Organize Your Collection of Collectible Card Games With These Apps

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Trading and collectible card games (abbreviated as CCG and CCG) can be a lot of work, especially when you start piling up boxes and boxes of physical cards.

Whether you’re a competitive Pokémon TCG player looking to try out new deck builds, the avid Yu-Gi-Oh! a collector looking for rare deals, or you’ve recently found yourself staring at wobbling stacks of long-forgotten Magic: The Gathering cards while KonMari stores your belongings (as I do), there are a number of apps you can use to catalog, rate, and more. . and unload parts (or all) of your collection.

Scanning cards against playing digital CCG / CCG

Before we get started, one quick note: all of the applications below are for managing your physical map collection – they allow you to scan maps to create digital catalogs; transfer imported maps from other regions; look for the latest rules for your game; or buy, sell and exchange cards in the app.

These apps are not meant to load your physical collection into online versions of these games like M: TG Arena , Magic Online , Pokemon TCG Online, or unofficial digital faxes. While being able to play online with copies of your physical cards would be cool, don’t expect game designers to ever be very interested in disrupting their digital economy by letting you import your physical cards.

Buy, sell and exchange cards with TCGplayer

TCGplayer is primarily intended for buying, selling and / or exchanging cards from your collection. The app supports Magic: The Gathering, Pokemon TCG, and Yu-Gi-Oh!, Although Final Fantasy TCG, Force of Will, and Star Wars: Destiny are expected to be added in future updates.

TCGplayer features are pretty standard. The app allows you to scan multiple cards at a time, even if they are in envelopes or bindings, and can automatically translate imported cards. However, the real attraction of TCGplayer is the functionality of the marketplace app.

When you scan a card, you can choose its quality, issue, and settings to get an accurate estimate of its value. TCGplayer (website) is a huge card marketplace, so when you scan your cards with the app, you can see their current market value right away. You can then sell and buy cards with other users directly through the app, and Magic: The Gathering collectors can even sell their cards at nearby in-game stores (rather than individual shoppers) using TCGplayer’s exchange feature.

You can also organize your scanned cards into sets that can be exported to a variety of file formats. This can be useful when you post deals online elsewhere, create a spreadsheet, or sell cards at brick-and-mortar stores.

You can download TCGplayer for both Android and iOS for free.

Manage your tournament-ready Pokemon decks with the Pokemon TCG Card Dex

Ironically, many Pokémon TCG apps have features that prevent them from being a universal collector’s solution. Some only recognize English flashcards, while others have crappy collection and organization features. The Pokemon company seems to have noticed this and will soon be releasing a free card scanning and collection organization app: The Pokemon TCG Card Dex .

With the Pokemon TCG Card Dex, users can scan their cards, create decks, and search for cards in a database that contains all the cards available, starting with the Sun & MoonPokemon TCG series. The app will also automatically translate the scanned map into your preferred language, useful for anyone playing in international tournaments or events that allow you to import maps – a feature that my 10-year-old at the height of the Pokémon fandom deeply envies. … Apart from these features, Pokemon TCG Card Dex is also the prettiest app of its kind thanks to its smart animated user interface, which you can see in the demo in the app above.

The only drawback of the application is that currently it only supports maps from the Sun & Moon series. While this makes sense given that the official Pokémon TCG events in Standard Format only allow you to use cards from the Sun & Moon series (and not the twelve episodes and numerous expansions that preceded it), it’s a shame the app does not currently allow you to scan even old maps. There is no official indication as to whether the older kits will be supported at the time of this article’s publication.

Nonetheless, curious fans should try the app. The Dex TCG Pokemon card will be available for free on iOS and Android. (The app has officially launched in Sweden, but full global rollout is expected soon.)

Track Your Magic: The Gathering Collection With Delver Lens

There are many third-party apps for Magic: The Gathering, but Delver Lens is one of the few zero-cost Android options that lets you scan, organize, build decks, and buy / sell / trade in a single app.

Delver Lens Scan Tool will recognize all cards from the original, customized to the Ravnica Allegiance extension released on January 25, 2019, even if you scan your collection offline.

By scanning cards with your phone camera, you can save a digital version of your collection, which you can then use to create decks right on your smartphone or tablet. You can also automatically back up your collection to Dropbox through the app, in addition to exporting cardsets to a number of other databases and online deck building tools such as:

  • CardSphere
  • DeckBox
  • DeckStats
  • EchoMTG
  • MTGGoldFish
  • MyCardInventory
  • PucaTrade
  • Silent speculation
  • TappedOut
  • Excel / Google Sheets

In addition to flexible cataloging and deck building options, Delver Lens also helps you buy new cards or sell / trade the ones you already own. You can check the current market value of your cards on the TCGplayer.com and MagicCardMarket.com listings , all of which can be converted to different currencies. You can also use Delver Lens to buy or sell M: TG cards directly through Card Kingdom .

Delver Lens is free to download and use for Android , but in order to export sets larger than 99 maps at a time, you’ll need to subscribe to the premium version of the app – either $ 2.99 per month or $ 30 per year.

BigAR TCG Card Scanners

BigAR offers a variety of game-specific map scanning apps that can be used as quick reference / translation tools, and they’ll even help you evaluate your map collection for almost all major TCG / CCGs:

BigAR uses a database that allows you to scan and translate cards even when you are offline. These scanners can also automatically pull the market value of the card (if available) from TCGplayer.com , MtgMintCard.com, or CardKingdom.com and convert it to your chosen currency, although in-app buy, sell and trade features are not included. … While these features are not as robust as TCGplayer or others, they still come in handy for niche games that don’t have other apps like this.

In addition to these features, M: TG, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! The manager apps also include deckbuilding and collecting features, with some caveats . The basic version of the manager apps only supports a limited number of “slots” for saving scanned maps, and you have to buy access to the latest expansion packs to save maps from them. Fortunately, that’s a pretty reasonable price tag – around $ 3 to unlock the newest sets and add an extra 100 card slots – but it’s still limited when compared to similar apps. On the other hand, BigAR is developing web versions for these applications that will enable cross-platform synchronization.

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