Leonard Williams, the 6'5", 302-pound defensive lineman who just won Super Bowl LX with the Seattle Seahawks, has an entire room in his Florida house dedicated to Magic: The Gathering. His collection is worth over $1 million. He plays competitive Elder Dragon Highlander on SpellTable and owns a one-of-100 serialized Lord of the Rings card he bought for $13,000.
Amber Glenn, the figure skater who won gold in the team event at the 2026 Winter Olympics in Italy, ripped open a Lorwyn Eclipsed collector booster pack during the closing ceremony on live television. She pulled a foil Bloom Tender. She plays Commander at local game stores. Her dog is named after Ukkima, Stalking Shadow, a blue-black creature that can't be blocked.
In what universe is this a sentence? A Super Bowl champion and an Olympic gold medalist are both serious Magic players. And neither of them is hiding it.
The Stigma Is Dead
For decades, Magic: The Gathering was the thing you didn't talk about at school. You played it in basements and card shops. You didn't mention it in job interviews. You definitely didn't open booster packs on camera at the Olympics.
That wall has been coming down for years. Post Malone bought the one-of-one Lord of the Rings card for over $2 million. Steve Aoki collects. But Williams and Glenn hit different because they aren't celebrity hobbyists with infinite disposable income buying trophies. They're competitors at the highest levels of their sports who genuinely play the game. Williams tweaks his Magda deck between practices. Glenn teaches her skating teammate Alysa Liu how to play Commander. These are real players.
When Glenn told reporters "I go to local game stores and play, I know it's nerdy but it's my hobby and I enjoy it," that's the kind of casual honesty that moves culture.
Commander Changed Everything
Both Williams and Glenn play Commander. That's not a coincidence.
Commander is the format that turned Magic from a competitive grind into a social game. Four players, 100-card decks, one legendary creature leading each deck. Games last 45 minutes to two hours. You sit around a table and talk while you play. It's game night, not a tournament.
That shift is the single biggest reason Magic is having this moment. Commander opened the door for people who don't want to memorize meta decks or grind Friday Night Magic every week. It made the game accessible to anyone who just wants to hang out and play cards with friends. Wizards of the Coast knows it. Nearly half of the 100 most-built commanders in 2025 came from preconstructed decks designed for new players to pick up and play immediately.
The Numbers Are Absurd
Magic: The Gathering hit $1.72 billion in revenue in 2025. Up 59% year over year. That's roughly 37% of Hasbro's entire $4.7 billion in annual revenue coming from a single card game.
The Wizards of the Coast division cleared $2.2 billion total with over $1 billion in operating profit. A billion dollars in profit. From a game that debuted in 1993 at a gaming convention in Milwaukee.
At the high end, a CGC Pristine 10 Alpha Black Lotus sold for $3 million in a private sale. That's the most expensive Magic card ever. The broader market is fueled by Universes Beyond crossover sets. Avatar: The Last Airbender. Final Fantasy. These aren't gimmicks. The Final Fantasy set drove massive Commander deck building throughout 2025.
The Tension Underneath
Not everyone is celebrating. There's a real undercurrent of frustration among long-time players who feel like Wizards is printing too many products too fast. Secret Lairs, collector boosters, special editions, Universes Beyond, limited-time drops. The release calendar is relentless.
The argument from old-guard collectors is simple: when everything is premium, nothing is. And when new sets come out every few weeks, cards lose value faster because attention moves on. Hasbro expects "mid-single-digit revenue growth" for 2026. That's a slowdown from 59% to maybe 4%. The hypergrowth phase might be leveling off.
But here's the thing. The game survived 33 years of ups and downs. It survived the Reserved List wars, the Chronicles debacle, and the 2021 speculator bubble. A correction from 59% growth is not a crisis. It's a card game doing $1.7 billion a year. It'll be fine.
Why This Moment Matters
Williams' Super Bowl media week put his Magic hobby in front of every sports journalist in America. Glenn's closing ceremony pack-opening went viral across every social platform. These two moments, weeks apart, gave millions of people the same realization at the same time: oh, cool people play Magic.
That's the normalization event the hobby has been building toward. Not a celebrity buying a trophy card at auction. Not a Twitch streamer doing a sponsored opening. A champion athlete casually mentioning that she plays Commander at her local game store. A Super Bowl winner showing off his Zhulodok deck on TikTok.
Magic: The Gathering isn't having a moment because Hasbro spent marketing dollars. It's having a moment because the game is genuinely fun, Commander made it social, and the people who play it stopped being embarrassed about it.
The nerds won. They just happen to also be Super Bowl champions and Olympic gold medalists now.