The audience of the progenitor of card tournaments is decreasing every year: the results of the Magic World Championship XXVIII

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At the end of October, Las Vegas hosted the 28th World Championship dedicated to the Magic: The Gathering TCG. In the new article, Esports Charts will tell you what this discipline is like, how large of an audience Magic World Championship XXVIII managed to attract, and what was interesting for this audience.

Magic World Championship has been held annually since 1994 and is the most important Magic: The Gathering tournament. The card game itself was developed by American mathematician Richard Garfield and published by Wizards of the Coast in 1993. Each game in Magic is a battle between wizards who use cards to cast spells, use artifacts, and summon creatures to defeat their opponents. It is noteworthy that until 2002, competitions were held only using real cards, and then the first official digital version of the game appeared, Magic Online. Currently, Magic: The Gathering tournaments are held mainly on the basis of MTG Arena, released in 2018.

Magic World Championship XXVIII had a $500K prize pool and taking part in the competition were 32 players, double the number from last year. It has been the first LAN World Championship since 2019, and the first tournament since 2016, to be held in three formats: Standard Constructed, Explorer Constructed, and Dominaria United draft.

  Nathan Steuer, the champion of Magic World Championship XXVIII  

Following the results of two game days, four players went to the final stage of the championship: Jakub Tóth, Karl Sarap, Eli Kassis, and Nathan Steuer. It is worth noting that they will receive invitations to all three tournaments of the Pro Tour series in the upcoming season. Steuer became the champion of the Magic World Championship XXVIII and earned $100K. It is noteworthy that he lost to Cassis in the quarterfinals, but, having passed through the lower bracket of the playoffs, took revenge on him in the final, winning with a score of 2:1.

Viewership statistics

Magic World Championship XXVIII broadcasts were on the air for just over 26 hours, during which time they generated 438.7K Hours Watched and attracted 16.7K Average Viewers. The event’s Peak Viewers mark was reached during the match for the champion’s title and amounted to more than 22.1K viewers.

Over 68% of the tournament's Hours Watched were generated by English-speaking viewers. The top 5 broadcast languages for Magic World Championship XXVIII also included Japanese, French, Spanish, and Portuguese.

The official English channel of the game on Twitch took the lead among the channels by a wide margin in all respects: Magic attracted more than 15.6K Peak Viewers and over 61% of the tournament’s total Hours Watched. The top 3 also included the Japanese channel Japan MTG (YouTube) and the French channel Val_PL_magicarenafr, the contribution of which to the championship hours was 8% and 7%, respectively.

Most popular Magic World Championship tournaments

World Championship XXVIII entered the top 3 tournaments of the series, barely outperforming the 2017-2018 tournaments by viewership statistics. At the same time, it lagged behind the 26th and 27th World Championships by about 6 and 3 times in terms of Peak Viewers, and by more than 4 and 2 times, and in terms of Average Viewers, respectively. It is noteworthy that the statistics of each of the tournaments were highly dependent on the performance of the Magic Twitch channel.

It's worth mentioning that World Championship XXVIII didn't even make it into the top 20 most popular Magic: The Gathering tournaments. The first spot belongs to the Mythic Invitational 2019, which featured a record-breaking for the discipline $1M prize pool and gathered 151.4K Peak Viewers.

World Championship XXVIII and Hearthstone World Championship 2021 Viewership Comparison

Magic: The Gathering is the progenitor of the TCG genre, so it's worth comparing World Championship XXVIII to last year’s Hearthstone World Championship. Curiously, their viewership stats were almost the same, with the Magic tournament having 2% more Average Viewers, but 5% fewer Peak Viewers. However, do not forget that the Hearthstone World Championship 2021 showed the worst statistics in the history of the series.

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Magic: The Gathering tournament statistics are highly dependent on the audience on the official English broadcast. Perhaps the organizers of the World Championship need to think about increasing the popularity of events through streamer broadcasts. After all, even on the example of Hearthstone, it can be seen that in the presence of well-known community casters, the audience of tournaments grows, and in their absence, it greatly decreases.