2023’s Magic: The Gathering heist spawned 2024’s best Gen Con cosplay

After 2023’s Gen Con — the biggest tabletop gaming convention in America — the biggest news was the real-life heist: Two men were caught on camera casually wheeling a cart containing $300,000 worth of Magic: The Gathering cards out of the convention. Two suspects were eventually arrested and charged, and Indiana court records show they’re due for a jury trial in October. The cards were recovered. 

But that wasn’t the end of it: During this year’s Gen Con, a roving cosplay duo dressed up as the thieves. Polygon tracked them down to talk about what went into their costume, and what it was like roving the con as a walking meme.

Partners Chris Chheng and Stephanie Szabo are part of a Facebook group, Fans of Gen Con, where Chheng says the Gen Con Magic thieves remain a running gag: “Everybody jokes about it, everybody memes about it.”

Szabo says the first time she suggested turning the meme into cosplay, it was just a joke, but she and Chheng quickly realized the idea could actually work. Once they’d committed to it, they brought in Chheng’s longtime friend Austin Jongeling as part of the plan.

“I was looking at a picture — a security-cam photo of the event,” Szabo tells Polygon. “I’m like, I could be one of the guys, but […] nah, this would be way funnier if we had Austin do it. I don’t really match the description of the perpetrator as much. People were going to get it more if we got Austin to do it with Chris.”

The costume elements seem simple enough — a pink shirt for Chheng and a Castle Assault T-shirt for Jongeling, mirroring what the thieves were wearing in the security-cam images released to the public. (The accused thieves are the creators of the Castle Assault game.) But Szabo says actually constructing that T-shirt wound up as a surprising challenge.

“There was a little bit of a kerfuffle with it,” she says. “We bought some iron-on printer paper so we could print the logo on and iron it on. We didn’t realize you had to get a special type of paper to show up on a black T-shirt. So we did it at first, and it was not showing up. I’m like, Oh God, this is in a couple days. So we had some white scrap fabric in our craft room, and we ironed [the logo] onto the white fabric, then HeatnBond-ed it onto the black T-shirt, and it ended up looking really good.”

Chheng and Szabo had the most fun building the cart prop for the cosplay, a hollow-core box covered in glued-on Magic cards to make it look like the cart was full. Mostly, those were common cards purchased in bulk, though Chheng worked in a few Easter eggs for anyone who looked closely: He printed off some of the rarer and more in-demand cards to include on the cart, including a few Black Lotuses and a single copy of the one-of-a-kind One Ring card that Post Malone famously purchased for $2 million.

For Jongeling, though, the fun was in inventing and playing a character as the duo joined Gen Con’s annual costume parade and wandered the halls to be seen and photographed by attendees.

“I have a background in theater,” he says. “Chris was pulling the cart, so I was like, I could just be a guy walking, or I can actually become a character. Fifteen feet into the actual exhibit hall, I was like, OK, I’m going to be stealing cards from the wagon, even though in the story canon, we’ve already stolen the cards. I became like a Machiavellian thief, like an old-time burglar, trying to sneak around and make sure no one was looking for the cards. I eventually started shoving cards into my pants pockets. I had, like, hundreds of cards in my front and back pockets. They were spilling out at times. I had to stop, get to the ground, and grab up the cards. Part of it was really trying to not leave debris on the floor, but it was also in character, trying to steal the cards and put them back in.”

The trio says they did hear a few instances of the dreaded cosplay question “What are you supposed to be?” 

“I was a little bit nervous,” Chheng says. “Like, Oh no, no, nobody’s gonna get it, and we’re gonna look like a bunch of idiots walking around. But then once we lined up for the cosplay parade, once that started going, people were just — it was just roaring laughter.”

“I saw one photo of a guy in the crowd — he’s just, like, laughing wholeheartedly, like open-mouth, you can tell the joy on his face,” Szabo says. “That made my highlight — this cosplay was so worth it, solely for that guy.”

“The way the box was set up — you probably saw in the pictures that from the front, you can’t really see the cards all that well,” Chheng says. “Then as we walked past people, and they saw the cards spilling out of it, and Austin falling behind in a little robber tiptoe, swiping them from the box as well — as we’d walk past people, they realized what we were, and there was just this consistent wave of people laughing as we walked past them. So that made it worth it for me.”

The trio skipped Gen Con’s formal costume contest: “We just did the parade,” Chheng says. “We were tempted to enter the costume contest, and probably would have, if it were a much smaller con, but—”

“There was a waitlist for the contest,” Szabo says. “I was like, ‘This will be a lot of effort for a joke, and I don’t want to take a legitimate spot from people who really want to enter for the craft. If there weren’t so many applicants, and this wasn’t the largest year of Gen Con, maybe. But we were like, We’ll just let other people do it.”

Instead, they were content to be in on the joke at one of their favorite annual events.

“When I was way younger, there weren’t a lot of nerd conventions,” Szabo says. “When I heard about Gen Con — I was really little, and I was like, That looks so much fun. I want to be around those people. And so when I got old enough to actually go, I just fell in love with it. I feel so welcomed here. Everyone feels like my friend, basically. You can just strike up a conversation with anyone.”