A Magic: The Gathering Collection Tracker That Starts With the Card

The printing is the whole problem

A Magic card is not one card. Lightning Bolt has been printed in dozens of sets across four decades, and the gap between the cheapest and the dearest printing is the entire reason anyone tracks a collection at all. Any tracker that records the card name and stops has recorded almost nothing.

What pins a printing is the set code and the collector number — both printed in small type along the bottom of every modern card. Those are exactly the sort of thing that is tedious to type and easy for a camera to read, which is why the photograph is the better starting point.

The eighteen fields a Magic card carries

Magic: The Gathering is its own type here rather than a row in a generic card bucket, and it asks eighteen questions no other type asks:

• Set / expansion, Set code, Collector number and Release year — together, the printing.
• Card frame — which era of border and layout, the thing that separates an old printing from a modern reprint at a glance.
• Color, Type and Mana cost / CMC — how the card actually plays.
• Rarity, Print and Variant — foil, showcase, borderless, extended art.
• Serialized number — for the numbered runs where the serial is the value.
• Signed and Storage — artist signatures, and where the card physically lives.
• Graded by, Grade and Certification number — shown from the start, with Raw first.

Language sits alongside them, which matters for the Japanese alternate-art printings that trade well above their English equivalents.

The price comes from Scryfall

The AI in this app is forbidden from estimating a value. What you paid, what it is worth and where you acquired it are withheld from autofill on every collectible type, because a confident number produced from a photograph is wrong exactly as fluently as it is right.

Magic gets a value by a different route. Once the printing is identified, TrophyShelf queries Scryfall — the free, public Magic card database — and writes the market figure into Est. value. That is a lookup against a real catalogue entry, not an inference from an image.

Three games are wired this way: Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon and Yu-Gi-Oh!, because those are the catalogues that are free and need no account. For every other type the field stays empty and yours.

One caveat worth knowing: the figure is for the printing, not your copy. A played card with a scuffed edge is worth less than the catalogue says, and recording that gap is what the Condition field is for.

Set it up in TrophyShelf

1. Create a Magic collectionTap + on My Shelf and pick Magic: The Gathering. That choice is what gives you set code, collector number, frame and variant — a generic type will not.
2. Photograph the cardFront first, and get the bottom edge in frame — that is where the set code and collector number live. Up to 10 photos each.
3. Let autofill read the printingSet, code, number, color, mana cost and rarity fill in from the photo, each carrying an AI badge.
4. Check the looked-up valueEst. value arrives from Scryfall for that printing. Confirm it is the printing you are holding before saving.
5. Record condition and storageCondition is always yours. Storage is the field that answers “which deck box is this in?” six months later.

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