Tales of the success of Magic: the Gathering’s Final Fantasy set may sound greatly exaggerated, but they are not. It was the fastest-selling Magic expansion ever, to the point that distributors and retailers experienced significant product shortages.
To wit: A Final Fantasy collector booster currently sells for over $120 at tgcplayer.com, and a collector box goes for over $1,300. Those resale prices pale in comparison to the news that dropped some days ago from Hasbro’s Q2 financial results: Magic: the Gathering – Final Fantasy produced over $200 million in revenue in just one day, the owner of Wizards of the Coast said. The record was previously held by The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth set, which took six months to reach that number.
Magic’s Universes Beyond series, which combines the gameplay of the popular trading card game with famous properties, has been controversial from its onset, but no one can question its financial success. First introduced through Secret Lair drops and Commander-specific products, Universes Beyond fully bloomed in 2022 with The Lord of the Rings: Tales of Middle-earth, which was designed for Limited play and to be included in the Modern Constructed format. This set was widely considered to be MTG’s best-selling to date, with Hasbro CEO Chris Cox stating in 2023 that the $200 million in revenue over six months that the Lord of the Rings set brought was roughly double what other high-performing sets had generated in the past.
Cox mentioned LotR again in the 2025 investor Q&A during the earnings call. He said it’s easy to understand why a Lord of the Rings set performed so well, as “it’s kind of the granddaddy of fantasy. It invented the genre, major books, major movies, major animation and games.” The MTG set also nailed the tone of the original story and setting, not least thanks to its masterful art direction.
Magic: The Gathering—Final Fantasy blew that out of the water, earning in one day what The Lord of the Rings earned in six months. Cox made a great assessment of the success of the set when he said during the Q&A that “the overlap of fan bases was stronger.” Being a franchise born from gaming, Final Fantasy has more appeal to TCG players, but that cannot be the only explanation.
Image: Wizards of the Coast/Amazon
Clearly, for the success of a Universes Beyond set, it’s paramount to find “the right IPs that are great adjacencies to what Magic fans might appeal to or what Magic might appeal to another fan base,” as Cox said. However, part of that success, in Final Fantasy’s case, is also due to Wizards of the Coast fully committing to making a Universes Beyond set “good” in terms of creativity and mechanics. Just like with LotR, players can really “feel” the world of Final Fantasy when they look at, or play with, the cards from Final Fantasy. It was an absolute home run, no doubt, but it also set a pretty high bar for the upcoming Universes Beyond set, Marvel’s Spider-Man.
In theory, Spider-Man is a far more mainstream IP than Final Fantasy. Spider-Man is a pop culture icon, but that won’t necessarily translate into record-breaking sales for a Magic set. The overlap of fan bases seems a lot less likely here, as Spider-Man fans are not necessarily gamers, unlike Final Fantasy fans. It will be up to Wizards to deliver a product that is on the same level as Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy. (As a long-time Spidey fan, I’m ready to burn my hard-earned money on this, but only if it gives me the same feeling of stepping into a world I already love that the other two successful sets achieved.)
The Lord of the Rings is the labor of a single man, and Tolkien’s fingerprints are clearly visible in every page, scene, and character. The Final Fantasy games all have different settings and characters, but the franchise successfully managed to maintain a unifying style — and Magic enlisting iconic artist Yoshitaka Amano to design some of the Final Fantasy cards surely helped in selling that. Spider-Man, on the other hand, has been drawn by hundreds of artists; his words and its characters are the result of just as many writers. That feeling of recognition and rightfulness that led to the success of Lord of the Rings and Final Fantasy won’t necessarily be there when a Spidey fan looks at a card from Marvel’s Spider-Man.
Still, the set is just behind the corner, and with Wizards’ packed Magic: the Gathering release schedule — way too fast, if you ask me — spoilers will emerge soon. I hope that Marvel’s Spider-Man will be another success, but it’s going to be very hard to reach the incredible benchmark set by Magic: The Gathering—Final Fantasy.