Wizards of the Coast (WotC) was founded by Peter Adkison in 1990 outside of Seattle, Washington,[9] and its current headquarters is located in nearby Renton.

[12] The following month, the game was extremely popular at Gen Con, selling out of its supply of 2.5 million cards, which had been planned to last until the end of the year.

[17] In 1994, WotC began an association with The Beanstalk Group, a brand-licensing agency and consultancy, to license the brand Magic: The Gathering.

[19] Also in 1994, WotC also expanded its RPG line by buying SLA Industries from Nightfall Games and Ars Magica from White Wolf.

[26] Between 1997 and 1999, the company spun off several TSR campaign settings, including Planescape, Dark Sun, and Spelljammer, to focus the business on the more profitable Greyhawk and Forgotten Realms lines.

WotC selected "Eberron", which game designer Keith Baker submitted, and its first campaign book was released in June 2004.

[19] Within a year, WotC had sold millions of copies of the Pokémon game and the company released a new set that included an instructional CD-ROM.

[61] In 2002, Wizards of the Coast's periodicals department was spun off; WotC outsourced its magazines by licensing Dungeon, Dragon, Polyhedron, and Amazing Stories to Paizo Publishing.

[79] On April 6, 2009, WotC suspended all sales of its products for the Dungeons & Dragons games in PDF format from places such as OneBookShelf, and its online storefronts RPGNow and DriveThruRPG.

[80][81] The company launched a lawsuit against eight people to prevent future copyright infringement of its books, including fourth-edition Dungeons & Dragons products that were sold through these places, and all older editions PDFs of the game.

[94] In 2014, 20th Century Fox acquired the screen rights to Magic: The Gathering to produce a movie series with Simon Kinberg attached to the project.

[99] Since the release of the 5th edition, WotC has published more than twenty Dungeon & Dragons books, including new rulebooks, campaign guides and adventure modules.

[112][113] In June 2019, internet-streaming service Netflix announced WoTC would work with Anthony and Joe Russo to create an animated series based on the mythology of Magic: The Gathering.

The Russo brothers were executive producers on the series, with writers Henry Gilroy and Jose Molina as showrunners, and Bardel Entertainment worked on animation.

[114][115] In July 2019, Joe Deaux reported in Bloomberg: "Magic is part of the [Hasbro's] 'franchise brands', a segment that accounted for $2.45 billion in net revenue for the company last year".

[43] According to Chris Cocks, Magic accounted for a "meaningful portion" of that sum and KeyBanc estimated the game's contribution was more than $500 million of the franchise brands.

[43] In 2019, WotC released a Hearthstone competitor called Magic: The Gathering Arena, which is a free-to-play digital collectible card game with microtransaction purchases.

[116][117] Brett Andress, an analyst at KeyBanc Capital Markets, predicted Magic: The Gathering Arena would boost earnings by at least 20 percent.

[119] On June 1, 2020, after the murder of George Floyd, WotC released a statement in support of its Black fans, employees, and community members.

[120][122][123] The New York Times, Polygon, and Kotaku reported following this criticism, WotC banned seven Magic: The Gathering cards that were deemed racially offensive from tournament-sanctioned play.

[124][121][125] The D&D team announced it would be changing portions of its fifth-edition product line that fans had criticized for being insensitive, such as racist portrayals of a fictional people known as the Vistani, and races characterized as monstrous and evil.

[133] During its 2021 Investor Event, Hasbro announced the company would be reorganized into three divisions: Consumer Products, Entertainment, and Wizards & Digital.

[144] In July 2022, WotC announced it was establishing another new video-game studio called Skeleton Key, which would focus on AAA games and would be headed by Christian Dailey, formerly of BioWare.

[149][150] At the Hasbro Investor Event in October 2022, it was announced Dan Rawson, former chief operating officer (COO) of Microsoft Dynamics 365 was appointed to the newly created position of Senior Vice President for the Dungeons & Dragons brand to act as head of the franchise.

[154][155] They noted the high engagement of fans with the brand but said the majority of spending is by Dungeon Masters, who comprise around 20 percent of the player base.

[d] Edwin Evans-Thirlwell of The Washington Post wrote: "pushback from fans, who criticized WotC's response as far from an apology and a dismissal of their legitimate concerns, led WotC to backpedal further" and that the company "appears to have committed an irreversible act of self-sabotage in trying to replace [the OGL]—squandering the prestige accumulated over 20 years in a matter of weeks".

[198] In April 2023, WotC sent private detectives from the Pinkerton agency to the house of a Magic: The Gathering YouTuber, who said the agents demanded he destroy cards from an unreleased set he had been accidentally sent, and to remove videos from his channel, otherwise he and his wife would face a $200,000 fine and imprisonment.

[202] In December 2023, TechCrunch reported that paperwork Hasbro filed with the SEC contained information announcing layoffs of 1,100 employees (20 percent of their entire workforce across all divisions) effective immediately.

[203] A wide range of WotC employees were laid off;[204] Chase Carter of Dicebreaker commented: "past successes and future plans could not save Wizards of the Coast's workers from the hungry maw of corporate line-item reduction, and the full extent of this culling remains to be seen".

[205] Cynthia Williams resigned at the end of April 2024[206][207] and was replaced that summer by John Hight, who left his long-time role at Blizzard Entertainment to take the job.