Getting started with TCGJoin: your collection up to date in an afternoon

Every uninventoried collection tells the same story: it started as "I’ll just remember what I have" and ended as a box where nobody knows whether there are three copies of the same card or none. The good news is that getting out of that hole is much faster than it looks.

This guide is the short route: what to do in your first session with TCGJoin, in what order, and what to expect from the free plan before you even think about paying for anything.

Step 1: the account and the active game

The free account takes a minute to create, with email or with Google. The first choice you make inside is the active game: Pokémon, Magic, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh! or whatever you collect, soccer stickers included. Everything else — the catalog you see, what the scanner recognizes, what the AI knows — depends on that choice, and you can switch it whenever you like.

Step 2: add your first cards

There are two paths, and it pays to know both. The scanner: you photograph the card with your phone, the AI identifies it — set, number, variant — and saves it as confirmed. The search: you type the name into the catalog and check it off by hand. The scanner is the fast lane for the pile of physical cards; the search is for adding the odd card, or marking cards you don’t have in front of you.

Start by scanning ten cards, not five hundred. The first ten teach you the motion — the lighting, the framing, confirming the proposal — and from there the rest is just rhythm.

Step 3: see what the inventory tells you

With the first cards in, the collection starts telling you things the box never did: each set’s progress (how many you have, how many are missing), each card’s reference price, and which part of your collection is scan-confirmed versus marked from memory. This is the moment most people discover they’re three cards away from finishing a set they thought was half done.

Step 4: your first deck

The deck builder runs on the same catalog, so the cards you already scanned are one click away. The free plan includes several decks and a handful of daily AI suggestions: enough to build your first deck and ask the AI to critique it — which is the best first question you can ask it.

What’s free and what isn’t, no fine print

• The free plan (Common) never expires: collection, scanner, set progress, several decks, and a daily AI quota to try things out.
• The paid plans (Rare and Legendary, for the price of a coffee a month) raise the deck count, the daily AI quota, and the number of cards with stored photos.
• If you ever downgrade, nothing gets deleted: whatever exceeds the limit is paused and comes back intact if you upgrade again.

The sensible order is to start free, build the inventory, and decide with the collection already in whether your plan’s quota is getting tight. The other way around — pay first, try later — doesn’t make much sense, which is why we won’t recommend it.