In late July 2026, two articles published just one day apart offered two very different readings of the same phenomenon.

The first, published by The Wall Street Journal under the title The Future of the Toy Industry Isn’t Toys. It’s Magic, examines the success of Magic: The Gathering from a business perspective. Magic has gone from a relatively niche hobby associated with specialist stores and gaming clubs to becoming Hasbro’s most important brand.

The following day, Fortune took those figures and turned them into a much broader theory. In What Magic: The Gathering’s record year reveals about America’s stalled adulthood economy, Nick Lichtenberg argues that Magic’s success is part of a wider economic and generational shift: many adults have not simply chosen to continue living like teenagers, but have watched the traditional paths into adulthood become increasingly inaccessible.

One article explains what is happening with Magic and Hasbro. The other tries to explain what that success says about the society buying the cards.

Magic, Hasbro’s main growth engine

The figures presented by The Wall Street Journal are difficult to ignore.

Magic generated approximately $1.72 billion in 2025, the best result in its history and a 59% increase over the previous year. Hasbro’s annual financial results attribute this growth to Universes Beyond sets, the back catalog, and Secret Lair.

The Wizards of the Coast and Digital Gaming segment increased its revenue by 45% that year and achieved more than $1 billion in operating profit, with a 46% margin. In other words, Magic is not only Hasbro’s fastest-growing brand: it is also an extraordinarily profitable part of the company.

The growth does not appear to have stopped. During the second quarter of 2026, Magic surpassed $500 million in quarterly revenue for the first time. According to Hasbro’s financial results, it generated $545.3 million during the quarter and more than $1 billion in the first six months of the year. Sets such as  Marvel Super Heroes (MSH) and  Secrets of Strixhaven (SOS) helped maintain that momentum.

The contrast with traditional toy categories is striking. According to Circana data cited by The Wall Street Journal, between 2021 and 2025:

  • doll sales fell by 36%;
  • infant and preschool toy sales fell by 15%;
  • games and puzzles, the category in which Magic is counted, grew by 36%.

Falling birth rates and the shift of children’s attention toward video games, mobile devices, and digital entertainment are reducing the traditional toy market. Adults, by contrast, have more spending power, can buy throughout the year, and are more likely to make repeat purchases.

Magic is almost the perfect product for this new market. It combines gameplay, collecting, competition, community, and a constant flow of new releases. Universes Beyond adds the appeal of franchises such as The Lord of the Rings, Final Fantasy, Marvel, and Avatar: The Last Airbender, which can attract people who might never otherwise have entered a card shop.

From The Wall Street Journal’s perspective, then, the future of the toy industry does not necessarily depend on selling more toys to children. It may depend on selling games, collectibles, and recurring experiences to adults.

Fortune’s theory: adulthood on hold

Fortune starts with the same data but makes a broader interpretive leap.

The most superficial explanation would be that millennials do not want to grow up and would rather spend their money on cards, LEGO, video games, and nostalgic movies. Lichtenberg proposes almost the opposite: this may not be a generation voluntarily rejecting adulthood, but one for whom the economy has made adulthood much harder to access.

Homeownership, marriage, children, and stable employment still function culturally as symbols of maturity. But all of them require far more capital and security than buying a Commander deck, a few booster packs, or a collector booster box.

Fortune supports this theory with a new way of measuring homeownership developed by the Federal Reserve Bank of Minneapolis.

The conventional US homeownership rate, at around 65%, measures the percentage of occupied homes owned by someone living in them. It does not measure how many individual adults are actually homeowners. The new metric, known as the homeowners-to-population ratio or HPOP, counts adults who personally own the home in which they live.

By this measure, only 53% of American adults are homeowners. Among people under 35, the difference is even more striking: the conventional measure puts the figure at 37%, while HPOP reduces it to 22%.

Many young adults live in an owner-occupied home, but the owner is a parent or partner. The traditional statistic effectively hides them inside a homeowner household even though they hold no share of that property.

Fortune also notes that 25.2 million Americans under the age of 35 were living with their parents in 2025. Roughly 70% of them were employed. This is not simply a population avoiding work or responsibility, but people with an income who are still unable to overcome the cost of housing.

This situation has also divided millennials themselves into two groups. Older millennials, especially those who were able to buy a home before the price increases of recent years, have accumulated wealth through rising property values. Younger millennials continue to pay high rents, have more difficulty saving for a deposit, and often carry student debt.

According to Fortune’s theory, Magic fits into the space left by this delayed adulthood. You cannot buy a home for $300, but you can buy a deck, a collection, or a shared experience with friends. Cards provide an affordable form of ownership, identity, and belonging.

A compelling connection, but not a proven one

Fortune’s interpretation is interesting, but we should be careful not to confuse correlation with causation.

To begin with, the figures being compared are not directly equivalent. Magic grew by 59% between 2024 and 2025, while the 36% decline in doll sales covers the entire period from 2021 to 2025. Presenting the two as perfectly opposing trends creates an effective journalistic image, but it does not prove that money once spent on dolls is now being spent on cards.

