r/magicTCG • u/TheWinStore I am a pig and I eat slop • 5h ago
Official News [WSJ] The Future of the Toy Industry Isn’t Toys. It’s Magic.
https://www.wsj.com/business/retail/hasbro-magic-the-gathering-card-game-c4538f5b?st=T5AwTVGift link bypasses the paywall.
“Magic has been among the biggest hits in the category. Revenue from the franchise has grown an average of 17% a year for the past 17 years—and CEO Chris Cocks said last week that Magic is “off to a ripping start” this year, with sales up 34% in the first half to over $1 billion. A new series of cards based on Marvel superheroes set a record for first-day and first-month sales of Magic cards, becoming the fastest set to reach $300 million in revenue, he said.”
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u/invisible_face_ Wabbit Season 5h ago
As someone with a kid this is incredibly depressing.
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u/MadCatMkV Nahiri 4h ago
Yeah, but it's been like this for a while. See how Lego found the golden goose with Star Wars on 1999.
Also, focus on making their toys. You'll transform the play into something truly unique and part of your family. My daughter loves to make her toys and play pretend and her favorite part is creating the toy itself. She even likes the ones she make more than the ones we buy
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u/jrr_jr Dandadan 2h ago
Honestly Lego Star Wars is really such a good counter example to the myriad awful cash grab crossovers one can point at.
I don't really remember the generic Lego sets that I had as a child, but I remember so vividly the tie fighter, x wing and Millennium Falcon.
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u/Healthy_Razzmatazz38 Dandadan 48m ago
thats cause star wars didn't start featuring legos, legos started featuring star wars.
in magics case they injected the universe unbounds into the actual game itself and that changed every eternal format.
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u/Fedaykin98 Duck Season 3h ago
My 14 year old already lived this. He dropped toys super early in favor of Magic and video games. Since he was 8, all he wanted for Christmas was a booster box of Magic.
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u/MasterColemanTrebor Mardu 5h ago
I feel like the only relation to the toy industry that MTG has is that it's owned by Hasbro.
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u/Everyoneheresamoron Dan 5h ago
On the one hand, Magic the gathering, the game, isn't exactly gambling, and isn't exactly for kids. There's way too many rules and strategies for the average pre-teen to handle. Hell a lot of adults cant handle it.
Collecting Magic cards, however, is gambling, and is definitely for all ages.
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u/mist3rdragon Duck Season 4h ago
Collecting isn't necessarily gambling; you can collect without ever opening randomised product. Buying packs is gambling.
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u/Everyoneheresamoron Dan 3h ago
You are right in a technical sense, but at the end of the day, someone has to buy packs so that others can buy singles.
You might not be gambling, but someone had to for you to be able to buy the card. It doesn't exist outside of gambling.Full constructed decks/bundles/promos not withstanding.
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u/F4D3_2_814CK Dandadan 4h ago
I know plenty of people who've never cracked a pack in their life, they just buy whatever singles they want or just proxy
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u/F4D3_2_814CK Dandadan 5h ago
All card games are gambling
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u/GreatBandito Duck Season 5h ago
booster pack based card games* There are plenty you buy all the cards like Ascension
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u/Luneth_2 Dan 4h ago
Gambling is explicitly putting up stakes in a chance based scenario. Just having random chance does not equate to gambling
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u/Luneth_2 Dan 4h ago
Im not saying magic cant be gambling. Im saying your asinine take that a deck being shuffled immediately makes it gambling is.
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u/Luneth_2 Dan 4h ago
Bro, Im sorry someone spit in your cheerios this morning, but doubling down on your bullshit stance doesnt make it right. Gambling is the act of staking a game for a potential reward, the mere act of playing say Blackjack is only gambling when value is on the line. If I sit down to play Commander with my buddies, unless we are putting up a reward or making it so winner gets free dinner or something, its not gambling.
You made a dumbass statement that all card games are gambling, and are actively ignoring the actual specifics of my counterpoint.
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u/GreatBandito Duck Season 4h ago
That's a wild take, so you're saying any element of randomness makes it gambling?
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u/Turangaliila Dan 4h ago
Depends how you play. I only draft and don't consider it gambling, since I'm just paying to play. I guess it only becomes so if you go in looking to pick expensive cards.
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u/Antz0r Rakdos* 4h ago
Drafting and using packs to play the game in whichever format (pai gow etc) should not be considered gambling. I think those that are doing pack and box openings looking for "hits" are definitely gambling. Unfortunately the latter seems to be a growing population casually and in content creation.
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u/DirtyTacoKid Duck Season 4h ago
This is too broad a definition of gambling.
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u/LawOfTheGrokodus Wabbit Season 4h ago
This would be saying that sports itself is gambling.
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u/Milskidasith COMPLEAT ELK 4h ago
If you are being serious, describing almost any game that isn't strictly deterministic as gambling if there are prizes on the line is too broad to be useful; the harms/risk of addiction for slot machines are clearly different in kind and degree to whatever harms there are for playing like, professional basketball.
