Like many other industry members, I arrived in Chicago on Thursday, a day early for MagicCon, looking to catch up with old friends and make new ones on my quest to discover a new vision for Hipsters of the Coast. Here’s a quick summary of what my weekend was like:
- On Thursday evening I injured my right foot walking through ice to get from Chinatown to Reggie’s in time for Lobby Khan.
- On Friday I made the mistake of eating both lunch and dinner at the convention center and had what is politely referred to as an “upset tummy.”
- On Saturday I broke a folding chair sitting down for my first Commander game of the day. My buttocks was bruised for nearly a week.
- On Sunday I twisted something in my back/hip area trying to sleep on what my hotel considered a “bed” but is more accurately a pile of mush.
At no point in the 4.5 days I spent in Chicago did I have enough sleep to function like a human adult (and this is from someone with two small kids so I already don’t get enough sleep). And, in all honesty, I would do it all again in a heartbeat for the amazing experience that was MagicCon Chicago 2025.
Mox Jasper by Steven Belledin
I want to start this recap by mostly talking about the vibe of the event, specifically juxtaposed with the vibe that one may normally get from the community either at a small event such as Friday Night Magic or from the community on social media platforms like Bluesky. After we talk vibe I’m going to talk a bit about the logistics of the event because I think it’s critical to understand where MagicCon is right now in the realm of conventions and where it could be heading as it pertains to Chicago specifically and the larger event tour globally. Lastly, we’re going to talk about the 283,000 sq ft that make up Hall E in the Lakeside Center at McCormick Place in Chicago and why I hope, nay pray, that Wizards of the Coast never uses it again.
Vibe Check
Jace, the Living Guildpact by Chase Stone
(Am I doing this right? Is this what a vibe check is?) MagicCon was awesome! MagicCon was great! MagicCon drove an estimated 15 to 17,000 Magic (and Dungeons and Dragons) fans to travel to one of the coldest cities in the world during the coldest time of year so we could all gather to celebrate the game and community we hold so dear to our hearts. I don’t think I’ve even been to a more positive Magic event, and possibly never a more positive gaming event, at least not since PAX East 2012 when Return to Ravnica was announced.
In fact, I would daresay that the vibe around Magic right now is probably more positive than its ever been. Think about how many things are currently going right for Wizards of the Coast.
- Just held the largest Magic convention in the history of the game
- The Standard format is being regarded in positive terms
- Universes Beyond are selling like hotcakes with Final Fantasy and Spider-Man coming this year
- Secret Lairs are being released at a reasonable pace, bringing in great art and bonus revenue
- Arena is getting better with new features like Achievements and the box-prize events
It hasn’t been all sunshine and rainbows for Magic since the Covid 19 pandemic. Wizards really had a hard time dealing with the shutting down of organized play, and obviously the inability to socialize had long-lasting effects on many local game stores, the lifeblood of our community. But the other side of the coin was that streaming had a large boom and the secondary market inflated massively as more people looked to Magic (and to a lesser extent Dungeons and Dragons) as a thing to do at home while stuck in isolation.
But the low point probably came around the announcement of the Magic 30th Anniversary Edition reprinting of the original Alpha edition of Magic. I don’t know why, and I’ll probably never know why, Wizards thought that a price point of $1,000 was appropriate for a collectors product. To this day I don’t think I’ve actually seen anyone using a Magic 30 version of a card in any Commander deck or Cube. I’m sure there are folks who use them casually for kitchen table play, and while a 30th Anniversary Black Lotus is only worth about 25% of an Unlimited Black Lotus, that’s still over $2,000.
Magic’s 30th Anniversary Edition Is Not For You by Tolarian Community College
Either way, the negative vibes continued through what I’d call the extreme burnout phase of Secret Lairs where we had more than one SLD product released every week in 2022. In total I think the number of Secret Lair drops that year nearly hit 100. Wizards decided they wanted to find the actual limit to how many annual product drops the community could sustain and they certainly found it. Since then that number has come back down to ~50 in both 2023 and 2024. And the vibes have improved!
