In this work, a numerical study of a reduced model of magnetoconvection is presented. By considering a background magnetic field in a conducting fluid in a plane layer, a generalized Lorenz model was originally derived by Macek and Strumik (2010) and is used here to investigate transition to hyperchaos as a function of the background magnetic field. In this work a merging crisis involving the collision of two symmetric chaotic attractors with a hyperchaotic saddle is shown to give rise to a hyperchaotic attractor. A new numerical technique for showing a collision between a hyperchaotic set and a chaotic attractor in a high-dimensional phase space is introduced. (C) 2020 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.