Scan any Magic card with your phone and see what it's worth

Everyone who plays Magic has a box of cards they can't name. Inherited collections, bulk buys, draft leftovers, that binder from 2004. Somewhere in there is a card worth real money, and nobody has the patience to type five hundred names into a search box.

The Cardboard Deals app has a scanner for exactly this. Point your camera at a card and, in a couple of seconds, you get the card identified, with its current value, full price history, other printings and any live deals attached.

How it works

When you scan, the app compares your photo against reference artwork for the printings we track and returns the closest matches with a confidence score. It finds the card in your photo first, so an angled shot on a messy desk still resolves, then matches on the artwork itself, which is what lets it tell printings apart rather than just naming the card.

From the match you land on the full card page: what it's worth raw, what graded copies go for, the price trend, every printing with its own value, and a strip of visually similar cards (handy when the match is close but the art looks slightly off, as the right version is usually one tap away).

Getting clean matches

A few habits make the scanner near-instant:

• Fill the frame. Use the on-screen guide and get the whole card in, edges included.
• Even light beats bright light. Glare is the enemy, especially on foils, so tilt the card away from direct light.
• Sleeves are usually fine. Heavy glare on a glossy sleeve isn't; pop the card out if a match comes back uncertain.
• Photos work too. You can pick an existing photo from your gallery instead of using the camera.

Free accounts get 15 scans a day, enough for a casual session. Premium removes the cap entirely, which matters when the shoebox turns out to be a crate.

What it's for

Valuing an unknown pile is the obvious one, but the scanner earns its keep in smaller moments: checking whether the LGS display case price is fair, confirming which printing a trade partner is actually offering, or adding cards to your collection at speed: scan, confirm, done, next card.

The scanner is free in the app. Get it at cardboarddeals.com/app. Your shoebox has been waiting long enough.