For this week’s episode of “Strictly Business,” Variety was on the ground at MagicCon 2026 in Las Vegas, a convention centered not around slight of hand tricks, but Hasbro’s hit trading card game Magic: The Gathering.
The three-day event featured 25,000 attendees engaging in multiple activities, everything from a headliner panel featuring the MCU’s Paul Bettany unveiling a first look at a new “Marvel Super Heroes” collaboration with Magic, to a “Cat Lair” adoption done in partnership with a Vegas-based kitten rescue. At the center of the convention is one event that only an elite few partake in: the pro tour, which splits a prize pool of $500,000 among the top Magic players from around the world.
And while MagicCon has only been around since 2023, the pro-tour portion has been going strong since 1994, just after the card game was first released.
James Coletta/Wizards of the Coast
“So the Pro Tour has been around for like 30 years. Just about as long as the game; they started up almost immediately after Magic caught on,” MagicCon show manager Brandon Owen said. “I got hired [in 2022] to create Magic Con. It had never existed. So I got to do the very first one and see it from its ideation to where it is now and hopefully onward. The idea was they wanted to have something that has the pro tour… It all grew around, we’ve got this pro tour, people watch it and everything, what can we build around it?”
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Made by Hasbro’s Wizards of the Coast (which is also the brand behind Dungeons & Dragons), Magic: The Gathering has increased in popularity in recent years with 2025 marking the game’s strongest year ever with $1.7 billion. And while Magic has begun collaborating with outside brands like “Avatar: The Last Airbender” and “Final Fantasy,” the Magic is a hot commodity on its own in the entertainment industry 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 back stage at the convention this year where he was meeting with pro-tour players for research).
Wizards of the Coast’s head designer for Magic: The Gathering, Mark Rosewater, and principal Magic designer Gavin Verhey discussed the challenges of leading the brand as it grows beyond the game – and sport – they once knew.
James Coletta/Wizards of the Coast
“There’s this dual 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 Magic is so many different things to so many different people, but every magic set has to talk to everybody, in some way.”
During the convention, the Wizards team unveiled first looks at their upcoming collaboration sets for Marvel super heroes and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit,” as well as MTG’s original IP collection, “Reality Fracture.”
“There’s never been a time in Magic history where so many eyes are on it and it’s grown so much in the past handful of years,” Verhey said. “We are truly acutely aware of how many people we’re trying to design for because the voices are always louder.”
“Strictly Business” is Variety’s weekly podcast featuring conversations with industry leaders about the business of media and entertainment. (Please click here to subscribe to our free newsletter.) New episodes debut every Wednesday and can be downloaded at Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, Spotify, Google Play, SoundCloud and more.