$40,000 Magic: The Gathering Robbery Victim Gives Advice To Make Sure Your Collection is Properly Protected

Long-time Magic: The Gathering collector Anthony Avitollo recently talked about how he lost his $40,000 MTG collection two years ago during his interview with Solely Singleton podcast, and he and the hosts of the show also shared some (non-legally binding) advice on how to make sure that your valuable Magic collection is properly insured and protected.

Credit: Wizards of the Coast

Avitollo shared the details of the robbery of his $40,000 collection with the Soley Singleton hosts Brad and Eric: While working late in high-school, he opened his home's front door, and when he entered his home, his possessions have been ransacked, and found out that his Cube vault (for those who don't know, it looks like a carrier gun case) and Xbox One were gone. He found out that it was taken to his local game store (LGS), and he was able to recover it from his LGS. There was a Magic: The Gathering Grand Prix Atlanta that weekend, and while playing at a Legacy side event, he received a phone call from the landlord asking if he usually leaves his backdoor open, and found out that his home was broken into again. He noticed that much of his MTG collection were missing. After contacting the police and going to the LGS to find out if the burglars brought his cards there to sell, and found out that much of his sealed MTG products were opened. While he was able to recover some of his MTG collections, he lost his entire playsets of MTG rares, mythic rares, and foils for Modern and Legacy formats. The burglars have already been arrested, and although he wasn't expecting to get a lot of what he lost back, Avitollo said that he's thankful that he was able to recover the $70,000+ of MTG products despite losing $40,000 worth.

Avitollo went on to share some advice on how to make sure your MTG collections are properly protected. He advised to not assume that the insurance will cover everything, so you should always claim everything and asks a lot of speciific questions to the insurance to make sure that your collectibles are covered properly if they are stolen. He also advised to identify which of your collectibles are for personal property or for work because there are different coverages.

Other advices include:

1) Buy a gun non-transportable safe resistant from fire and water damage

2) Don't leave your cards in a car, not even in the trunk.

3) Document every MTG purchases, keep track of your buy history, take screenshots of online purchases. Online inventory is not enough.

4) Take photos of your collections.

5) Buy an alarm or a vicious dog

You can listen to the podcast in the embed below:

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