As Wizards took their foot off the gas, 2023 brought the new MagicCon series with events in Philadelphia, Minneapolis, Barcelona and Las Vegas. The series continued in 2024 with events in Chicago, Amsterdam, and Las Vegas. The Pro Tour, which returned to be called the Pro Tour instead of whatever Mythic Championships were supposed to be (a topic for another day) have been a component of the MagicCon experience, but have absolutely been relegated to the sidelines of the event.
Matt Nass wins Pro Tour Aetherdrift, from magic.gg.
And that brings us (skipping several beats) to MagicCon Chicago 2025. As I said earlier, 13 years ago I sat in the back of a conference room in Boston at PAX East as I watched the Magic Panel that mostly focused on the upcoming Avacyn Restored expansion but also announced that the fall block would be Return to Ravnica (the block during which I began my writing career). Up until this past weekend I had not experienced the same level of energy until I sat in the theater for the Tarkir Dragonstorm preview panel.
If you want, you can watch a video of the 2012 panel here.
Preview panels have come a long way. In an hour in Chicago the team from Wizards rolled through a brief history of Tarkir, showed off a slew of new cards from the set, then dove into a bunch of artwork from Edge of Eternities (releasing later this year) and finally capped things off with the announcement of the Avatar: the Last Airbender Universes Beyond set which will round out 2025’s release calendar. It seems clear that Wizards has learned how to connect to their audience, and while we all have varying opinions on Universes Beyond products in general, I don’t think anyone can argue that they’re produced and marketed much better today than they were back when Walking Dead happened.
Nothing last forever, or so they say. And certainly the good vibes Wizards has achieved of late can’t last forever, but surely they can last a bit longer, right?
Have We Reached the Top?
“I wish there was a way to know you’re in the good old days before you’ve actually left them.” Andy Bernard’s oft-quoted line from The Office feels like it may be strangely appropriate to Magic right now. Things are really good, if not great, as we transition from Foundations/Aetherdrift/Chicago into the Tarkir/Final Fantasy/Las Vegas chapter of 2025 and then move on to the Edge of Eternities/Spider-Man/Atlanta/Avatar chapter to close out the year.
Stiltzkin, Moogle Merchant, by Yumeko
I expect things to improve between now and Las Vegas and I think a lot of that will rest on Tarkir and Final Fantasy. Tarkir is going to be fun because multi-color sets are a lot of fun. They create a lot of interesting interactions, give players a lot of flexibility in deck building, and given the current Standard metagame it will likely continue to help support a diverse and flexible environment, just with more dragons. Final Fantasy should also be a hit because its an incredibly popular property and people will eat it up just for the experience of Final Fantasy. And, of course, the annual Las Vegas event will be the industry event it has been for a decade now.
But I have a lot of trepidation about the journey from Las Vegas to Atlanta and here are a few reasons why (because I’m apparently in the mood for bullet-point lists this week):
- Having one premium priced Standard-legal product this year would have probably been fine in the form of Final Fantasy. Having two of them by adding Spider-Man to the calendar is certainly going to push budgets tight. Throwing a third one at the end of the year with Avatar is going to be a problem.
- Building off of that, the American economy is almost certainly heading towards a major recession. Even the governing party doesn’t seem to be denying this fact with many accepting a “things will get worse before they get better” mentality, or just blaming it on the previous administration. Either way, politicians and economists all seem to agree that the economy is going to be worse later this year.
- There’s no events outside of the United States this year which is unfortunate timing for Wizards of the Coast because that decision lines up with the government deciding that now is a good time for the United States to no longer be friends with their traditional European allies. While I don’t expect WotC to be able to predict the ebb and flow of political movements, the decision to double-down on an America-centric marketing program was never going to go over great, but will almost certainly now be given more scrutiny when foreign consumers (whose economies will likely be dragged down by America’s) decide what to spend money on.
