Magic: The Gathering just had its most financially successful year yet, Hasbro has announced. And it's largely thanks to its collaborations with other brands, via its Universes Beyond and Secret Lair releases.

In its earnings call today, Hasbro revealed that MTG revenue was up 59% year-over-year, in no small part thanks to the Avatar: The Last Airbender set last year, which is now the third highest-selling set in Magic history after Final Fantasy and Lord of the Rings. Other Universes Beyond sets, as well as Secret Lair, also had a hand in the success.

That 59% is a huge increase, and one that is responsible for Hasbro's overall numbers looking good. The company overall was up 14% year-over-year, almost entirely driven by 45% growth in the Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming segment (Monopoly Go! also helped a little). Its other segments, Consumer Products and Entertainment, both saw declines of 4% each.

The revenue-raising capabilities of Universes Beyond and Secret Lair are a helpful look for Hasbro's C-suite, which has found itself the target of a shareholder lawsuit on the very subject recently. The lawsuit alleges that Hasbro has mismanaged Magic: The Gathering by overprinting sets of cards, specifically Universes Beyond and Secret Lair, thereby devaluing existing cards. The complaint itself contains some pretty sharp accusations that the company's top brass have been holding such sets in reserve to deploy whenever the rest of the company is struggling.

In response, Hasbro has stated that such claims have "no merit," and has recently moved to dismiss a similar lawsuit with very similar accusations filed in 2024 by the West Palm Beach Firefighters' Pension Fund and City of Miami General Employees & Sanitation Employees' Retirement Trust, on the basis that the complaint has been amended so significantly since it was originally filed that it is no longer related to the original issue.

Hasbro reached out to share the following updated statement on these lawsuits as pertains to its earnings today:

As we shared when you covered the matter in January, these claims have no merit. Our strategic plan for Magic was implemented, and the results underscore the strength of that strategy. As further reflected in our earnings results released this morning, Magic: The Gathering just completed its most successful year ever.

Magic: The Gathering's next set will be a Universes Beyond set for Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, complete with commander deck, and will release on March 6.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Wizards of the Coast has confirmed that it doesn't "currently" have plans to visit any magical schools besides its own Strixhaven in future sets, suggesting that a Harry Potter collaboration isn't in the cards for the moment.

This comes from a Reddit post from the official WOTC_CommunityTeam Reddit account in response to a thread on the Magic: The Gathering subreddit asking if WOTC might "touch the fire that is [Harry Potter]" in the future. The post was sparked by a slide from this morning's Hasbro earnings call, where the WOTC parent company talked about expanding its partnerships on IP such as Harry Potter, KPop Demon Hunters, Street Fighter, and Voltron.

In response, WOTC_CommunityTeam wrote, "The Magic Multiverse has its own school of Magic at Strixhaven with plenty of secrets still to explore. Our Universes Beyond roadmap currently doesn't have us visiting any others."

The reply does say "currently," meaning that a future Harry Potter collaboration may not be fully off the table for the future. The company has been printing more and more of its "Universes Beyond" collaborative sets in recent years (so many, it's now the subject of a lawsuit) as well as smaller "Secret Lair" sets for other collaborations. However, WOTC does plan these sets out pretty far in advance, often around three years or even as many as five in the case of Final Fantasy. That means we're unlikely to see Harry Potter make an appearance for at least a few years, if at all.

Widely popular as Harry Potter is, the post and subsequent community discussion on Reddit is overwhelmingly against Harry Potter being introduced into Magic due to author and creator J.K. Rowling's openly professed transphobic beliefs, as well as her large donations to anti-trans causes. In contrast, a fundraiser for Trans Lifeline run by popular Magic content channel Tolarian Community College just amassed over $600k in donations over three days. The game itself introduced its first canonically trans character, Alesha, Who Smiles at Death, way back in 2015 in a short story, and has since turned her into a pretty solid Commander card.

Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. Got a story tip? Send it to rvalentine@ign.com.

Fans of Stardew Valley are eager to get married... again. To whom? They don't know. But they're hoping their bride/groom will be a couple of individuals in particular.

To understand why, take a look back at our own interview with ConcernedApe, where he exclusively revealed to us that the next update, 1.7, would include two new marriageable characters. He wouldn't say who they were, and we don't even know if these will be brand new characters or existing characters that suddenly become available. While ConcernedApe will let us know later this month on the game's 10th anniversary, that hasn't stopped people from wildly speculating who it'll be, and there are a few theories reigning supreme right now.

Logically, we can put together that we will likely get both a man and a woman, as all the other candidates have opposite-gender pairings for events like the Flower Dance. To find out who the most popular people in the game for romance were, Reddit user JeffTheKillerFa put together a poll for fans to see who came out on top. They've since posted the results, showing Sandy coming out waaay ahead of the other single women (Marnie was in second place), and the Wizard winning the vote for single men.

But interestingly, fans have latched onto another possibility that we could see in 1.7: breaking up an existing couple. The poll also asked fans who of the currently married individuals in the valley they wanted to steal. Robin was the clear winner, with players clearly not losing any sleep over breaking her up with Demetrius. That's even something ConcernedApe has discussed as a possibility before! But Caroline (currently married to general store owner Pierre) was also a favorite.

As a bit of a gag, the poll also included a section for "non-giftable" characters, or individuals who you can't currently form even a friendship with due to a lack of ability to give gifts and limited dialogue options. Marlon of the Adventurer's Guild was a pretty obvious winner here, followed by Gunther from the museum. And in a final poll, it seems like people don't necessarily want to marry the Dwarf, but like Krobus, they wish she would move in as a roommate.

These poll results do seem to line up roughly with comments posted all over the community since our interview about who people want to see. However, there's one character that got some attention on socials who wasn't in the poll at all: