'Stone Rain Dan': Green Bay collector amasses magnificent collection of the same Magic the Gathering card

GREEN BAY, Wis. (CBS 58)--A Green Bay man has taken his love for a card game to a whole new level. The man known as 'Stone Rain Dan' shares with CBS 58 News his obsession with his favorite card, which has turned into a massive collection.

"I always loved games," Dan Barnard said. "I'm halfway decent at it but there's a lot of people that are better at it than I am."

Barnard said he served six years in the Air Force within the military police, security forces unit.

"When I first went into the military we first started playing 'Dungeons and Dragons,' and we played the whole time I was in the military," he recalled.

Once he was out, he became a computer programmer.

"One of the guys came back from Gen Con said 'hey, there's a new card game out there called Magic: The Gathering and he brought a bunch of cards and that was in the summer of 1995," Barnard added.

Barnard has been hooked on playing the game since the mid-90s.

"It's like two wizards in an arena facing off and they're doing spells back and forth at each other," he explained. "And you get them down from 20 lives down to zero and you win."

He spends at least once a week at the "Gnome Games' shop in Green Bay, playing his favorite game with some of his buddies.

"The Magic community is a very social community, always glad to help out new people," he said.

It might be a game but it's serious business. There are quite literally thousands of officially traded cards. Some worth as low as a nickel and others, as high as $50,000.

"The maximum I've paid for one card is $4,000," he said.

For Dan Barnard, there's one card that's worth everything, it's called "Stone Rain." He has nearly 139,000 versions of the exact same card.

"All it does is destroy target land; now, land is what you use to power your spells," he went on to explain.

He owns copies in different languages, test prints, limited editions, and some even autographed by artists.

"There's probably, I think there's over 100 editions and each edition has anywhere between like a 150-300 cards," he said.

It's an obsession Barnard said began in 1997.

"I keep everything sorted out by edition and I keep an exact count of exactly how many I have with each," he told CBS 58 News as he pulled out boxes and boxes of his collection.

The idea came after a friend shared his collection of another card with Barnard.

"He had 130 of them and I thought, 'I can do better than that,'…I thought, 'oh, I can get a lot of these and it's not real expensive, let's see how many I can get,' and I just never stopped," Barnard said.

The community is well-aware of who he is. In fact, to many, he's known as 'Stone Rain Dan.'

"Pretty much you cannot find a Stone Rain within 50 miles of Green Bay, they just don’t have them…because of me," he admitted.

He's also been involved in tournaments. On some occasions, he's been able to travel across the nation.

About 9 years ago, I actually became a judge for the tournaments," he said.

And what may have started out as a personal challenge, may very well end up receiving some global recognition sometime very soon.

"I've actually contacted Guinness, as in the book of world records but it takes about 12 weeks for them to come out," Barnard said.

For now, 'Stone Rain Dan' has no plans to stop collecting his favorite card.

"I'm going to keep going as long as I can, am able to, I'm going to keep hoarding them," he said. "A friend of mine says that what we should do…when I die, is that, all the good ones, all the more expensive ones are going to go to my daughter Emma, and they're going to take all the rest of them, that hundred and thousand some of them or, by that time, who knows, probably two hundred thousand, and put them onto a big stack, and then put my body on top of them, have this big Viking funeral."