Wizards of the Coast Has No President, and Now One of Its Top Executives Has Left

Here’s a fun one to chew on: Wizards of the Coast, the company behind both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons, doesn’t have a president, and now it has lost one of the executives who ran its business day to day. John Hight, who’d held the job since 2024, walked away on September 1st. There was no immediate replacement lined up. For a stretch, the company that ships more cardboard and cards into game stores than almost anyone on earth was, functionally, running without a driver.

Hasbro has since stepped in and handed the wheel to Chris Cocks, Hasbro’s own CEO, who’s now overseeing Wizards on an interim basis while they go find someone permanent. That’s a little bit funny if you know the history, because Cocks already did this job once. He ran Wizards from 2016 to 2022 before moving up to run all of Hasbro. So in a weird way, this isn’t chaos, it’s a rerun.

Then, weeks into the vacancy, came the second shoe. Brian Trunk, a 17-year Wizards veteran who most recently served as Vice President of Commercial, Digital Games Revenue, and the Wizards Play Network, left for Asmodee, one of the few companies that competes with Wizards for shelf space, store loyalty, and talent. At Asmodee he’s taking the title of Senior Vice President, Route to Market, Americas, which means owning commercial strategy and go-to-market for the company’s games business across North and South America.

Trunk’s résumé reads like a tour of Wizards’ money-making machinery. He started as Senior Director of Business for EMEA, worked up to Vice President and General Manager across EMEA, LATAM, and APAC, and in his final stretch oversaw a global games portfolio that ICv2 and Cardsrealm both put at $2.2 billion. He also rebuilt the Wizards Play Network, the tournament and organized-play system that keeps local game stores selling Magic singles and running Friday Night Magic, after the pandemic nearly gutted it. That’s not a marketing job. That’s the plumbing. In a LinkedIn post, Trunk said he has “always believed the most successful businesses are built on great people, strong relationships, trust, and community.” Both trade outlets that covered the hire treated it as a straightforward executive move. Neither connected it to the empty president’s chair at his old employer.

We will, with a caveat. Nothing here says Trunk left because of the leadership gap. People leave 17-year jobs for all kinds of reasons, and running the Americas for a company the size of Asmodee is reason enough on its own. But timing is still information. A specialist this senior choosing a direct competitor over waiting around for whoever Hasbro eventually hires is not nothing, and it means whoever gets the permanent job will inherit a team with at least one fewer holder of institutional memory.

Should you care if you’re just trying to figure out what to play Friday night? Probably not in any urgent way. Wizards is a big enough machine that leadership gaps at the top don’t usually turn into missed print runs or canceled sets overnight. But Wizards’ last few years have been a roller coaster: the OGL controversy, layoffs, restructuring, Magic leaning harder into crossover sets, D&D’s big 2024 rules refresh. Whoever ends up in the chair permanently will have real influence over how aggressively Magic keeps chasing crossover money, how D&D handles its digital ambitions, and how much goodwill Wizards has left to spend with its own players.

While we wait, the game itself is in a genuinely good spot. If you haven’t picked up the 2024 core rules yet, the D&D 2024 Player’s Handbook is still holding a 4.8-star average across thousands of reviews, and it’s the cleanest, most approachable version of the rules D&D has put out in years.

This is developing news out of Wizards of the Coast. We’ll update this post if a permanent president gets named or another executive departs.