In late June of 2023 I stumbled across a unique Graded Lightning Bolt that my now close friend Jacob was selling. It was a unique card because it had been a part of Cyrille de Foucaud’s legendary collection and was played in his deck for the first Magic World Championship in 1994 where he made it all the way to the Top4 before losing to Bertrand Lestree. The idea of owning a piece of Magic’s history was tantalizing and made it a snap buy for me.
Purchasing this Lightning Bolt from Jacob was the genesis of our friendship which has continued to grow in the time since. Jacob cracked the Bolt for me and sent it along with the tag and an Emerald City Trolls sticker.
Later in the summer of 2023 I negotiated a deal for a set of Richard Garfield altered Blue Power which were also from Cyrille de Foucaud’s collection. I will write a post about them sometime in the future. Throughout this process I enlisted the help of my friend Benoit who is the foremost expert on Garfield cards. Benoit was invaluable in helping me craft my correspondence, negotiate a price, and ultimately execute a deal. Thanks a ton for the help with that one!
After acquiring more cards from Cyrille’s collection I became interested in getting in touch with him to find out more of the backstory on them. With Benoit’s help, I sent Cyrille an email, got one reply back confirming I had the right person, and asking if I had WhatsApp. After I responded saying that I did have WhatsApp and would love to catch up, I never heard back.
With the help of my friend West I dug into the old coverage archives and found a few gems about Cyrille and his past. I was eager to learn more, but didn’t hear back.
Over the past year or so my friend Simon has floated the idea to me that it would be really cool if I could get Cyrille to sign the Lightning Bolt a few times. I wholeheartedly agreed, but aside from the email that he never responded to I was unsure how to get in contact with him. After Simon brought it up at the end of 2024, I shared this problem with Benoit who had an out of the box solution. Cyrille owns a jewelry store in Geneva which is where our mutual acquaintance Francois lives. Maybe they know each other and Francois can assist with getting the signature.
I knew Francois because he and I had played a match at Winc0n in 2023 and then randomly shared a cab to the Gothenburg airport at n00bcon last year. I reached out to him with minimal expectation that it would turn into anything but funnily enough he had bought a watch from Cyrille a few years ago. Francois was happy to facilitate, I just needed to send the Bolt to him and ideally retrieve it at n00bcon this year.
I randomly had the urge this week to reach out to Francois to see if he’d had any luck getting in touch with Cyrille having not exchanged any messages since the end of January. In a strange coincidence, Francois messaged me back a few hours later to say that he had actually been to see Cyrille and get my Bolt signed earlier that day!
In addition to having an aesthetically pleasing signature, Cyrille had shared some fun anecdotes from the past including how a guy at Origins 1994 had proposed to him that he could purchase 20% of the entire Beta print run for $120,000… For those doing math at home that works out to $187 per complete set of Beta…
I cannot wait to see Francois at n00bcon to retrieve my precious Lightning Bolt and hear some more of Cyrille’s tales from the early 1990’s. If I’m lucky I someday might get in direct contact with him, but that will have to wait for a future blog post.
Huge thanks to my friends who have helped me out along the way with this journey. Jacob, Benoit, West, Simon, and Francois all helped me in their own way and without any one of them I think this pipe dream would’ve fallen apart.
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