Once a fringe fixture of comic-book stores, a trading-card game has become a powerhouse of the toy industry — and it is doing it while the rest of the aisle shrinks.
The divergence
Traditional toys have been under pressure for years, squeezed by falling birthrates and the shift to video games. Doll sales are down 36% from 2021 to 2025, according to research firm Circana. Toddler and preschool toys are down 15%.
Games and puzzles — the segment that includes Magic: The Gathering — are up 36% over the same period. The difference is the customer: older, increasingly adult, and much more likely to come back and buy again.
Magic is the category’s biggest hit. Franchise revenue has grown an average of 17% a year for the past 17 years. Chief executive Chris Cocks said sales rose 34% in the first half, to over $1 billion, and called the year “off to a ripping start.” A new series of cards based on Marvel superheroes set first-day and first-month records, becoming the fastest set to reach $300 million in revenue.
“Magic is not a niche hobby business. It is a mega franchise,” Cocks told investors. The market agreed: Hasbro shares jumped 8.8%, their biggest gain in more than a year.
Why the economics work
Magic was created by mathematician Richard Garfield and first published by Wizards of the Coast in the early 1990s. It found success through thousands of local game stores. Hasbro bought Wizards in 1999, and more than 50 million people have played.
Cocks ran Wizards for six years before becoming Hasbro’s CEO in 2022. The unit — which also houses Dungeons & Dragons — has roughly doubled revenue on his watch, partly by licensing blockbuster franchises. A player can now build a deck mixing Marvel, Lord of the Rings and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles.
The price ladder is the real machine. A starter box runs about $29.99. Many customers step up to special box sets at $50 or more. Others chase rare cards through booster packs at roughly $5 to $7 each — and fans play and collect for years.
“This is not just a fad that just showed up,” said Arpiné Kocharyan, a UBS analyst who covers toys and games. She credits collaborations with “some of the best trophy franchises of the world” for pulling in collectors well beyond the hardcore hobby-store player.
Here is the translation for investors. A $5 booster pack bought weekly for twenty years is a recurring-revenue business — a subscription, essentially — that happens to be printed on cardboard. And a franchise that has compounded 17% a year for seventeen years is not a fad, whatever the shelf next to it is doing.
The shelf next to it tells the other story. Fewer babies means fewer dolls and fewer preschool toys. The card table, meanwhile, keeps filling with adults happy to pay a few dollars for a shot at a rare card. In the toy business right now, the grown-ups are carrying the aisle.