Hot damn! That was a crazy five days. Last week, March 1st through 5th, TCG Machines sent a delegation of four people (Dan, Matt, Nathan, and myself) to exhibit at the 2026 GAMA Expo. This marks our third consecutive year attending this particular event, and wow, this year’s show did not disappoint! To set the stage for the expo and understand why this year was more interesting than most, we need to travel back to February of last year when there was big news from TCGplayer, who announced that they had stopped onboarding for their BinderPOS software, effective immediately. This was a bombshell, as BinderPOS represented one of just two major incumbents (the other being CrystalCommerce) in the TCG point of sale software market. The net result? Everyone started to develop POS software to fill this massive void.

Fast forward to GAMA 2026, and – perhaps unsurprisingly – there were several POS start-ups exhibiting at the show. Perhaps foremost among them, with a giant 20’x20’ booth, was ShadowPOS, a new software offering that has burst onto the scene in the last few months. Founded by Dustin Arnold, ShadowPOS counts among their developers none other than Barrett Routon, who – plot twist! – was one of the technical founders of BinderPOS. He’s back! … from the shadows? Is that where the name came from? Anyway, we had multiple occasions to interact with Dustin and his team over the course of the week, and I can personally attest to the fact that these are people who know what they’re doing. Another, exceedingly well-timed, POS offering was that of Trent Ellingsen and StorePass. Shout out to Trent, not only is he a very talented entrepreneur in the TCG tech ecosystem, he’s also the father OF FOUR! And I thought my life was busy. It’s a rarefied group of people that I can relate to on being both a founder in the TCG space and a father. But wait, here’s one more: Mikah Walters was also there with his company, SortSwift, which counts a POS system among their many software products. Apart from being a fellow TCG company founder and a father, Mikah is also a fellow robotics entrepreneur, and he and his team were at GAMA for the first time with their robot: the Super Sorter. This is the perfect segue into the titular topic of today’s blog post!

Along with being a most excellent year for POS software companies, 2026 was also the most well attended show to date for robotics and automation products. Exhibiting at the show were ourselves (TCG Machines) with the PhyzBatch-9000, SortSwift with the Super Sorter, CardCastle with the CardBot, and TCGplayer with the Roca Sorter. We were all relatively close together in a tight loop – automation alley, baby! It was particularly enjoyable for us, as we were kitty-corner, with our little 10’x10’ booth, to TCGplayer and their back-to-back 20’x20’ mega booths. Just staring each other down the whole week. But actually, the TCGplayer staff I spoke with at the show were incredibly cordial and polite. I especially enjoyed extended conversations with Ahmad Zeaiter, Head of Digitization, and Sam Clement, Senior Customer Success Manager. Both very genuine, very cool people. Right, but I am delaying speaking to the important news that has shaken the TCG robotics industry to its core: on day one of the expo, TCGplayer announced the Roca Sifter, a portable TCG scanner/sifter slated to start shipping this September (alliteration!) with a price tag of just $800.

$800? Yes, $800. But isn’t that like, 1/40th the cost of your machine? Yes, approximately so. Oh, and it gets even better: their software subscription costs just $25-per-month, compared to our $150-per-month. So… are you guys like totally f****d here or what? Well, happily no, we are not. While this new offering from TCGplayer is certainly a game-changer in a number of respects (for people appraising and listing their personal collections, as a desktop check-out machine, as a portable scanner to take to conventions, etc.), it does not compete directly with the primary use case of the PhyzBatch, which is to process high volumes of cards very quickly and to physically sort those cards into useful outputs. And while I have heard from at least one person who went ahead and purchased 20 of these new Sifters, it would – generally speaking – be a royal pain in the butt to try and accomplish what one PhyzBatch can do with a commensurate number of Roca Sifters.

All that said, people’s minds have been irrevocably blown by this pricing, and we’ve already had customers of ours say, “Hey, they’re able to offer software and updates for just $25 a month! How can you possibly justify charging us $150 per month? You stupid jerks.” Ouch. Our products may be robots, but we are still humans with human feelings 😢 Anyway, to answer your question: TCGplayer (AKA eBay) does not earn their primary income from software subscriptions on a hardware product. They make their money through transaction fees, ranging from 10 to 30% depending on how many of their services you are accessing, for sales occurring on their platform. A multi-billion dollar corporation running a massive digital marketplace can absolutely afford to offer rock bottom pricing on a loss leader product – hell, they could have given the Sifter away for free if they had wanted! Very clearly, the goal was not to make money on this new robot. Instead, the Roca Sifter is a net, which eBay and TCGplayer (given the pricing) are casting very wide, to increase TCG sales volume on their marketplace platforms. This makes perfect sense and is a prudent and pragmatic business maneuver. The net effect (ha, see what I did there?) of this maneuver on our industry will be very interesting to see. I have already heard several opinions from game store owners, varying from “this can only be good” to “this is the worst possible thing to happen ever.”

