2026 is going to be a very big year for Magic: The Gathering—a year with seven major sets releasing. It’s also going to be a fascinating one for the future of Magic, considering that a scant majority of those new sets will be part of the game’s wildly lucrative (and occasionally controversial) “Universes Beyond” licensed crossover line. But while Hasbro is celebrating the huge amount of money Magic is making for it at the moment, there’s a glimmer of hope for fans who fear the game’s future might go all in on crossovers.
This week Hasbro announced its financial reports for the fourth quarter, and all of 2025—and Magic is more important to the toymaker than ever before. According to CEO Chris Cocks (via Polygon), Magic accounted for $1.7 billion in profit last year, growing around 60% compared to 2024. This was in part due to the launch of not one, but two of the best-selling Magic sets of all time: Final Fantasy in the summer, and Avatar: The Last Airbender in winter, with the latter being the third best-selling Universes Beyond set ever, behind Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-Earth and Final Fantasy.
That might not sound like great news to the sect of fans miffed that Magic is getting increasingly taken over by licensed crossovers—especially as whenever Hasbro has announced a major license deal recently, it’s indicated that that deal will inevitably lead to some Magic cards (save for one: the company’s announcement this week that it had acquired the Harry Potter license; Wizard’s own community team released a prompt statement on social media to declare that there were no plans for a tie-in set in the face of preemptive backlash due to the franchise fueling J.K. Rowling’s ongoing persecution of trans people). In a year where Universes Beyond releases will outnumber sets based on original Magic storytelling, and with Magic now such a profit driver for Hasbro, it might seem like it’s almost certain that the game’s future is in increasingly splashier crossover sets.
That’s not necessarily the case, at least according to the financial data. While also celebrating the successes of last year’s Universes Beyond sets, Cocks also confirmed that last month’s Lorwyn Eclipsed set—a return to the beloved dual settings of Lorwyn and Shadowmoor from the 2008 block that introduced it—is the fastest-selling in-universe Magic set ever, even after just a few weeks on sale since its launch on January 23.
While we don’t have solid numbers on any of these rankings Cocks mentioned (especially how in-universe set sales compared to Universes Beyond sets), Lorwyn Eclipsed‘s success is a great thing, and suggests there’s more to its success than just being a well-received Magic set or because of a return to a beloved part of the game’s lore. It would seem, at least, the Universes Beyond collaborations are making new Magic fans, and those fans are being kept invested in the game beyond whatever original crossover intrigued them in the first place—which is what Universes Beyond should do, ideally, introducing casual audiences to the broader game and its myriad settings, and keeping them around to sustain a community outside of fairweather tie-ins.
That may not be a particularly grand saving grace for players who still don’t want Universe Beyond’s dominance to continue—for better or worse, these numbers show it’s clearly here to say. But it at least shows that original Magic, and the lifeblood of the game itself, isn’t being left behind by the game’s increased exposure.
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