Wizards of the Coast wins the Extra Life Partner of the Year Award

Congrats to Wizards of the Coast for taking home the Children’s Miracle Network Hospitals’ 2019 Extra Life Partner of the Year Award! This award honors a Children’s Miracle Network Hospital partner who is raising significant funds through the Extra Life program. We know that the gaming community has an incredible influence to help heal kids and this past year, Wizards of the Coast proved to be a powerhouse #ForTheKids.

Wizards of the Coast is a Seattle-based game publisher, best known for publishing Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons. In 2019, the team at Wizards of the Coast set a goal to raise over $1 million USD for Extra Life and they planned to galvanize sales of their retail products to achieve these ambitious results. Wizards of the Coast is owned by Hasbro, which also owns the My Little Pony franchise. So, the folks at Wizards of the Coast began to dream about how exciting it would be to create a mash-up of Magic: The Gathering and My Little Pony. 

This past fall, Wizards of the Coast released Ponies: The Galloping products. Most notably, they released four limited-edition Magic: The Gathering playing cards. Nearly 25,000 cards were sold. They also released Magic playmats featuring My Little Pony characters. These playmats were a huge hit and sold out in less than three minutes! In total, Wizards of the Coast were able to raise over $875,000 USD via their Magic: the Gathering activation, funding the life-saving work of Seattle Children’s Hospital.

However, Wizards of the Coast wasn’t done. They had plans to activate the Dungeons & Dragons community as well. The D&D community hosted various sales, influencer-led events and charity streams. D&D proved to have a powerful fundraising capacity, bringing Wizard of the Coasts’ total funds raised to over $1,000,000 USD in 2019! You can read more about their comprehensive fundraising strategy here.

Congrats to Wizards of the Coast for facilitating this complex and incredibly exciting campaign. We’re thrilled to honor them with the 2019 Extra Life Partner of the Year Award and look forward to working together on future innovative activations to play games and heal kids!

Don’t forget to sign up for Extra Life to help sick and injured kids in hospitals around the US and Canada by playing games!