Magic: The Gathering just posted the best year in its three-decade history, generating $1.72 billion in 2025 revenue — a 59% jump that made the card game Hasbro’s single most important profit engine. Even more strikingly, as noted over the weekend by The Wall Street Journal‘s Natasha Khan, the surge in Magic cards is exactly inversely proportional to an equal plunge in doll sales.
The obvious read is generational: millennials, stereotyped for years as a cohort that refuses to grow up, pouring disposable income into a game they picked up as teenagers. The real story is structural. The money that they should have been spending on dolls for their kids are going to games for them to play with their friends instead — because parenthood, even adult life itself, is delayed in the 2020s economy.
