Full transparency: I was pressed for time to get this post up today, so I (once again) used Microsoft Copilot’s “Visual Creator” AI tool to generate images for this post. Turns out that AI image generators have a lot of issues with numeracy and literacy, as evidenced by some of the horrifying results I got from what were very simple and explicit prompts.

Today is the 10-year anniversary of TCG Machines! This breaks my mind. To be fair, the company was originally incorporated as “Immortal Systems Ltd.” for an entirely different business venture. I thought I had come up with a cost-effective electricity generation system utilizing the temperature differential between above-ground and below-ground nodes in winter climates, similar in principle to an Einstein Refrigerator (a device which I was only recently made aware of). Long story short, the earth is a very poor conductor of heat, so what I had actually designed was a very effective ground freezer. Sigh. Luckily, I realized my error pretty quickly, and immediately pivoted to the card sorting machine venture.

Well, here we are now a full decade later! In a fun coincidence, we also rolled over another historic milestone today, as our fleet of card sorters surpassed 300-million (300,000,000) total trading cards processed as of this morning. That is 600 tons of cards, equivalent to five blue whales, or four Statue of Liberty’s. This means our customers are using their PhyzBatch-9000s as they were intended, and it’s nice to come back to work after the holidays to some social media posts highlighting exactly this (shout out to CNA Games and KitchenTableTCG).

2025 promises to be a big year for our company, as we have a lot of fun developments and features coming down the pike. What kinds of developments and features, you ask? Well, how about 100% accurate foil card detection. That’s right. No more of this ~80-95% accuracy nonsense. We’ve developed new technology that has (so far) proven to be perfectly accurate across every type of trading card we’ve tested, including Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, One Piece, and even sports cards! The best part is, this new tech is reverse compatible with our existing machines, so we can roll this out to all of our existing customers simply by swapping out the Scanner module of the machine.

Not impressed? Well, please lower your standards – you’ll be a happier and more content person. But, we also have some very promising R&D in the area of counterfeit card detection. And again, the hardware to enable this new tech is able to be incorporated into our existing machines. Blam!

No definitive timeline on either of the above as yet, but please expect more information on these fronts from us soon. And, of course, we are constantly working on improving the accuracy of our card identification techniques and adding support for more TCGs (and eventually sports cards). There will be some significant improvements and updates rolling out this year.

Happy New Year from all of us here at TCG Machines, and – as ever – thank you for your patronage. You can’t have a business without customers, and we’ve got some pretty excellent customers 😃