Pokémon card scanner: point, shoot, cataloged

Show the card to your camera and in seconds you know what it is, which set, which variant, and its reference price. No typing.

How the scanner works

Open the camera in TCGJoin, frame the card, shoot. The vision AI identifies it — name, expansion, number within the set, and variant — and finds it in the catalog. You confirm the proposal and the card lands in your collection with its reference price and its slot in the set’s progress.

The difference versus typing it out isn’t comfort, it’s scale: identifying one card by hand takes minutes between set symbol, number, and variant. With the scanner, a mid-sized collection is inventoried in an afternoon. The full walkthrough is in the scanner guide.

What it knows about every card you scan

Exact set and number: it tells the 25/102 from Base Set apart from the same card in any reprint.

The variant: regular, holo, reverse holo, promo, or alternate art. That’s where the price gap lives.

A market reference price, for sorting the collection and flagging what deserves a serious appraisal.

Set progress: you scan, and you see how many cards you’re still missing from that expansion.

It’s marked "scan-confirmed", photo included: you know you genuinely own that copy.

Covers the whole history of the Pokémon TCG

From Base Set (1999) to the current Scarlet & Violet and Mega Evolution sets: the catalog covers the full expansions with their variants. You can browse the complete list of Pokémon sets with card counts and the estimated value of completing each one.

The scanner recognizes cards in English, Spanish, and Japanese. And if you collect more games, the same motion works for Magic, One Piece, Yu-Gi-Oh! and the rest of the catalog — just switch the active game.

Tricks for first-try scans

Even light, no glare: on holos, tilt the card a few degrees until the shine stops covering the text.

Whole card in frame, on a contrasting background.

Straight on, not diagonal: a tilted photo distorts the number and set the AI reads.

Check the active game. It’s the number one cause of "card not found", well ahead of bad photos.

Frequently asked questions

Is the scanner free?

Yes. The free plan includes the scanner and your collection, with no expiry. Paid plans raise how many cards keep their stored photo and the daily AI quota — not the scanning itself.

Will any phone work?

Any reasonably modern phone. Lighting matters more than the camera: a glare-free photo identifies better than an expensive camera with reflections.

Does it detect fake cards?

No: it identifies which card it is, not whether the print is legitimate. A good counterfeit gets identified as the card it imitates. For that, use the manual checks in our fake card guide.

Does it read Japanese cards?

Yes — the Pokémon catalog covers EN, ES, and JP. The card is identified the same way and linked to its set.

What if it picks the wrong variant?

The scan proposes and you confirm: before saving you can pick the correct variant. Typical misses are near-identical variants, fixed in one tap.