Back in September 2016, I left behind a career as a Design Engineer manufacturing automated drilling equipment so that I could focus on TCG Machines full-time. This wasn’t a trivial decision, as it meant walking away from a solid income to become a bootstrapping entrepreneur, but I had done extensive market research and was highly confident that the endeavour would quickly become profitable. Indeed, I had some rather naive expectations for how fast I would get a trading card sorting machine to market. Naive is putting it lightly – the optimism of my initial projections was downright ridiculous. Looking at my business plan from September 2016, I expected a commercial launch of the PhyzBatch-9000 by March 2017, and for machines to be in the hands of customers by July 2017. Enter reality.

Jumping ahead to July 2017, and the only milestone I had achieved was a personal one: I got married. Luckily, my wife was gainfully employed, which (in case you’ve been wondering) is how I was able to continue to pursue this endeavour full-time without drawing a salary – thank you Jen! Fast-forward to April 2018, and I had a working alpha prototype – I called it Alphie – of the robotic card sorter. I was so impressed with Alphie that I filmed a short promotional video with it (link below). This turned out to be a tad premature, as Alphie did not begin field trials with a local game store (LGS) until six months later in October, and that version of the machine never became a commercially available product.

Over the course of 17 months, and many hundreds of fixes and tweaks to the hardware and software, Alphie diligently scanned and sorted one-million Magic: The Gathering cards. That’s a ton of cards! Actually, that volume of cards weighs 4,000 lbs (1,800 kg), which is quite literally two tons. It’s difficult to put this into perspective, but here’s my attempt: THAT’S A FLIPPIN’ ELEPHANT SEAL WORTH OF CARDS!!! What’s an elephant seal? This is:

If one-million Magic cards were stacked in a single column, they would stand 1,000 ft (305 m) high – which is the height of a 71-story building. For dramatic effect, a scale image of this theoretical column of cards is shown below in orange next to the 984 ft (300 m) tall Eiffel Tower and a large wind turbine tower:

Though a momentous achievement, having a single prototype card sorter process a couple tons of cards for one LGS was a far cry from being a “commercial launch”. However, I did achieve another personal milestone during this period, that being the birth of my son in December 2018. I had made assurances to my wife that TCG Machines would be revenue positive long before our first child was born. Whoops! Despite this, my wife decided to stay with me. Perhaps having a child together helped with that. Huzzah!

Jumping ahead another several months, and I was able to leverage Alphie’s success to fund the production of eight Beta Trial machines, the first of which entered service in August 2020. These beauties are still going strong today, which brings us (finally!) to the title of the blog post: a series of world records set by the Beta Trial PhyzBatch-9000 card sorting machines! Before jumping in, a few points of clarification for the records presented below:

• Use of the words "cards sorted" refers to cards being scanned, identified, appraised, digitally catalogued, AND physically separated into output bins
• These records are for cards run through an individual machine, with people actively loading and unloading those cards. The machines have a hopper capacity of 1,750 cards, hence, other than for "most cards sorted by a machine in one minute", these records are not fully autonomous
• The cards being sorted were either Magic: The Gathering or Pokémon cards
• Elephant seals are enormous! Go watch a Youtube video! It’s crazy.

With those caveats established, I give you the world records!

This is absolutely stupendous. Sorting one million trading cards once took 17 months, but now this same feat is being accomplished in just one! We can now officially award TCG Machines’ much coveted Elephant Seal of Approval to the PhyzBatch-9000.

This most prestigious award is bestowed only on card sorting machines that can demonstrably sort one-million trading cards within a single month. Are we above making up awards and then giving them to our own products? Cleary, we are not. And the real kicker here is that these are just Beta Trial prototypes! Where are the Production Machines, you ask? Well, they are being assembled right now and the first will be delivered to customers starting in May, 2022. So, from my initial projection for having PhyzBatch-9000s in the hands of customers by July 2017, I was only off by about… five years. This brings me to our final world record:

I would add that I am also very lucky that my wife has stuck by me this whole time; we actually just celebrated the birth of our daughter at the end of February this year. I now officially have kids, plural. Who needs sleep, am I right? Having a social life is overrated too. Kids are the way.

I will wrap this post up by extending my most sincere gratitude to the team we have built here at TCG Machines. Their efforts are making production of the PhyzBatch-9000 a reality, and I am very, very excited to finally be sending these marvels out into the world.

With great humility and the utmost of thanks to our incredibly patient customers,

Graeme

‍