By Mary Grace Loreto, Account Executive, The Lippin Group
The Lippin Group (www.lippingroup.com, https://linktr.ee/thelippingroup)
I went to MagicCon: Las Vegas 2026 from May 1-3 last month. Despite having played Magic: The Gathering on and off for the past decade, this was my first time attending the massive convention. MagicCon runs twice a year across the U.S. and Europe, bringing together players, artists, exhibitors, creators, collectors, and pros from around the world for a weekend of full‑tilt Magic: The Gathering mania.
I’ve worked fan conventions like Anime Expo and KCON for many years, and fan cons have taught me a lot about how to speak with fandoms. Every community is different, but there’s also something universal about their energy, enthusiasm, and depth of care. You can’t parachute in with marketing speak—you have to learn the language people already use with each other.
At my first MagicCon, I picked up a few new lessons about how to speak to nerdy communities specifically. The Magic community is built on trust, generosity, play, and joyful chaos, and if you want to communicate with them effectively, you have to understand how they communicate with each other. MagicCon: Las Vegas was a living case study in how fandoms communicate, self-govern, and sustain passion over decades. Here’s what communicators can learn from this event about communicating with nerdy fandoms:
Honor System: Trust Drives Conversion
Magic: The Gathering is a game that relies a lot on an honor system. Players remind each other if they miss triggers or forget to draw a card; they call out their own mistakes and hold themselves accountable even if it costs them an advantage. Of course they want to win, but more importantly they want to win with integrity.
This is a community built on trust, and once that trust is broken, you lose your most enthusiastic advocates. Communicating well with this fandom means being explicit about any limitations or tradeoffs in your marketing, admitting mistakes quickly and honestly, and designing campaigns and comms that assume good faith.
Let the Game Play Out: Organic Exploration is Key
Sometimes, there’s a moment mid‑game when a player knows they’ll win in just a few turns—or that they’ve made a costly mistake and their opponent will overtake them soon—but they keep playing anyway. They let the game play out because things can change with a single card draw, winning feels better when your strategy unfolds naturally, and even losing can be fun when you do so spectacularly. Conceding early might be efficient, but it robs everyone of the experience.
In Magic, the process matters just as much as the result. Whether you win or lose, seeing your board come together, even if briefly, is deeply satisfying. That moment where your deck does the thing is often the point, not the final outcome. It’s why people keep playing, tweaking, theory‑crafting, and coming back for another game.
This is an important lesson for communicators. When marketing over‑optimizes for quick conversions or tidy narratives, it often shortens the experience. Nerdy communities want time to understand, explore, and emotionally invest. Letting the game play out in your communications means resisting the urge to rush people to the end and instead designing customer journeys that honor discovery, build anticipation, and allow people to arrive at buy‑in on their own terms.
Gamification Works
Magic: The Gathering players wouldn’t be at MagicCon if they didn’t absolutely love games. Puzzles, scavenger hunts, side quests, Draft v. Commander, prizes, hunting for mythics in card packs. The event doesn’t just feature games, it is a game in itself.
But gamification for nerds only truly works when it is natural and intrinsic rather than performative. While gaining points and winning prizes is certainly enticing, real motivation comes from the allure of mastery, discovery, and clever design.
Applying this to your MarComms playbook might look like designing and using creative puzzles as part of your strategy and making participation in such challenges feel like a reward in itself. Reward skill and creativity, not just engagement. Make your campaigns feel like a “secret level” that fans have unlocked.
Pass Your Turn: Leaving Room for Participation and Co-Authorship
One of the things that makes Magic so compelling is its chaotic, “anything can happen” energy. No two games are ever the same. Outcomes swing based on the cards drawn, the interactions between decks, and the choices players make in the moment. The fun isn’t just about winning: it’s about watching something unpredictable unfold.
That same principle applies to marketing in fandom spaces. Brands come alive when fans are invited to participate in message‑creation and storytelling, instead of being handed a fully scripted narrative to consume. When you give people room to play –through remixing, memeing, speculation, etc. – you turn your brand into a living system rather than a static campaign.
This kind of chaos builds investment. Fans care more deeply about stories they help shape, and for nerdy communities especially, this matters. These are builders, tinkerers, and theorists by nature. Leaving room for emergence doesn’t mean losing control of your brand, it means designing the rules of the game and letting the community bring it to life.
Embracing Cringe
Fan cons are designed to be safe spaces for people to be loud, earnest, over-the-top, and deeply, unapologetically passionate. Creating space for nerds to feel psychologically safe is critical for building trust, which we’ve learned is the most important conversion driver when it comes to marketing for fandom.
Because fandom runs on authentic passion and excitement, communities will immediately sniff out messaging that feels sus or inauthentic. Nerds, especially, have finely tuned radar for anything that sounds like it was written by someone trying to sound cool from the outside.
That doesn’t mean you can’t speak to a fandom you’re not personally part of—but it does mean you have to do the work. You don’t need to play Magic: The Gathering to speak to Magic: The Gathering players. But you do need to truly understand why they love this game, celebrate that love openly, and show up with sincerity.
MagicCon: Las Vegas was a great reminder that the most effective way to communicate with nerdy communities and passionate fandoms is by respecting the rules and expectations already set in places by that community. Marketing to fandom works best when we treat people not like audiences to target, but as fellow creatives and collaborators – ones that we trust to play honestly, participate generously, care loudly and deeply, and give space for a little mischief-making. These 5 lessons from MagicCon are just a short list of what we can do to start speaking their language.