Mentioned in this article Games: Hearthstone

Wizards of the Coast hosted their first-ever $1M USD tournament for Magic: The Gathering Arena over the weekend at PAX East in Boston, and viewership for the event on Twitch shows the kind of potential the virtual card game has as an esport.

The Mythic Invitational was held from March 28-31 and was featured on the official Magic: The Gathering Twitch channel that attracted a total of 1.9M hours watched over the course of the past seven days, making it one of the top 10 most-watched channels on Twitch.

As the first major part of Wizards’ MTG Arena esports initiative, the event stimulated MTG viewership on Twitch helping it achieve the highest hours watched totals that it’s recorded all year or last year.

The tournament came following Wizards unveiling plans in December for a $10M Magic Pro League that combines online play with MTG’s traditional formats featuring physical cards.

While the MTG Twitch channels average concurrent viewership of 26K isn’t particularly impressive, that figure includes peripheral coverage and re-runs of the Mythic Invitational over the weekend. The final session of live coverage for the event that lasted a little bit more than 5.5 hours averaged 96K CCV, peaking at 126K. Other sessions of live coverage averaged around 50-60K CCV from Friday-Sunday.

That boost wasn’t enough to put MTG ahead of Blizzard Entertainment’s more established trading card video game Hearthstone though. Despite no significant esports events going on, influencer-driven content has helped Hearthstone rack up 3.2M hours watched in the past seven days, beating out MTG’s 3.1M hours watched that comes at the heels of the Mythic Invitational.

While MTG was led by the official Magic Twitch channel, only one Hearthstone stream managed to eclipse 500K hours watched, and no one managed to reach more than 600K. Relatively low viewership at the top of Hearthstone shows just how dispersed the title’s viewership is across a wide variety of broadcasters.

Meanwhile, upcoming esports related events and card set releases have Hearthstone poised for strong viewership in the month to come. A new set of content for Blizzard’s card game drops on April 9. Additionally, the Hearthstone Championship Tour’s World Championship is taking place April 25-28.

As both games vie for their share of the online card game market, viewership of esports related events on Twitch will have a continued, growing importance. To a lesser extent, MTG’s ability to build an influencer base that can at least compete with Hearthstone could help the title extend its reach in a way that could cultivate a larger esports audience.