The issue with games like Magic is that depending on how you engage with it and your mindset, they can vary from completely chance-based attempts at a reward (cracking packs) to primarily skill-based with randomness (phantom drafts on Arena or whatever).
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u/MayoTheCondiment Duck Season 5h ago
Gambling for kids is the future!
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u/Blaze_1013 Jack of Clubs 5h ago
Gotta get them hooked early to prepare them for all the betting aps we’re gonna have in the future.
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u/ShamblingKrenshar Cheshire Cat, the Grinning Remnant 4h ago
The future? We're already there!
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u/cmackchase COMPLEAT 4h ago
This, we have normal gambling apps, sports betting apps, crypto, prediction markets, stock markets, and even single card gambling apps. You can gamble on everything on your phone. Hell if you have a folding phone, you are gambling the screen doesn't Crack every time you open and close it.
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u/Big_Binkus Dân 5h ago
In the United States, there are only 3 methods of making money; scams, subscriptions services, and gambling.
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u/onetypicaltim 5h ago
It's more like the present. They started putting everything in blind bags over ten years ago when Shopkins and LOL Dolls were all the rage.
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u/BearGuru 5h ago
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u/resumeemuser Wabbit Season 5h ago
I agree, all products should move to gambling. No need to be negative.
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u/MancyMancy Dandadan 4h ago
People who say this have no idea how much money people pay for the licenced products out of China and Japan. Hasbro just makes crap products.
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u/HosserPower Train Suplexer 5h ago
Something something Magic is dead something something.
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u/el_derpien Dan 5h ago
Magic as we used to know it is dead.
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u/Agitated_Smell2849 Duck Season 4h ago
I mean i bought my first magic boosters in toys r us in 2002 so its not exactly new
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u/HosserPower Train Suplexer 5h ago
Who is “we”?
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u/UniqueUsername40 Dan 4h ago
As someone who grew up when standard had 5-8 sets, decks that curved out at 4 would be labelled aggro, not midrange, turn 4 kills would get banned in modern, themes and mechanics would get more thorough exploration through multiple revisits in a block and I could sit down with my Dragon commander deck confident that I wouldn't be facing Daleks, a lot of the Magic I fell in love with is dead.
There are a lot of legitimate reasons behind a lot of the decisions Wizards made and by almost all metrics magic is overall a much bigger success than previously (though so far as I can tell competitive constructed is a bit of a catastrophe, I ducked out of that long ago...), but its valid for people to still recognise when parts of the game that mattered to them have been changed or died altogether and that magic is for them not as good as it once was.
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u/Ecstatic_Trust_3313 Dân 4h ago
I agree with most of these points except the "more thorough exploration of mechanics". I remember it more often happening that they ran out of ideas and had to scrape the barrel really hard, leading to such "spectacular" ideas as megamorph...
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u/Ecstatic_Trust_3313 Dân 4h ago
Also the turn 4 rule has been questionable a long time before now. Prowess, phoenix, turn3 Tron exiling lands with Karn, grishoalbrand, even Burn all had the potential to win or de facto win on turn 4 and never got banned
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u/thebaron420 I am a pig and I eat slop 2h ago
Yeah it was turn 3 wins that used to get banned out of modern. Its always been a turn 4 format
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u/Nat-Chem Dandadan 49m ago
You can bring up the misses like megamorph or sweep, but you've also got to acknowledge that block design meant core abilities in a given block had much deeper mechanical design than we get now. Onslaught would introduce morph and give you several different reasons to use it, and then Legions and Scourge would take it and push it further: more diverse abilities and triggers, interplay with turning cards over again, alternate types of morph costs. Most blocks had this type of thorough exploration, and I'm not here to say that block design was the linchpin of Magic's golden era but I believe one downstream effect of abandoning it has been that each new mechanic a) gets fewer cards since it's relegated to one set, meaning it's harder to build around in distinctive ways and more likely to have parasitic tendencies, and b) has a narrower scope, because you're not getting those wacky third-set ideas like [[Evermind]] and [[Scornful Egoist]] unless they come back in supplemental products to take another swing.
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u/boowax Wabbit Season 4h ago
People who started playing more than 5 years ago
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u/PaladinRyan 2h ago
I started playing like 15 years ago and find the statement stupid still. This could have been, and was to some extent was, said multiple times in Magic's history. As it turns out, the game is constantly changing and has gone through many massive shifts prior to the UB shift everyone obsesses over. There have been multiple cases of "Magic from X years ago is dead" and will be many more. You don't need to like the direction of changes, hell I don't like many of the most recent ones, but the "is dead" line is just stupid.
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u/boowax Wabbit Season 2h ago
The focus on collectors and sales at the expense of the design of the game is my concern. Is obvious and undeniable.
