The house that Garfield built: the Wizards of the Coast story

Every trading card game on our shelves exists because of one company, and that company started in a basement. Peter Adkison was a Boeing engineer and a lifelong role-playing fan when he founded Wizards of the Coast in 1990. The first office was his basement, and the first products were modest role-playing supplements. The headquarters settled in Renton soon after, which means the center of the card world has been sitting about twenty minutes from our shop this whole time.

A lawsuit, a mathematician, and a better brief

The early years were not glamorous. A 1992 supplement called The Primal Order landed Wizards in a lawsuit with Palladium Books, and the case dragged until a settlement the following year. Plenty of tiny publishers would have folded right there. Adkison instead went looking for talent, and at a convention he met a mathematician named Richard Garfield. Garfield pitched him a board game. Adkison said no, and asked for something better suited to a small company: a portable game, quick to play, with endless variety.

The genre every modern card game lives in, from booster packs to rarity tiers, starts on that Gen Con floor.

The game that invented a genre

Garfield came back with Magic: The Gathering, which debuted at Gen Con in the summer of 1993. It was the first collectible card game, and players lost their minds for it in a way nobody had budgeted for. Print runs sold through, a secondary market caught fire almost overnight, and the little basement publisher suddenly had the biggest hit the hobby had ever seen. Success bought ambition. In 1997, Wizards used its Magic money to buy TSR, the failing company behind Dungeons and Dragons. Read that again, because it never stops being strange: the new card game rescued the most important role-playing game ever made, a game created in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin, and gave it a second life in Renton.

The Pokémon chapter, and the rival it created

In 1998, Wizards picked up the English-language rights to the Pokémon Trading Card Game. The American launch in early 1999 set off the Charizard craze and put Wizards cards in every backpack in the country. Then Hasbro bought the company in 1999 for $325 million, and a few years later the story took its most poetic turn. The Pokémon license ended in 2003, and the game Wizards had introduced to America went home to The Pokémon Company. The student became the rival.

Here is the part that matters if you sell cards for a living. The market Wizards invented is now enormous, and Wizards is still winning it. Magic just posted the biggest quarter in its history, topping $600 million in three months. The Wizards segment delivered roughly $2.2 billion across 2025. The current engine is crossovers: the Final Fantasy set became the largest release in the brand's history, and Hasbro's CEO has called Avatar: The Last Airbender the third-biggest Magic set of all time.

And it is not a one-game town anymore. Ranked by marketplace sales in TCGplayer's latest bestselling list, the top five trading card games are Magic: The Gathering from Wizards of the Coast, Pokémon from The Pokémon Company, the One Piece Card Game from Bandai, Yu-Gi-Oh! from Konami, and Riftbound from Riot Games. One Piece passing Yu-Gi-Oh! would have been unthinkable five years ago. A League of Legends card game cracking the top five in its debut quarter would have been unthinkable last year.

Look at that list the way a historian does and the whole hobby snaps into focus. The company that invented the category is still first. The game it lost is second. The anime game our players shuffle up on Friday nights is third. Adkison left the company in 2001 and later bought Gen Con, the very convention where Magic first appeared. The basement is a segment of Hasbro now. The genre it created fills our play space every single week.

Bobby and Car tell the whole story, lawsuit and all, on today's Trade Post. Give it a listen.