Story by Jessica Abel
Photos by Landon Cooper
Kess Hendrix, a senior at UNC-Chapel Hill, was sick of digging through the half-dozen mildewing boxes in her parents’ house in Charlotte.
She had been at it for two hours, combing through hundreds of vintage cards in search of a few rare treasures, when she saw a small deck box. It was dingy and weighed almost nothing.
“Eh, I guess I’ll check this one little box,” she thought. “I mean, there’s hardly anything in it.”
She opened the tab and let the cards spill out into her hand.
“‘Oh, my God,’” Hendrix said as she stared at six of the cards.
She thought she was looking at $20,000— per card.
***
The boxes Hendrix was looking through were filled with cards from the early years of the collector’s game, “Magic: The Gathering.” Her love of the game began with her parents, Michele and Nelson Hendrix, who began collecting cards in 1994, before Kess or her brother, Miles, were born.
Michele Hendrix was raised a Star Trek fan and attended popular culture conventions to keep up with the science-fiction community. She first encountered “Magic: The Gathering” at Dragon Con, a celebration of sci-fi and fantasy culture, in Atlanta and was hooked.
Michele worked at a consulting company in Winston-Salem, and she and her husband would play Magic with work friends during their lunch break and after work. She often found herself at Paradise Games in Winston-Salem to pick up booster packs of cards to round out her deck.
The cost of a pack in the early 90s? $2.99.
“I absolutely never thought of their collectability,” Michele said. “We collected them for their artwork, because they were pretty.”
After years of collecting and playing with friends and family, Michele and her husband began to have less time for Magic game nights when they had kids.
“It all got put on the back burner for a while,” Michele said, laughing. “But I kept everything. I thought, ‘I’m going to raise my children right. They’re going to know what this is. My children are going to be nerds just like me.’”
Kess poses with her mom, Michele Hendrix, 52, while holding the “Magic The Gathering” cards that they still have. Michele began collected the cards in 1994. She began teaching the game to Kess when Kess was in elementary school. They keep the remainder of their highly-valuable cards in a protective binder. The cards currently shown are all worth between $300-$500 each.
When Kess and Miles were in elementary school, Michele followed through on her promise.
“I would come home from a swim meet and it would be Magic time,” Kess said. “My uncle and my aunt would come over and we would play with all their old cards. I didn’t even know that there were other cards in existence except for theirs.”
The cards traveled with Kess’ family through moves around North Carolina and the Charlotte area. They stayed packed in boxes, bouncing from storage room to attic to closet. They’d been well-loved and well-played, and were treated as a game more than a collectable.
It wasn’t until spring of 2018, when Kess was in college and visiting a comic store in Durham, that she thought of the cards again. There was a display of “Magic: The Gathering” in the middle of the store, and as she left to go home for spring break, 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 said. “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.”
That’s when the treasure hunt began.
“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 some quick research, Kess realized the worn state of the cards and their edition would decrease the value, but she knew they were still treasures.
Michele remembers the text her daughter sent her.
“‘Mom, I think you have a card that’s worth, like, a thousand dollars,’” Michele said. “So I laughed and said, ‘Sure, Kess, show me the money.’ And then she did.”
They took the cards— including the Black Lotus, the most prized vintage card known to the Magic community— to Get Some Game, a game shop in Charlotte, to be evaluated and priced.
“I was standing there, holding them, moving them back and forth in my hands, and I think I dropped one,” Michele said. “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.”
Dennis Bolton, who works as a manager at Get Some Game, remembers getting the cards in the shop.
“It’s the first time we’d ever bought a Black Lotus,” Bolton said. “We get a few of the Power Nine a couple times a year, but, specifically, a Black Lotus is incredibly rare.”
When Bolton looks to value the cards, he checks for scratches, water damage and wear to the cards’ edges. Any mark or dent will devalue a card, and Kess’ cards had seen some play.
“They were pretty beat up, so we ended up getting $4,500 for the set,” Kess said. “But that’s pretty good.”
Get Some Game kept the cards until they found a local collector who bought them, so the cards could remain in Charlotte.
***
Michele and Kess continued to search through the cards, and shipped many of the other rare cards to the company Card Kingdom in Seattle, Wash.
All in all, they sold more than $18,000 in cards, and are holding on to other vintage editions until their values increase
“Now it’s just what I do. I understand it,” Kess said about continuing to find, sell and collect the cards. “And it’s so much fun. It’s a treasure hunt feeling.”
And what did they do with part of their Magic income?
“We ended up going to Disney World for a week,” Michele said. “This was our 30th anniversary year, and we had decided at the beginning of the year that we would do some trips. I don’t think we would’ve done that if we hadn’t found [those cards].”
