Magic the Gathering owner Hasbro $HAS earnings release Thursday. Expecting collabs larger than Final Fantasy and strong growth
Hasbro is basically 2 companies: Toys (yuck), and Magic the Gathering that is basically an actual monetary printer.
They drive growth several ways on the card side. Bring in new players by broadening the player base appeal through outside property collaborations, and increase the product offerings so that whales spend more and more money on each set chasing special art versions of cards, and secret lair drops. Both of these strategy buttons are being smashed repeatedly by management and the growth of the game is evident, and I don't see any sign they will pull back on these directions.
The last 2 years worth of sets has really shown WotC is capable of signing and designing outside properties to be put into magic as the Universe Beyond sets. Final Fantasy, Avatar the last Airbender, and even widely hated set Spiderman are Top 1, ~4th, and ~10th best selling sets of all time respectively. Distributors have to keep putting in maximum orders even through hated sets to get access to the big sets. There's several potentially huge sets still coming this year sales wise: Marvel Superheroes, The Hobbit, and Star Trek in the outside universe group can all do numbers. I'm personally going to be buying a lot of Star Trek.
Even their in-universe sets of late have been wildly popular. Edge of Eternities, Lorwyn Eclipsed, and now Secrets of Strixhaven are doing huge events and prereleases, and the product is selling at high volumes on the big ecommerce sites.
WotC is also balancing their sales better between Amazon/big-box and local game stores (LGSs). Previous attempts saw Amazon/Big-box really negatively affect LGSs since product was being dumped online, and LGSs couldn't sell their in-store items at nearly the cost that Hasbro was directly selling to Amazon. They've since appeared to strike a safer balance so that LGS demand is still more than supply, and selling through Amazon still gets them more margin (Hasbro effectively captures much more profit selling direct).
What does this mean for Hasbro revenue going forward? The toy business almost doesn't matter at this point, focus on MTG, focus on tie-ins.
Mark Rosewater, noted MTG subreddit villain, is also on record saying they've already locked up a larger collaboration than Final Fantasy. Speculate away, but I think it's going to be something like World of Warcraft of Star Wars.
Postions: Loads of Jun 100Cs 105Cs, Sept 110Cs, Jan 110Cs, Mar 110Cs 115Cs. Probably adding more today since it's looking ttechnically appealing.