The Capcom Pro Tour, the yearly tournament circuit that determines the best Street Fighter V player in the world, comes to an end this week. Originally scheduled to be held live in the Dominican Republic, the rise of the Omicron variant caused Capcom to shift gears. Now the tournament will take place online, with the players who made it through their region’s regional tournaments fighting it out for the lion’s share of a $200,000 USD prize pool. Today, Capcom also announced another surprise for fans of their flagship fighting franchise. Namely, the reveal of the Street Fighter Secret Lair series for Magic: the Gathering.
Secret Lairs are limited edition card sets that Magic’s publisher, Wizards of the Coast, started a couple of years ago. These sets are only available for a small window of time, and contain special cards only obtainable in Secret Lairs. Sometimes they are just alternate arts of existing cards, or can be completely new cards for the set. Wizards has already done Secret Lairs for franchises like The Walking Dead, Stranger Things, and Arcane. To keep things fair for competitive play though, all completely new cards cannot be used in officially sanctioned tournaments. On top of that, new versions of the cards will be released in standard Magic: the Gathering sets six months after release as regular, non-licensed cards.
This official announcement comes after a leak from Twitter user named lxduo84, who swiftly deleted them minutes after. There are eight cards in the set, each one representing one of the original World Warriors from Street Fighter 2. Ryu, Ken, Chun-Li, Blanka, Dhalsim, Zangief, E. Honda, and Guile all make an appearance as legendary creature cards. That means they’re tailor-made for Commander decks, with Chun-Li and Ken as standouts of the group.
*cracks knuckles* We’re ready for those Lightning Kicks! Bring it on! pic.twitter.com/0Sm36FIrUm
— Street Fighter (@StreetFighter) February 16, 2022
Tap two mana for rollback
All Secret Lairs come with a bonus card. My best guess is either M. Bison or Akuma, or perhaps the classic Magic card Fireball redone as a Hadoken. It would make sense, after all. Either way, pre-orders for the Street Fighter Secret Lair go live on February 18 and end on March 18. There will be foil and non-foil versions available. As cool as this is for fans of fighting hand trading card games, hopefully this isn’t what Capcom has been counting down towards this week.