- Content creation has entered a golden age of sorts in the past few years, but as the economy turns south, more creators will be forced to give up time they spend creating to find work that pays better. Content creation still pays very poorly, but the US economy has been surprisingly resilient the past few years, and social programs to help people, such as the Biden administration’s decision to forgive certain federal student loan debt, has helped many. As that changes, I expect content creators to get hit hard, which will be bad for the community.
So while the top is soon to come, I expect we’re going to rebound before the year is out. And while a lot of this is completely out of Wizards of the Coast’s control, and may or may not have been predictable at the time the decision was made, they will have to handle the coming economic and geopolitical storms that are currently on the horizon.
Horizon Canopy by Alayna Danner
But, Magic made it through the pandemic, and I expect Wizards to remain resilient through the upcoming recession. But I don’t think the community will come out the other side completely unscathed. MagicCon Chicago will hopefully remain a beacon of light and hope as we enter a soon to be very dark time.
Maybe I’m wrong though. Don’t quote me. If I’m wrong I’ll owe you a drink in Chicago next year.
Let’s Talk About Hall E
Everything I just said about Chicago being a beacon of light and hope for the community? Please exclude McCormick Place Lakeside Center Level 2 Hall E from those memories. Just over 11 years ago, Matt Jones wrote about the abysmal conditions he experienced while at a Pro Tour Qualifer event at a game shop in Brooklyn. I don’t think I’ve played in a more depressing space since the Kings Games basement until I spent an entire day at MagicCon Chicago in Hall E of the convention center playing Commander.
Over the weekend I heard many players describe the hall as a liminal space, as if it was a transitional place between two states of being. I would describe it as a cross between the never-ending aisles of a big box wholesale store like Costco, and an inescapable prison without so much as a window or even proper ventilation.
[Editor’s Note: I decided not to include any pictures of Hall E because this is a children’s game and there may be children reading this and we wouldn’t want to give them nightmares.]
Hall E was used for four main purposes through the weekend. In the front-left area (from the entrance) was the Prize Wall. The front-center was setup with a Pastimes booth (as they help organize the ticketed play area I guess they got the privilege of being here instead of upstairs). And in the front-right area was the “food court.” The rest of the are was play space, with the right third being reserved for the “Command Zone” and the left and center thirds being used for ticketed play events (both on-demand and single events).
I don’t think I can give you a coherent description of the space. Here are some random thoughts. Pillars went on forever. Everything had a greenish/yellow tinge. There was only one entrance/exit. The bathrooms were frigid. The “food court” had no ventilation and the smell of grease would fill the escalator shaft that connected the hall to the show floor above. The prize wall line felt like a limbo-space that existed nowhere and everywhere all at once.
Leaving Hall E could only be done through the main doors which exited to the shared lobby with the theater (this lobby was mostly used for on-demand Dungeons and Dragons play) or it could be done through escalators that went upstairs to the main show floor. Exiting either way felt like waking from a dream, or at least returning to reality after an excursion to some other plane of existence.
Last year, Wizards didn’t have Hall E available. They had ticketed play upstairs using a bunch of space that was this year dedicated to creators and family play. It was a good move to give more space to those events, which attract a lot of people to the event. But the cost of putting players in Hall E for the weekend was awful.
McCormick place has a lot of other spaces for conventions. While only the Lakeside Center has the theater space, I don’t think that was worth having to suffer through Hall E for the weekend. The North Building has skylights and a terrace floor overlooking the main convention hall. The West Building has a rooftop garden deck. The South Building has a proper food court.
I’m begging you Wizards, please pick a different building for MagicCon Chicago 2026 (but still at McCormick Place because this event is great and you’re all great and we love you so much).
Rich Stein (He/Him) is the President of Hipsters of the Coast. He has been playing Magic the Gathering since Ice Age and has been writing about it since Return to Ravnica. His competitive resume consists of this one time he finished in the top 16 of an SCG Open, and the time he beat Darwin Kastle at a Time Spiral Sealed Grand Prix by using Avalanche Riders. Rich has never made day two of a Grand Prix, but he has gone 7-0 in the MTG Arena Chromatic Cube.