After Gen Con 2023 — the largest board game convention in America — the biggest news was the real-life robbery: two men were caught on camera carelessly stealing a cart containing $300,000 worth of Magic: The Gathering cards from the convention. Two suspects were eventually arrested and charged, and Indiana court records show they are facing a jury trial in October. The cards were recovered.
But that wasn’t all: At this year’s Gen Con, a traveling cosplay duo dressed up as the thieves. Polygon tracked them down to talk about what went into their costumes and what it was like to travel the con as a walking meme.
Partners Chris Chheng and Stephanie Szabo are part of a Facebook group, Fans of Gen Conwhere Chheng says that the Gen Con Magic Thieves remain a running joke: “Everyone makes jokes about it, everyone makes 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 work. Once they made up their minds, they brought Chheng’s old friend Austin Jongeling on board as part of the plan.
“I was looking at a photo — a security camera photo from the event,” Szabo tells Polygon. “I thought, I could be one of them, but (…) no, this would be a lot funnier if Austin did it. “I don’t really fit the description of the unsub. People would understand it more if we could get Austin to do it with Chris.”
The costume elements seem simple enough: a pink shirt for Chheng and a Castle attack T-shirt for Youngling, which mirrors what the thieves were wearing in the security camera footage that was made public. (The accused thieves are the makers of the Castle attack game.) But Szabo says actually making the T-shirt was a surprising challenge.
“There was a bit of a fuss about it,” she says. “We bought some iron-on paper for printers, so we could print the logo and iron it on. We didn’t know that you needed a special kind of paper to show it on a black T-shirt. So we did it at first, but it didn’t show. I thought, Oh God, this is in a few days. So we had some white scrap fabric in our craft room and we ironed (the logo) onto the white fabric, and then HeatnBond-ed on the black T-shirt, and it ended up looking really good.”
Chheng and Szabo had the most fun building the cart for the cosplay, a hollow box covered with glued-on Magic cards to make it look like the cart was full. Most of these were regular cards bought in bulk, though Chheng did throw in a few Easter eggs for anyone looking closely: he printed up some of the rarer and more sought-after cards to put on the cart, including a pair of Black Lotuses and a single copy of the one-of-a-kind One Ring card that Post Malone famously bought for $2 million.
For Jongeling, however, the fun was in creating and playing a character, as the duo joined Gen Con’s Annual Costume Parade and wandered the corridors to be seen and photographed by those present.
“I come from a theater background,” he says. “Chris was the one pulling the cart, so I thought: I can just be a walking man, but I can also become a character. Fifteen feet into the actual exhibit hall I thought: Okay, I’m going to steal cards from the wagon, even though we’ve already stolen the cards in the story canon. I became a kind of Machiavellian thief, an old-fashioned burglar, trying to sneak around and make sure no one was looking for the cards. Eventually I started putting cards in my pockets. I had hundreds of cards in my front and back pockets. Sometimes they would fall out. I had to stop, get down on the floor and pick them up. Part of it was really trying not to leave a mess on the floor, but it was also part of my character, trying to steal the cards and put them back.”
The trio say they’ve heard the dreaded cosplay question a few times: “What are you supposed to be?”
“I was a little nervous,” Chheng says. “Like, No, no one is going to get it and we’re going to look like a bunch of idiots walking around. But once we got in line for the cosplay parade, once it got going, people were just — it was just roaring laughter.”
“I saw a photo of a guy in the crowd — he’s just smiling, his mouth open, you can see the joy on his face,” Szabo says. “That was my highlight — this cosplay was totally worth it just for that guy.”
“The way the box was set up — you probably saw in the pictures that you couldn’t see the cards very well from the front,” Chheng says. “When we were walking past people and they were seeing the cards falling out, and Austin was tiptoeing behind and stealing them out of the box too — when we were walking past people, they realized who we were, and there was just a constant wave of people laughing as we walked past them. 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 do the costume contest, and probably would have done it if it was a much smaller con, but—”
“There was a waiting list for the contest,” Szabo says. “I thought, ‘This is going to be a lot of effort for a joke, and I don’t want to take up a legitimate space for people who really want to be in the business. If there weren’t so many applicants, and this wasn’t the biggest year of Gen Con, maybe. But we thought, We just leave it to others.”
Instead, they were content to be part of the joke at one of their favorite annual events.
“When I was a lot 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 fun. I want to be with those people. And when I was old enough to go there, I just fell in love with it. I feel so welcome here. Everyone feels like my friend, really. You can just start a conversation with anyone.”