Hasbro Allegedly Dumped 30th Anniversary MTG Sets in a Landfill

Earlier this week, Hasbro shareholders filed a lawsuit against the company for their alleged mismanagement of the Magic: The Gathering property. The complaint is 78 pages long, and generally accuses Hasbro and Wizards of the Coast of overproducing cards, diluting the market, and deliberate attempts to mislead investors. Some of their complaints you’ll have to see to believe. Let’s get into it.

Here’s something you don’t see alleged in a federal lawsuit every day. According to a shareholder complaint filed January 21 in Rhode Island, a former Hasbro employee reported seeing photographs of Magic: The Gathering 30th Anniversary Edition boxes dumped at a Texas landfill alongside older Magic products.

These weren’t just any Magic cards. These were the $999 30th Anniversary boxes containing non-tournament-legal reprints of Beta cards like Black Lotus that Hasbro claimed sold out in 30 minutes, and one of the most controversial MTG releases of the last few years.

According to the lawsuit, they didn’t sell out at all. The company allegedly pulled the plug on sales when they realized performance was weak, posted an “out of stock” message to save face, then literally threw the leftovers in the garbage.

The lawsuit includes testimony from six former employees, and their accounts paint a picture of systematic deception.

One VP who was actually in the “war room” during the November 2022 release said Wizards personnel, including then-president Cynthia Williams, had established a protocol before launch. If sales were “underwhelming,” they’d cut off the sale and post “out of stock” on the website. When it became clear the Anniversary Edition was bombing, that’s exactly what happened.

The lawsuit also alleges Hasbro has been running what former employees called “Project Parachute” since 2018. Here’s how it worked: whenever other Hasbro divisions were underperforming, executives would tell the Magic team to quickly print and release new sets worth $40 million to $80 million to plug the revenue hole.

According to a former VP cited in the complaint, Hasbro’s CEO at the time would tell Chris Cocks, then president of Wizards of the Coast, that the company needed $80 million to cover failing ventures. Cocks would then instruct his team to release new Magic sets on rushed timelines. One example: Commander Legends Battle for Baldur’s Gate was produced in about a year instead of the normal two-year timeline specifically to generate emergency revenue.

The strategy relied heavily on “Masters” sets containing reprinted cards because they were cheap and fast to produce. Before 2016, Hasbro released only two physical Masters sets total. Between 2016 and 2023, they released roughly double that number. By 2022, these emergency “parachute” sets accounted for 46% of all Magic releases.

Former employees confirmed this wasn’t some one-time thing. One stated flatly that “the Company was using its Parachute Strategy every year.” The whole segmentation strategy Hasbro kept telling investors about? According to the lawsuit, that was cover for printing whatever they needed to hit quarterly numbers.

Hasbro and Magic: The Gathering have been reporting remarkable profits for years, with the latter contributing up to 15% of the former’s revenue in 2021. If the claims in this lawsuit are true, it’s clear that these profits are largely propped up by corporate scheming.

Bank of America’s November 2022 report, which the lawsuit cites extensively, found that Magic sales nearly doubled during the pandemic and Hasbro just kept the printers running. Between 2019 and 2022, the number of Magic set releases increased roughly 150%. In 2022 alone, Wizards released a record 39 separate Magic sets.

But here’s the problem. While Wizards revenue was up 65% compared to 2019, consumer interest in Magic was only up 15% over the same period. The math doesn’t work unless you’re extracting way more money from the same players, which is exactly what Bank of America concluded. They found Hasbro was “overprinting Magic cards, which have propped up Hasbro’s recent results but are destroying the long-term value of the brand.”

The lawsuit validates everything resellers have been experiencing. When Hasbro floods the market with new sets every few weeks to hit quarterly targets, it destroys the secondary market. Sets that should appreciate sit because another special edition drops two weeks later. Individual card prices crater because nobody trusts scarcity anymore.

The complaint specifically mentions the Spider-Man Universes Beyond set selling poorly because the market was oversaturated with crossover products. Sound familiar? That’s been the pattern for years now. Hasbro announces a collaboration, collectors and resellers buy in hoping for scarcity, then Wizards announces three more collaborations the next month and values tank.

Right now, booster boxes from recent sets are sitting or dropping when they should be climbing. The market’s so flooded that identifying what will actually hold value has become nearly impossible. Former employees told the lawsuit that when the Bank of America report dropped in November 2022 saying Hasbro was killing the brand, employees from line staff to directors all agreed BofA was right. They’d known about the overprinting for years.

If you’re holding sealed product from recent sets hoping it appreciates, you might want to reconsider. The market’s been flooded for years and this lawsuit confirms it was deliberate. Until Hasbro actually changes course, there’s no reason to think recent releases will gain value.

But if this lawsuit forces a strategic shift, if Hasbro actually pulls back on volume and returns to scarcity-based releases, the next few years could be great for flipping Magic. The secondary market needs trust. It needs to believe that limited means limited, that sets won’t get reprinted to death, that buying in early will pay off. Right now Hasbro’s destroyed that trust. Rebuilding it would require real change to how they operate.

The allegations in this lawsuit are damning. Faked sellouts, landfill dumps, emergency printing to cover corporate shortfalls. That’s not how you manage a billion-dollar brand. Whether the courts force change or shareholders do, something’s got to give. For resellers, that change can’t come soon enough.