Those who grew up in the 90s will remember well the afternoons spent with friends playing Magic cards, the fantasy game produced by Wizards of the Coast. Like any fashion, these cards have also had their day, replaced by video games and new board games. However, they can still have a certain usefulness. Tomaso Freschi, a 36-year-old financial advisor from Piacenza, sold them and managed to save up enough money to buy a new house. “Over the years, I collected 80 albums of cards that completely filled the bookcase in my room,” Freschi says in an interview with Bologna Mail“But the good news – he adds – is that among this mass of papers there was also the Black Lotusso rare that it was valued at more than ten thousand euros.
The passion of collecting
The 36-year-old from Piacenza says he started playing Magic in 1995, when he was eight years old. “I bought them at the comic book store and then played with my friends. For five years, this game kept us company. The level of competition allowed us to own increasingly rare cards,” explains Freschi. Once he started high school, the decks ended up in drawers, but the collection continued to grow. “Even if I didn’t play with them anymore, I still bought them occasionally, but above all I exchanged them with direct acquaintances or people I contacted on the Internet. In thirty years, the speculative spirit had never prevailed, the goal was to have an excellent collection,” assures the 36-year-old.
From collection to sale
After attending a few comic book fairs, Freschi realized that all the papers he had at home could have a value that was anything but negligible. And so, in 2019, he decided to sell them all at once. “I found myself with a whole room full of magic,” he says. “At that moment, I was driven by the desire to emancipate myself and I went looking for a home of my own. So I decided to sell my entire collection in bulk, offering it to two Italian collecting societies.” Once the deal was done, Freschi decided to immediately reinvest the sum he had just received. Like, how? Buying a house. An expense for which he did not have to pay a single euro – he now claims – from the other savings he had set aside in the meantime.
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