AI Card Scanner

AI Card Scanner

The scanner identifies Magic cards from your phone's camera. Point it at a card, tap once, and you have a match in under a second, including the set, collector number, and whether it's foil. It's not magic (well, it's a little magic), but it's close.

It's phone-only. Open it on a desktop and you'll get a note pointing you at the Queue instead. A webcam pointed at a card on a desk gives the model far less to work with than a phone held over it.

How It Works

Tap the large circle at the bottom of the scanner to capture the current frame. The image goes to Google Gemini's vision model, which reads the art, name, set symbol, and collector number all at once, matches the result against the card database, and drops it into your Queue for review. Nothing touches your collection until you approve it.

You'll know it worked because your phone will vibrate and you'll hear a short beep. A double-buzz means no match was found, try again from a slightly different angle.

Scanning is free and unlimited, for everyone, forever. It's not counted against any AI allowance and it never will be. See AI Features if you want the details on what is and isn't metered.

Auto-Scan

This is the one worth knowing about. Flip on the cyan Auto toggle and you don't have to tap anything. The scanner watches the camera feed, notices when the picture changes enough to mean you've put down a new card, and captures on its own.

In practice that means you can hold your phone in a stand, sit down with a stack, and just flip cards. No tapping between each one. It's the difference between cataloging a shoebox in an evening and giving up halfway through.

The manual capture button switches off while Auto is running, since the two would fight each other. Turn Auto off and it comes back.

Setting Up Phone-to-Desktop Scanning

Scanning a whole collection is much more comfortable when your phone does the scanning and your desktop shows the results. Here's the setup:

The QR code dialog closes automatically once the connection is established. If you close the scanner on your phone, just rescan the QR code to reconnect.

Scanner Controls

There's a row of four toggles just above the shutter button.

Auto: Hands-free capture, described above.

Price: Puts the scanner in read-only mode. It still identifies the card and shows you a full-screen readout with the name, set, and price, but nothing goes to the queue. This is the one to use at an LGS or across a trade table when you just want to check a number.

Bright: Brightens the captured frame for flat, matte cards. On by default. The scanner skips it automatically when the flash is on, which stops glare from washing out the art.

Flash: Turns on the phone's torch. Only appears if your device actually supports it. Worth it in a dim room or with dark card borders.

Capture Button: The large circle at the bottom. One tap per card, and it disappears while Auto is running.

Tips That Actually Help

Keep the card flat and fully in frame, angled or partially visible cards confuse the model. Good lighting matters more than you'd think; a few seconds adjusting the torch or brightness boost will save you a lot of bad matches. If you're getting a string of misses, try switching which lighting option you're using.

If you scan the same card twice in quick succession, you'll get a Duplicate detected prompt with the choice to skip it or add it anyway, handy when you legitimately own two copies. Rescanning the exact same card within ten seconds is ignored silently.

After three failed matches in a row the scanner stops itself and asks you to refresh the page. That's deliberate: three misses in a row usually means something environmental: bad light, a reflective sleeve, the camera focusing past the card, and grinding through more failures won't fix it.

What Happens After You Scan

Every card lands in the Queue with a confidence badge: green for high confidence, amber for medium, red for low. High-confidence cards are almost always right. Red ones need a closer look. You can approve everything at once, reject everything, or go card by card. If the AI got it wrong, you can correct it before approving. See the Queue section for the full approval workflow.