‘Final Fantasy’ Cards Could Work Some ‘Magic’ for Hasbro This Year

As longtime gamers well know, the next “Final Fantasy” is never the FINAL “Final Fantasy.” That could be good news for Hasbro. 

The toy and game company, owner of the “Magic: The Gathering” line of trading and playing cards—it accounted for about $1 billion in sales last year—will later this year release a set of cards based on the long-running series of “Final Fantasy” video games. Early presales of those cards, executives said this week, appear strong. 

“Final Fantasy has the potential to be our biggest ‘Magic’ release yet,” Hasbro (HAS) CEO Chris Cocks said on a conference call Thursday, a transcript of which was made available by AlphaSense. 

The “Final Fantasy” games have been around since the 1980s, yielding a long list of titles across platforms and devices in which, broadly speaking, a group of young people gather up weapons, fight monsters and seek to save the world. 

The cards, meanwhile, are part of a strategy by Wizards of the Coast, the Hasbro division that runs “Magic,” to sell sets based on well-established outside intellectual property; another line in the works is based on Spider-Man.

When the company did something similar in 2023 with “Lord of the Rings” cards, the inclusion of a one-of-a-kind card set off a frenzied global search. (It ended when a collector in Canada found the card, then sold it for $2 million to Post Malone.) “Magic” sales fell slightly last year from a year earlier, the company said, in part due to the degree that the “Rings” set lifted 2023 sales.

Hasbro’s suggested retail prices for the “Final Fantasy” cards range from about $7 for a pack to $150 for a “Collector’s Edition Commander Deck.” Early preorders of the “Rings” cards, Cocks said Thursday, took a week to sell out. For “Final Fantasy,” he said, it took an hour. 

“We think Final Fantasy will do pretty well,” he said. “I don’t think you can necessarily quantify that absolutely, but there absolutely is a lot of demand.”