WALL STREET — The earnings call for toy giant Hasbro showed massive increases in revenue fueled by their Magic: The Gathering IP. What’s more, a good portion of the revenue is derived from a card game based on the coveted Magic: The Gathering novels and comics.
“We were very confused when we saw how much revenue the card game based on the MTG IP is generating when compared to the novels and licensing for things like Funko Pop dolls,” Reagan Hodgson, spokesperson for Hasbro said. “We know characters from popular books can end up making a lot more in the toy world—hell it’s the whole reason to write a novel these days—but we had no idea they’d be doing as well as they are in a card game. I mean, it’s cardboard. We never thought people would actually pay for that.”
The authors of those books are happy their creations are making an impact on their fans.
“If you’re curious why that weird cardboard game is doing so well, it’s because there’s a period of sorrow, sometimes called a “book hangover”, after a reader has completed a novel. People become attached to the characters and their journey; their struggles become our struggles. Their victories our victories. Their failures, our failures. That card game is merely a way to make the reader feel they’re visiting an old friend, to experience a small sliver of what the book offered while they await the next entry.”
Market analysts are just as excited about the earnings call as Hasbro themselves.
“This data is really something else,” Cade Ridley, spokesperson for the firm “It’s Called Data Not Data” said. “Adaptations of novels usually work best in the film world. However, we’re also seeing success for novel IPs in the world of video games. If that video game ends up being successful, then you may have a chance to branch that IP into other things like card games. Take The Witcher for example – great book into a massively successful video game which ended up getting the card game treatment, mediocre as it is. Here, however we’re seeing the success of a novel turn into god-awful video games, usually signaling the death knell for other adaptations. I was predicting MTG Monopoly at most given the many “planes” in the novel’s fantasy world, but never once expected a card game to be created or to be as successful as it has been.”
We’ve received reports that the card game is actually older than we originally thought, going back as far as five years, though we are in the process of verifying that claim since we would have heard about it before now if that was the case.
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omg. dry erase cards. Of all the dry erase cards these are the driest. “How dry are they?” As dry as my wife after hearing me talk about how great MTG is. Sahara dry.
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