Ooh, slight tangent, but while on the subject of online market platforms, it was great to see Andrew Johnson and Tom Pannell exhibiting with Mana Pool. The first time I met these two gentlemen in-person was three years ago during our inaugural GAMA Expo. Back in 2024, they were in the very early stages of launching Mana Pool, which, it is very exciting to see, has exploded in popularity in the last couple of months! They had this fantastic graph on display at their booth, showing the number of people using their platform as it grew linearly, albeit slowly, over time. Then 2026 rolls around and the chart just takes off to the moon! So good. Thus, it’s not just the POS and robotics segments of the TCG industry that have started to diversify into a more healthy competitive state, it’s also the marketplace side of things. Could this have something to do with TCGplayer’s loss leader tactic with the Roca Sifter? Dare I speculate wildly on such things!? Well, if not here in one’s own blog post, then where, pray tell? Wheeeeeeeeeeeeeere!?! Back to robots now.

So what, if anything, does this mean for us here at TCG Machines? Well, not a ton, other than that the Roca Sifter totally stole our thunder at the show. We were very excited to unveil new technology at the expo, which included recognition support for the new Riftbound TCG and our new foil detection system. So far, our new Foil Finder system has proven to be 100% accurate, which is a huge improvement over our previous foil detection method. Sadly (for us), the Roca Sifter will be launching with very similar tech, so our advancement just got lost in the noise. Also, we did a “Premier Presentation” this year, with seating for almost 300 people! But, most unfortunately for us, our slot to speak was on the last day of the conference, and most expo attendees had already gone home by that point. Also, all four of us TCG Machines exhibitors had been going hard all week at the conference, out late every night and up early every morning. None more so than, Dan, of course. You legend. Anyway, each of us had lost our voices to varying degrees and were feeling pretty haggard for the talk – feelings mirrored, I’m sure, by many of the attendees. Lesson learned: never again on the last day of the expo!

The presentation was a fun time, though. And our good friends Dave, Lea-Anne, and Kit with Red Claw Gaming, and Dan with Four Knights really helped us out by speaking to their experience with us and the PhyzBatch-9000. It was also great getting to spend some time with these excellent people throughout the week.

So, here we are now post-GAMA. The competitive landscape has changed, but our purpose has not. We’re still here to build tools to help people run profitable trading card businesses. We still have a prominent place in the market and we’re excited to continue delivering on our mission. The future is much less certain for CardCastle’s CardBot, as the new Roca Sifter competes much more directly with their two-bin system. Another product which will be dramatically impacted, and who’s future was already uncertain, is the as-yet undelivered CardMill. With a price tag of just $300, CardMill was positioning themselves as the first commercially available TCG scanner/sifter/sorter for personal use. They did a KickStarter campaign and raised literally millions of dollars from nearly 4,600 backers. Now, as someone who has been walking the walk of running (ha!) a trading card game sorting machine business for over a decade, I have many thoughts and opinions on how Jonathan Domanus decided to go about launching the CardMill. Going from a prototype straight to mass production of something this complex was nothing short of insanity. INSANITY! And the landscape just got even more complicated with the Roca Sifter in the mix.

It was difficult enough for us when we launched just trying to meet the expectations of dozens, and eventually hundreds of customers. But trying to appease thousands of people, right out of the gate? My God. I guess, for me, that’s going to be one of the most interesting aspects of this new Roca Sifter launch. Again, speaking only from my experience (as that is all any of us have, I suppose), it has been very tricky to provide high-calibre support for our product, and we are just one small, relatively nimble company. With the Roca Sifter, you have a similarly complex product, but instead of it being housed under one roof, it is a collaborative effort between Lexmark, which is owned by Xerox, and Roca, which is owned by TCGplayer, which is owned by eBay. It’s a mouthful just to get all the parties involved into a single sentence. How will support be for such a product? Time will tell.

Until next time, here’s a few photos of our team enjoying the 2026 GAMA Expo!

‍