MagicCon Growth, Pro Tour Business at Hasbro

For this week’s episode of ‘Strictly Business’ Variety attended MagicCon 2026 in Las Vegas, a convention that wasn’t about small hand tricks, but about Hasbro’s popular trading card game Magic: The Gathering.

During the three-day event, 25,000 attendees took part in multiple activities, everything from a headlining panel with the MCU’s Paul Bettany that revealed a first look at a new “Marvel Super Heroes” collaboration with Magic, to an adoption of “Cat Lair” in partnership with a Vegas kitten rescue. At the center of the convention is one event in which only a small elite participate: the pro tour, in which a prize pool of $500,000 is distributed among the best Magic players from around the world.

And while MagicCon has only been around since 2023, the pro tour portion has been strong since 1994, right after the card game was first released.

“So the Pro Tour has been around for about 30 years. About as long as the game; they started almost immediately after Magic caught on,” said MagicCon show manager Brandon Owen. “I was accepted [in 2022] to create Magic Con. It had never existed. So I got to do the very first one and see it from the idea to where it is now and hopefully beyond. The idea was they wanted to have something that the pro tour has… It was all growing, we have a pro tour, people are watching it and everything, what can we build around it?”

Listen to the full podcast:

Created by Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast (also the brand behind Dungeons & Dragons), Magic: The Gathering has grown in popularity in recent years, with 2025 being the game’s strongest year ever at $1.7 billion. And while Magic has teamed up with outside brands like “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “Final Fantasy,” Magic is a hot commodity in the entertainment industry in its own right with an animated Magic series in the works at Netflix and a live-action film set up at Legendary with director Matt Johnson (who was backstage at this year’s convention meeting with pro-tour players for research).

Wizards of the Coast’s Magic: The Gathering lead designer Mark Rosewater and Magic lead designer Gavin Verhey discussed the challenges of leading the brand as it expands beyond the game – and sport – they once knew.

“There’s a twofold idea of ​​making sure all the different things are addressed and it’s a challenge,” Rosewater said. “One of the things that’s really hard is that magic is so many different things to so many different people, but every magic set has to talk to everyone in some way.”

During the convention, the Wizards team unveiled the first looks at their upcoming collaboration sets for Marvel superheroes and JRR Tolkien’s ‘The Hobbit’, as well as MTG’s original IP collection, ‘Reality Fracture’.

“There has never been a time in the history of magic with so many eyes on it, and it has grown so much in the last few years,” Verhey said. “We’re really acutely aware of how many people we’re trying to design for, because the voices are always louder.”

‘Strictly business’, yes Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about media and entertainment. (Click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes drop every Wednesday and can be downloaded from Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.