Magic Pro Tour: Arena Championship 3 becomes most popular online tournament series

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In recent years, Magic: The Gathering online tournaments have been attracting increasingly more viewers, especially for the Magic Pro Tour series. The audience for Arena Championship 3 exceeded that of the previous two events in the series, possibly hinting that the legendary game is experiencing a renaissance. For more details, read the review by Esports Charts. 

The Magic Pro Tour is a series of regular MTG tournaments that take place every four months. In these events, the top 32 players of the Pro Tour series compete for a total prize pool of $200K. Anyone can qualify for the Arena Championship by achieving a high rank in the game and passing the qualification rounds. The champion of the Magic Pro Tour: Arena Championship 3 was American player Benjamin Broadstone, who defeated Ondrej Strasky from the Czech Republic with a score of 2-0 in the finals. The finalists received $30K and $20K, respectively. 

In addition to the cash prize, the finalists of the Magic Pro Tour: Arena Championship 3 also received invitations to the Magic World Championship XXIX — the main tournament of the year — which will take place on September 22-24 in Las Vegas as part of the MagicCon festival.

Magic Pro Tour: Arena Championship 3 Viewership Results 

The Magic Pro Tour: Arena Championship 3 tournament ran for 16 hours and accumulated about 130.2K Hours Watched in that time. The event saw 8.2K Average Viewers and 10.8K Peak Viewers. The main language of MPT: Arena Championship 3 broadcasts was English — it accumulated 76.7% of the total Hours Watched and drew 8.4K Peak Viewers.

The official Magic channel became the most popular channel of the tournament — it got 84.7K HW and attracted 7.1K PV. The second most-watched channel was Amazonian, owned by a popular female community streamer from Complexity Gaming.

Comparison with Previous Tournaments of the Series

The third MPT: Arena Championship tournament drew more viewers than the first two, which shows a stable interest in the discipline, even despite the high competition from Hearthstone and other KKIs. Compared to the first tournament, the Average Viewers number of the Arena Championship increased by 28%, and the Peak Viewers number increased by 26%. 

Most popular Magic Pro Tour online tournaments

It is worth noting that, in addition to the online tournaments such as Arena Championship, the Magic Pro Tour series also hosts major LAN championships in the United States, such as the Pro Tour March of the Machine and the Magic Pro Tour Phyrexia 2023. Each of these tournaments has a prize pool of $500K and attracts 3-4 times more viewers than online events. 

Magic: The Gathering is a very niche esports discipline with a relatively small but very dedicated fan base. This TCG cannot boast the same level of popularity as League of Legends or CS:GO, but it regularly hosts fairly large tournaments with prize pools ranging from hundreds of thousands to sometimes millions of dollars. Magic: The Gathering is most popular in Western Europe, the United States, and Japan, with players from these regions frequently ranking among the top prize winners.

Most popular Magic: The Gathering tournaments by Peak Viewers

Magic: The Gathering reached its peak popularity in 2019/2020, when the world championships offered a million dollars in prize money. The most popular tournament remains the Mythic Invitational 2019, which racked up 2.2 million Hours Watched and drew 151.3K Peak Viewers. In 2022, for example, the most popular MTG tournament drew only 22.1K Peak Viewers in 2022, but in 2023, that number increased to nearly 40K. We'll see if the discipline continues this positive trend going forward.