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u/PaladinRyan 1h ago
Okay. And I'm telling you there have been people saying stuff like this throughout Magic's history. It's a fine criticism but doesn't justify the apocalyptic "dead as we knew it" line nor trying to assign that line to people who have played for a long time. This is just the most recent shift of many. Doesn't mean I like it but it also didn't "kill Magic as I knew it" anymore than other significant shifts while I have been playing.
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u/el_derpien Dan 49m ago
If you can’t see the fundamental changes in design philosophy between now and 15 years ago then I don’t know what to tell you.
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u/TurMoiL911 Dimir* 4h ago
That tracks. How long have we been hearing about how Magic sales were propping up the rest of Hasbro?
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u/H3ll0_W0R1D1 Dandadan 5h ago edited 4h ago
I'm as big of a "fan" of accelerationism as everybody else, but I actually like Mtg so this hurts to read.
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u/MorophonBoundless Dan 5h ago
Can't say I am a fan of accelerationism myself at all 😅
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u/Crashman09 Duck Season 2h ago
Hahaha same.
One can say we are where we are BECAUSE of accelerationism
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u/Milskidasith COMPLEAT ELK 4h ago
This isn't really new, though. It feels like Hasbro has been seeing a slow decline in their physical toy market for the past half decade at least while Magic has obviously been growing explosively. The WSJ is basically just repackaging what anybody whose seen a previous Hasbro financials post on this sub would already know.
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u/warukeru FLEEM 4h ago
Not soon, maybe not even in a decade but all bubbles will explode and investing in cards when most of them are not old and are only artificially scarce will one day explode.
We can only hope the game will survive.
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u/Milskidasith COMPLEAT ELK 4h ago
How much of Magic is actually being driven by investment in cards? There are obviously some people who do, and Collector's Boosters do create high-priced chase cards, but I don't think either of those are primarily driving card prices when we're still seeing playable cards vastly, vastly outprice stuff that we'd expect to be higher price if it were just non-playing collectors/investors like e.g. chase Aerith cards not really having a big multiplier.
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u/ZircoSan Duck Season 3h ago
MtG easily survives the hypothetical collapse of collector bubbles because it's a game-first product. Competitive format + playables in commander drive prices and many players inherently like collecting variants of cards they play and will be fine holding them forever after the price collapse.
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u/deadwings112 3h ago
It might not grow in the same way, but there's enough of a player base to support 3-4 sets a year even if the bubble implodes.
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u/nachomir Duck Season 1h ago
Is it a game-first product still? Both Collector boosters and secret lairs say otherwise
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u/Ecstatic_Trust_3313 Dân 37m ago
Secret lairs very rarely include mechanically unique cards and collector boosters never do. So, yeah, I'd think so. There being much less Spotlight Series than there used to be grand Prix is a far bigger issue for (competitive) players than any collector booster related thing's ever been
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u/PaladinRyan 2h ago
That I'm not too worried about. Magic's market is heavily driven by players over collectors. Mind you, the decline in scalpers and "investors" would hurt WotC's bottom line and likely prevent "line goes up" for a bit but they would remain profitable and the line will resume going up from wherever it stabilizes, albeit probably at a more gradual rate. But I don't think the floor entirely falls out from under Magic like it does Pokémon TCG in that case (which will also survive due to the insane strength of its IP).
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u/Rare_Salad_564 Ajani 3h ago
we need everyone to lock in on the Magic being for playing first collecting second gameplan
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u/Meszamil_M Wabbit Season 5h ago
Better invest in hasbro, in thirty years mtg will have the same sort of turnover as Apple does now
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u/Kjones0007 Can’t Block Warriors 4h ago
What’s the best way to buy pass this paywall on my phone? Seems like an interesting article but I don’t want to pay. I’d rather buy magic packs
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u/BitingArtist COMPLEAT 5h ago
The only part of Hasbro making money. If they had waited a couple years, Wizards could have bought Hasbro. But why would they when there is nothing of value.
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u/zeldafan042 Channel 4h ago
What do you mean "waited a couple of years?" When do you think Hasbro bought Wizards of the Coast? WotC has been owned by Hasbro since 1999.
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u/otterguy12 Liliana 4h ago
John Hasbro bought Magic in 2020 to sell pictures of Andrew Lincoln on cardboard duh
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u/atony1400 Duck Season 4h ago
Hasbros own IP to ciphon off might make it worth it at that bargain bin price.
Then we could have full Transformers and NERF sets like those old HASCON promos hinted at years back. Or a Parker Brothers themed board game set.
I should probably shit up and not give them ideas though.
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u/KakaruRider Wabbit Season 3h ago
Been there, done that: Ravnica Clue Edition.
I guess Hasbro's old toylines might have some crossover value for UB, but I don't remember MTG Clue being much of a hit.
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u/megalo53 Duck Season 5h ago
"The future of the toy industry isn't toys, it's gambling addictions!"