A common problem faced by collectors of trading card games like Pokemon is getting a modern fix thanks to a Calgary-based company.
Graeme Gordon said he got the idea when he was recovering from a knee injury and decided to sort the collection of Magic: The Gathering cards he’d started as a child.
It took him three full days to sort through his collection, a “monotonous, painstaking experience.”
“That’s the light bulb moment when I realized that myself as a personal collector, having this problem, must exist at scale for businesses that have millions of cards, not just thousands,” Gordon, president and CEO of TCG Machines, said.
An automated equipment designer for the oil and gas industry by trade, Gordon took some time during a downturn to do market research. Hundreds of phone calls to stores in dozens of provinces and states confirmed shops that sell and resell collectible card games were in need of an automated way to identify, sort and evaluate cards.
Phoenix Comics in Calgary put a million cards through Gordon’s prototype.
“Totally a game changer. It helped us sort through so much stuff,” Phoenix Comics owner Brian Ziemba said.
“We were using it a lot to sort by price, where we were putting in cheap stuff and then it would spit out all the good stuff. And then we could look through that closer, and all the rest of the stuff just kind of got rid of.
“But a huge game changer.”
TCG’s current machines use an optical scanner to identify the image and match it to a database. The machine can sort 60 cards per minute according to a variety of criteria, like valuation, colour, print year, or other card characteristics.
In addition to working on being able to sort cards by special edition and condition, Gordon is planning to add a type of artificial intelligence to improve the sorting software, providing further value for his clients.
“We are branching into machine learning now, which is going to help a lot with speed as well as being able to recognize new games faster.”
A $100,000 grant helped get eight more machines out to stores around the province in 2020, and “the force” was with TCG Machines on its commercial launch on May 4, 2021.
“We made 50 sales in the first 30 days after launch, and it was very clear that we needed to scale up and start a production operation,” Gordon said. “We ended that year with five employees and we ended last year closer to 20 employees.”
They’ve moved 150 units out their doors now, with another 50 on back order.
Since the company’s inception, TCG Machines have processed more than 100 million cards, weighing the equivalent of 200 tons.
“It’s all been word of mouth, it’s all been organic,” Gordon said.
The global trading card game market size has been estimated at around USD$13 billion in 2021, with double-digit growth expected to push the industry to more than USD$33 billion by 2028.
According to Japanese government filings shared by industry analyst Serkan Toto, the Pokemon Company’s net sales in 2022 reached USD$1.67 billion, a 15 per cent increase from the previous year.
Hasbro’s Magic: The Gathering posted a 16 per cent increase in net revenues in Q1 2023, surpassing USD$229 million in net revenues that quarter.
Gordon’s got his eye on a market that’s beyond trading card games.
“Sports cards is the next big milestone for us – we plan on getting into it in 2024. And also Europe – we need to expand globally and start getting into the EU.”
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