We also do not know what proportion of Magic’s audience consists of millennials without children or without homes. The game has players from several generations, and Universes Beyond is widening that audience even further. Many players have children, a mortgage, and a perfectly conventional life. Others began playing recently and feel no nostalgia for the game’s earliest editions.

Moreover, money spent on Magic probably competes more directly with other forms of leisure—video games, cinema, restaurants, travel, or other collectibles—than with buying a home. Giving up booster packs would hardly be enough to save the deposit required in today’s housing market.

Fortune’s theory works better as a cultural portrait than as a proven economic explanation. Magic is not necessarily a consequence of the housing crisis, but its success fits very well within an economy in which major life investments are difficult while smaller purchases that provide satisfaction, community, and identity remain accessible.

The “kidult” economy

Magic is not an isolated case.

The industry commonly uses the term kidult, a blend of kid and adult, to describe teenagers and adults who buy toys, games, or collectibles for themselves.

According to Circana, the European market for toys purchased by people over the age of 12 reached €4.5 billion in 2023, accounting for 28.5% of total sales across Europe’s five largest markets. Adults were the fastest-growing group.

The over-12 category also includes teenagers, so not all of these sales can be attributed strictly to adults. Even so, the trend is clear. Board games, LEGO, figures, plush toys, trading cards, and products based on popular franchises have become a structural part of the market.

In 2024, licensed toys grew by 8% and represented 34% of the global market tracked by Circana. Products based on Pokémon, Marvel, Star Wars, and other familiar franchises outperformed many entirely new products. Collectible sales also reached record levels, driven in part by trading card games.

The trend accelerated in 2025. According to Circana’s global figures reported by the Toy Association, toy sales grew by 7%, games and puzzles by 30%, and collectibles by 32%. Almost 40% of European consumers said they had bought a toy for themselves or another adult.

This helps explain why so many companies revive older franchises, produce premium versions of children’s products, and design directly for adult collectors. Nostalgia offers familiar brands, existing communities, and customers who already have an emotional relationship with the product before it reaches the shelves.

Universes Beyond is a particularly sophisticated version of this strategy: it combines Magic’s mechanical and collectible depth with memories, characters, and worlds that players already love.

Is it really infantilization?

This shift has fueled a cultural debate that goes back many years.

Some researchers have treated adults’ consumption of products associated with childhood as evidence that the boundaries between stages of life are dissolving. In 2013, Keith Hayward described this as life stage dissolution: advertising and popular culture stop assigning particular tastes to particular ages and instead promote permanent youthfulness.

Jacopo Bernardini developed a similar argument in The Infantilization of the Postmodern Adult and the Figure of Kidult. In his interpretation, consumer culture promotes a conscious form of immaturity: the pursuit of immediate satisfaction, the avoidance of responsibility, and youth transformed into a permanent ideal.

These theories identify something real. Companies exploit nostalgia and encourage adults to consume products connected to their childhoods. Franchises do not merely sell stories or objects; they sell the possibility of reconnecting with a time perceived as simpler and safer.

But the concept of infantilization can also be too easy.

Buying cards, watching animation, or building a LEGO set tells us very little about someone’s capacity to work, care for others, make decisions, or accept the consequences of their actions. Equating taste with maturity requires an extremely narrow definition of how an adult should behave.

Psychological research on nostalgia presents a more complex picture. Experiments have found that remembering the past positively can temporarily strengthen self-esteem, a sense of meaning, and connection with others. However, studies of nostalgia in everyday life also show that it often appears during periods of sadness, loneliness, or dissatisfaction and does not always improve later well-being.

Nostalgia is not necessarily an illness or a cure. It can be comfort, community, escape, and a commercial opportunity all at once.

Similarly, research into adult playfulness connects the ability to play and reinterpret situations in a playful way with certain approaches to coping with stress. Adult play can be creative, social, and intellectually demanding. In Magic’s case, it can also involve strategy, learning, competition, and relationships maintained over many years.

Playing is not necessarily a refusal to grow up.

So what does Magic’s success tell us?

Probably a little of both.

The Wall Street Journal is right to present Magic as an ideal business model for an industry that can no longer depend exclusively on children. Hasbro has found an adult audience willing to spend repeatedly, interested in collecting, and emotionally connected to numerous franchises.

Fortune also identifies a genuine transformation. Traditional milestones of adulthood are arriving later, particularly for younger adults who have not benefited from rising property values. When homeownership is out of reach, smaller and more affordable forms of ownership, community, and identity become more important.

But saying that adults play because they cannot buy a home would be too simplistic. Saying that playing is proof of immaturity would be even less convincing.

Perhaps the main change is not that adults have become infantilized, but that play is no longer reserved for children. Companies have noticed this and are exploiting it commercially, but that does not invalidate the value these hobbies can hold for the people who take part in them.

Maturity does not necessarily mean abandoning the things that entertained us as children. Perhaps it means consciously deciding which ones we want to keep, how much we are willing to spend on them, and what place they should occupy in our adult lives.