks, but none is a genuine Commander staple.

Three of these cards (Felidar Guardian, Paradise Mantle, and Careful Study) have previous Secret Lair printings, while Starfield of Nyx and Merchant Scroll are new additions to the SLD set list. If you wanted to pick up a copy of each of these cards, it would currently run you a minimum of $35.

These SLD versions, due to the iconic renown of the Lofi Girl online and the anime girl tax, will likely end up costing more than this.

There is one other inclusion in this Secret Lair worth discussing: the bonus card. In nearly every Secret Lair, WotC includes an unannounced bonus from either a rotating common pool shared by multiple Lairs, a narrow thematic pool, or a set inclusion.

No Universes Beyond Secret Lair drop has ever had cards from the common pool, so it is almost certain that this drop will either have a fixed bonus card featuring Lofi Girl art that you are guaranteed to receive, or a small selection of Lofi Girl-themed cards you can pull from. Could the bonus card be Rhystic Study?

If this were any time prior to May 2026, it would be incredibly unlikely. Historically, up until the 2024 Fallout Secret Lairs released alongside the Fallout Commander decks, all bonus cards were fixed.

With the release of Fallout drops, there was a small (about 5%) chance you would get a copy of Mana Vault instead of the otherwise fixed bonus card.

Rare bonus cards in Universes Beyond drops continued, with highlights including the Snapcaster Mage (Encore Electromancer) in all of the Hatsune Miku drops, and multiple tiers of rares in the Spongebob drop.

There was also the five Modern Horizons III Evoke Elementals in the Final Fantasy drops, the Chaos Emerald-themed Lotus Petal cards in the Sonic: the Hedgehog drops, and most recently the Dreadpool reprint in the second Deadpool Secret Lair.

Traditionally, bonus cards do not directly drive sales since they are not known until the cards arrive at people's homes and online. Because of this, there is little incentive to make them highly desirable or expensive cards.

Outside of the rare bonus cards, which make up a maximum of one in every twenty bonus cards, there are very few highly desirable bonus cards. There is one recent Universes Beyond drop which bucks this trend, and it also has a rare card worth discussing.

The Dwarf Fortress drop came with a really shocking bonus card in Crucible of Worlds. Previously, Crucible was a $30 card. With the Secret Lair printing, original copies dropped to... $30, but the new printings are about $20.

This is hard to explain, especially with the great variety of new cards being printed with effects that improve upon Crucible's in one or more ways. As mentioned, this set also had a rare card which replaced Crucible about 5% of the time.

Since Crucible was already such a highly in-demand card, you might expect this bonus card to be something crazy, but it was actually Glorious End, a dollar mythic rare from Amonkhet. If you pulled this instead of Crucible, don't be disappointed, the SLD version will currently sell for a hot $380 online.

What does this mean for the Lofi Girl drop? It means that, yes, it is possible Rhystic Study appears in the bonus slot, but it isn't likely. The printing of Crucible means they've started a new policy change; occasionally putting valuable cards in the bonus slot.

If they do decide Rhystic Study is a thematic card for this drop, it is more likely that they will make it a rare bonus card, as they have done with desirable or expensive cards in every SLD prior to Dwarf Fortress.

If you really want a Rhystic Study, you should not buy this set to gamble on it being in the bonus slot.

Does this mean Rhystic Study will be banned?

Now, we enter the realm of conspiracy. There has been some discussion online that the absence of Rhystic Study is a clue that it will be banned in Commander.

Rhystic Study is a Game Changer and a powerful card draw engine that elicits many a groan when it hits the table. Asking your opponents "Do you pay the 1?" is iconic, as is everyone focusing down the person who cast it.

There have certainly been calls from the community for a Rhystic Study ban in the past. Unfortunately for those asking for it, the evidence points towards no ban happening anytime soon.

With the current bracket system and Game Changer list, there is less motivation than ever to give more weight to the historically light-handed banhammer.

Rhystic Study is strong but not broken in Brackets 4 and 5 and should not be included in lower Brackets. As it stands, the fix to broken Rhystic Study games is Rule 0 enforcement, not a banning.

Even if the fix was banning Rhystic Study, it is unlikely the Secret Lair team would be the first to know about it.

The Secret Lair team is its own department within Wizards of the Coast, and the teams that handle constructed bans do not always communicate with the promo card and Secret Lair teams, if the many post-ban printings of Monstrous Rage is anything to go by.

Why was Rhystic Study not included?

Does the absence of such a thematic card mean anything? Not really, when we consider that the cost of Rhystic Study, worth a minimum of $63 (which gets you the Arcane Secret Lair version), dwarfs the price of all the other cards in the drop.

Wizards are incentivized to keep the price of some cards high, so that their inclusion can help sales for sets that they are less confident in, which is why highly desired cards like Fetch Lands don't see reprints in every Commander deck.

This "reprint equity" is a valuable resource they are hesitant to use for a set that is very likely to sell out regardless of the price of the cards included.

And there's the rub; this Secret Lair is almost certain to sell out. It has everything a Secret Lair needs to be successful: an anime girl, a nostalgic reference, and cards with niche applications you'd be happy to run in the right deck.

All the cards in this drop are good cards. There's no need for any great cards. And Magic is undoubtedly growing at a rate that WotC did not predict or plan for. Every new in-universe set is the best selling in-universe set of all time. Every Universes Beyond set, even Marvel's Spider-Man, sells above expectations.

They printed an amount of this Secret Lair six to nine months ago which was barely enough for the audience then, with no idea how many more players are going to want to get their hands on it now.

Conclusion

Prior to doing research about this drop, I had only a vague familiarity with Lofi Girl which I picked up through cultural osmosis. I do, however, know a lot about Secret Lairs, and I know this is one worth considering with or without Rhystic Study.

It's unlikely there will be a Rhystic Study and there's no guarantee there'll even be a rare bonus card, but it's got a cute anime girl, an interesting history, and a lo-fi vibe that makes me want to relax/cast spells to.