Business

Hasbro’s best toy is a card game

Hasbro beat estimates with $2.90 a share as Magic: The Gathering revenue rose 34%, while toys grew 4% and tariff refunds padded the quarter.

Published

4 hours ago

October 21, 2026

Massih Shahbazi

Board game pieces and dice on a wooden table, in black and white, beside the headline The card game carrying Hasbro

The most profitable thing Hasbro sold this summer wasn’t a toy you’d find under a tree. It was a stack of cardboard rectangles with wizards printed on them.

Hasbro reported third-quarter revenue of $1.595 billion on Tuesday, Oct. 20, up 15% from a year earlier, and adjusted earnings of $2.90 a share, up from $1.68, according to the company’s results release filed with the SEC. Analysts had expected about $1.86 a share on revenue of roughly $1.48 billion, TradingView reported. The stock jumped 11.2%, according to Zacks on Yahoo Finance.

I went through the release segment by segment, because the headline number hides a split personality. One half of Hasbro is growing like a tech company. The other half is a toy business.

Magic did the heavy lifting

The Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming segment brought in $747.2 million, up 31%, the release said. Inside that, Magic: The Gathering alone rose 34% to $616.1 million. That’s one card game producing well over a third of the entire company’s quarterly revenue.

Magic is more than 30 years old, and it keeps finding new ways to sell. Collectors buy sealed product, players buy decks, and licensed sets tied to outside franchises pull in fans who might never have touched the game before. For Hasbro, the appeal is the margin. The Wizards segment earned about $367 million in operating profit in the quarter, according to the company’s SEC exhibit, which is roughly 49 cents of profit on every dollar of sales.

The digital side was quieter. Digital and licensed gaming grew 3%, according to TradingView, and the mobile hit Monopoly Go! contributed $41 million in the quarter. Hasbro also took a $56 million impairment related to digital games this year, the release said, a reminder that not every screen bet pays off.

The toy half

Consumer Products, the segment that covers toys and games on store shelves, had revenue of $827.9 million, up 4%. That’s still the bigger segment by sales, but it’s growing at a fraction of Magic’s pace.

Hasbro kept its full-year consumer products revenue guidance at 1% to 3% growth, TradingView reported, while saying it expects better margins there. Translation: the company isn’t promising shoppers will buy a lot more Nerf blasters and Play-Doh this holiday season. It’s promising to make more money on each one.

Entertainment, the smallest piece, brought in $20.2 million, up 9%.

Read the footnote on tariffs

The quarter includes about $55 million in tariff refunds, the release said: $48 million in Consumer Products and $7 million in Wizards and Digital Gaming. That’s roughly a tenth of the $541.2 million in adjusted operating profit, which rose 52%.

Those refunds relate to previously paid IEEPA tariffs, and the release warns they could be delayed, reduced or never received. In other words, part of this quarter’s profit came from the government handing money back, not from selling more product. Investors cheering the beat should know that piece won’t repeat on its own.

Strip it out and Hasbro still beat estimates comfortably. But the margin story is a little less heroic than the raw number suggests.

What management raised

Hasbro now expects full-year revenue to grow 7% to 9% in constant currency, up from 5% to 7%, according to the release. It raised its adjusted operating margin forecast to 27% to 28%, from 25% to 26%, and lifted adjusted EBITDA guidance to $1.575 billion to $1.625 billion. It also doubled its share repurchase target for the year, though the release didn’t give a new dollar figure.

“Inspiring a lifetime of play is our superpower, and this quarter showed what it can do,” CEO Chris Cocks said in the release. Chief financial officer Gina Goetter credited “the power of Hasbro’s brand portfolio paired with strong execution.”

The company returned $206 million to shareholders in the quarter through dividends and buybacks, cut debt by $79 million and declared a $0.70 dividend payable Dec. 2.

From the kitchen table

For most families, Hasbro means Monopoly on a rainy day and a toy aisle in December. The numbers say the company’s future is being decided somewhere else: at game stores on Friday nights, where Magic players open booster packs hoping for a rare card, and in mobile apps where Monopoly is a dice-rolling habit rather than a board.

That shift has a cost for the kind of customer who isn’t a hobbyist. When a company’s growth depends on collectors who will pay for scarcity, the pressure is to release more sets, more premium editions and more chase cards. The more a business leans on that, the stronger the temptation to keep the releases coming. A 34% jump is not an argument for slowing down.

What we don’t know

The release doesn’t say how much of Magic’s growth came from one or two blockbuster sets versus steady demand. A single licensed release can make a quarter and leave a hole the next year. Hasbro also didn’t spell out the new buyback amount, and the tariff refund risk is real enough that the company flagged it in writing.

The toy business, meanwhile, heads into the holidays with guidance that barely moves. That’s the season when Consumer Products is supposed to shine.

So Hasbro walks into December as a card company that also sells toys. The question for next year is whether the wizards can keep paying for the plastic.