A Calgary man built a machine to sort trading cards. Now with 150 machines sold, he has sorted 100M cards.

Hours slip by while Graeme Gordon sorts through his thousands of trading cards.

A collector of Magic: The Gathering cards, he spends hours sorting to determine what duplicates he owns and cut them from his collection.

Some collectors love this process; the tedious work of examining each card and determining where it fits. They are absorbed by the work as hours fly by.

Gordon is not one of those people. He dreads the process.

“I saw the opportunity for a card-sorting machine because at the time there was nothing commercially available in the market,” he says.

A mechanical engineer working in oil and gas as an automated equipment manufacturer, Gordon had the background to actually take his idea and make it a reality.

“I started doing some research and there were no automated [machines] to do this and it kind of seemed like a big hole in the marketplace.”

From dream to reality

It was 2015 when Gordon first entertained the idea of building his dream card-sorting machine, but in 2016 he left his position in oil and gas to pursue the machine full time.

In 2018, after two years of working, he had his first prototype of the PhyzBatch-9000.

“I took this prototype around and I showed it to maybe 10 different stores here in Calgary,” he says.

The first to bite was Phoenix Comics. Gordon says the store had a million cards it needed to be sorted, and staff saw the machine’s potential.

Phoenix Comics then started doing field trials with the PhyzBatch-9000. Over the next two years, Gordon would collect data, fix bugs, and continue working on the machine until he was happy to move into the next phase.

The next step was to apply for a grant through Alberta Innovates. Gordon was then given $100,000 to build more machines and prove the concept in a larger network of customers.

In January 2021, Gordon hired his first employee to build his company website, TCG Machines. In May, they launched their first commercial orders.

“It got amazing traction right off the hop, I think we got something like 50 orders within the first 30 days,” he says. “Business every step of the way is a bit of a gamble, a bit of a risk, and you don't really know if it's going to work out until you get there.”

Gordon had to hire more staff, lease a co-warehouse, and plan out production. Now he’s got a team of about 20 working on engineering, production, and more.

“We've just been making machines ever since and people keep ordering them so it's been great!”

The PhyzBatch-9000

The PhyzBatch-9000 currently sorts Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Cards.

To use the machine, all the trading cards are stacked into the input hopper, which holds 1,750 cards. Rollers take the card from the stack over to a glass plate where cameras take a photo of the card and data is pulled to determine where the card belongs.

“We get things like the name of the card, the year it was printed, and how much it's worth on various different online marketplaces. Then using those metrics, you can then sort the card into any number of output bins depending on how you'd like to stock them or catalogue,” Gordon says.

One of the great features of this technology, he adds, is how up-to-date it is. Gordon says one would need an encyclopedic memory to know the worth of every card. On top of that, cards go up and down in value every day.

“What was a worthless card yesterday might be a very valuable card today, and of course, no human being can keep track of all of those parameters in their head,” he says.

With the cards sorted physically and digitally catalogued, it makes it easy for any person to know and understand their collection.

Enough cards to reach the stratosphere

Now with just over 150 machines sold across Canada and the US, Gordon keeps track of how many cards each machine sorts.

On July 2, at 11:43am, the fleet of PhyzBatch-9000s had sorted 100 million trading cards.

“If you stack those cards up in a vertical column, it would be 32-and-a-half kilometres tall, which is into the stratosphere of the Earth,” Gordon says, trying to visualize the number.

“In terms of weight, it's over 200 tonnes or over 180 metric tonnes, which is 30 large African elephants,” he adds.

Although 100 million is a huge feat for Gordon and TCG Machines, he is barely scratching the surface of the trading card industry.

Each trading card game—Magic: The Gathering, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh!—prints more than a billion cards every year. Additionally, there are about 120 billion cards already in print.

“One hundred million, although it's a very, very large number, isn't even 10 per cent of just one game in terms of new product every year. So, there's a lot of room for us to continue to expand,” Gordon says.

Sorting across the globe

TCG Machines has primarily focused on the Canadian and US markets, however, Gordon hopes to take the machines globally in the near future.

Additionally, he plans to expand outside of trading card games.

“There's this whole other half of the trading card market, which is sports cards,” he says. “Each of those industries is worth about $6 billion every year, so it’s worthwhile to pursue.”

Although Gordon has large goals for the future, he’s also proud to have made it to where he is now.

“It's not easy, raising a young family and basically turning away from a good income to see if something's going to work,” he says.

Some days Gordon feels like he’s barely getting by with endless work being thrown his way, however when he steps back to look at what he has accomplished, he’s impressed with what he has built.