Magic: The Gathering's Final Fantasy Universes Beyond expansion was really, really, really popular. It was the fastest-selling expansion in Magic: The Gathering history, per Hasbro. Its Secret Lair collaboration drops sold out in record time, and while stocks of the boosters, starter kits, and decks have improved, there was a period there where it was difficult to get your hands on anything Magic x Final Fantasy-related. The set's popularity even pushed a bunch of non-Final Fantasy cards to higher prices, just because of their excellent synergy with the set.
And on top of all that, it apparently earned $200 million in a single day - the same amount that Magic's Lord of the Rings set earned in six months.
This is according to Hasbro in its Q2 earnings call, which revealed the figure alongside a report that Magic: The Gathering revenue grew 23% year-over-year in large part thanks to the Final Fantasy release. Per CEO Chris Cox, it brought in more new players in stores over two weeks than any other set has in 12 weeks. And in the investor Q&A during the earnings call, Cox answered a question about how Final Fantasy's demand correlated to the company's expectations with the following quote (courtesy of Investing.com's transcript):
In terms of Final Fantasy and how it met expectations, I’ll give you a comparison between two of our biggest universe at the onsets. Lord of the Rings took six months to deliver $200,000,000 of revenue.
Final Fantasy took one day. And we left demand on the table. So we couldn’t produce enough. I think we increased production runs on it four times pre release. It was substantially, by many, many very high double digit percentages, ahead of any other production run we’ve ever done.
And we left the market wanting more. And our expectation is there’s going to be a nice long tail of backlist for the product. Likewise, we’re still selling Lord of the Rings product today. So, even though we hit $200,000,000 in December ’2 for Lord of the Rings, We sold a substantial percentage of that in the several years following. We expect Final Fantasy to be no different.
It’s partially what’s powering our backlist, which already in five and a half months in the year did more than we’ve ever done in any year prior. So, I think that’s a little bit on what our bullishness is on Final Fantasy. What drove success for it? I think it’s a couple of things. I think first and foremost, it’s finding the right IPs that are great adjacencies to what Magic fans might appeal to or what Magic might appeal to another fan base.
Lord of the Rings was fantastic because it’s kind of the granddaddy of fantasy. It invented the genre, major books, major movies, major animation and games. Final Fantasy, I think, is almost as strong as Lord of the Rings in terms of IP strength, if not stronger in some regions. I think it has stronger cross regional appeal, and it has probably more of a sweet spot in gaming than Lord of the Rings has, because it was kind of born from gaming. So, I think potentially the overlap of fan bases was stronger than you might have even seen for something like Lord of the Rings.
In a follow-up question, Cox also noted that he feels "pretty good" about future collaborations and first-party sets coming next year "in terms of being Final Fantasy like in terms of the types of players, the size of community, and the adjacencies we have."
That last remark bodes well for fans of the Final Fantasy set. We just saw a Sonic: The Hedgehog Secret Lair crossover debut, and already know about Spider-Man and Avatar: The Last Airbender themed sets in September and November, respectively, so with success like this, more crossovers are likely to make sense to the folks at Hasbro. In the meantime, at least this means Hasbro will keep the Final Fantasy cards stocked for a good while, for those who haven't been able to get their hands on them yet.
Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.
Continue reading...