Magic: The Gathering’s head designer Mark Rosewater has confirmed the card game earned more than $1 billion in 2022. Writing to his Tumblr blog on January 2, Rosewater said this is something MTG has never done before.
Since Hasbro’s investor day last October, we’ve known that Magic was approaching this target, with higher ups at Hasbro referring to their ‘first $1 billion dollar brand’ and all but breaking out the champagne a couple months early. During the presentation, Cynthia Williams said the TCG had raked in over a billion in the past 12 months, so, barring catastrophe, it was fairly safe to assume it would reach the big billion dollars when looking just at the 12 months of 2022.
Still, it’s a major milestone for Magic and good news for Wizards of the Coast (which makes Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons and Dragons) after the company’s disappointing third quarter. Of note, in 2021 Wizards topped $1 billion in revenue, in what was its best ever year, but now MTG is achieving that all on its own.
Rosewater shared the information in response to an MTG player concerned about “the volume of product being released”. Across 2022, this has been a constant worry among the games’ online fans, with many complaining about feeling burnout and confusion due to the number of new cards and sets released. In response, the head designer echoed a recent point that “internet chatter” is not a good basis for making decisions about Magic.
“The metric of success though won’t be volume of internet chatter,” he pointed out. “It will be all the metrics we look at (play numbers, sales numbers, digital numbers, social media metrics, market research, etc.)”
Rosewater added that “for the last three years, the metrics have not just been good, but the best we’ve ever seen” – suggesting that Magic is doing well in every way that Wizards measures. He also said that the increase of supplemental MTG products is not “being done without careful thought. We want Magic to be healthy, not just for the present, but for the future.”
For more information on what the near future of Magic holds, check out our guide to the MTG 2023 release schedule. Or, if your heads in a spin with the speed of releases, here’s every MTG set in order.