UNC Student Finds $18,000 Worth of Magic: The Gathering Cards (Including The Black Lotus) in Her Childhood Home

Image: Christopher Rush (Wizards of the Coast)/ Trailer: Wizards of the Coast

UNC-Chapel Hill senior Kess Hendrix has found $18,000 worth of Magic: The Gathering cards while looking through half-dozen mildewing boxes in her parents' house in Charlotte, North Carolina, WRAL reports.

According to the report, the boxes Hendrix was digging through were filled with cards from the early years of Magic: The Gathering. Her parents, Michele and Nelson Hendrix, began collecting Magic cards in 1994, before Kess and her brother, Miles, were born.

Michelle discovered Magic: The Gathering at Dragon Con, an annual celebration of fantasy and sci-fi culture.

"I absolutely never thought of them as collectibles," Michele admitted. "We collected them for their artwork because they were pretty."

Kess told WRAL that her uncle and aunt would come over to play with all their old cards back in her elementary school years.

When Kess visited a comic store in Durham in the spring of 2018, she thought of Magic again, so she decided to get back into the game she grew up with.

"I was at home [in Charlotte], bored, when I realized I'd never really investigated their worth," Kess admitted. "So I looked it up and was like, ‘Which cards would be the holy grail to find?' If I found these five or six cards, I'd basically be golden."

"I just started digging, and I literally went through all five big boxes, and nothing," Kess said "Then there was one tiny, very grubby, very worn deck box sitting off to the side in a closet. And I opened it up and in it was all six of the cards I was looking for."

After looking up the value of the cards, Kess sent her mother a text message.

"‘Mom, I think you have a card that's worth, like, a thousand dollars,'" Michel told the news outlet about her daughter's text message. "So I laughed and said, ‘Sure, Kess, show me the money.' And then she did."

They brought the cards including the Black Lotus, the rarest card in the Magic community -to a game store in Charlotte called Get Some Game so they can get some price evaluation for them.

"I was standing there, holding them, moving them back and forth in my hands, and I think I dropped one," Michele admitted. "And the guy working there about had a heart attack. He said, ‘Please, don't drop those cards. They're worth a lot of money.' And then they put them in a hard cover case."

Get Some Game manager Dennis Bolton recalled getting the cards in the store.

"It's the first time we'd ever bought a Black Lotus," Bolton revealed. "We get a few of the Power Nine a couple times a year, but, specifically, a Black Lotus is incredibly rare."

Any Magic collector would know that any mark or dent on a card will decrease its value, and Kess' cards are not in perfect condition. "They were pretty beat up, so we ended up getting $4,500 for the set," Kess said. "But that's pretty good."

The report says that Get Some Game kept Kess' cards until they found a local collector who purchased them, so the cards could remain in Charlotte. Kass and Michelle are keeping some vintage editions until their values increase but they ended up shipping other rare cards to the Seattle-based seller Card Kingdom, and they received $18,000 after selling the cards.

All in all, they sold more than $18,000 in cards, and are holding on to other vintage editions until their values increase.

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