MTG Scanner Reviews

This is a great app for people that have large and actively updated collections. Data base is comprehensive and scanning is fast and accurate. The price tracking is also great, no complaints there. My only issue with MTGScanner is that I find the deck building to be a bit lacking. My biggest want is importing decks from other platforms but another feature that would be great is having decks show which cards I am lacking in my collection when I make a deck. I have a lot of cards but I still need to pick up the odd card now and again so it would be nice to know when I need something for a deck I am planning.
One last minor thing, I also noticed the data base doesn’t recognize the stranger things secret lair by the stranger things names (Mike, Will, etc.). While it’s easy enough to just search the magic equivalents, it would be nice to have the card name in MTGScanner match the words on the card.

Yes you can track your cards prices, just like every other ap like this. You can scan the card, Theoretically, I never got it to work. But the big minus in this is that let’s say you enter the card into the inventory area and then you want to say I have a deck of these cards you have to re-enter them you cannot simply move them or select them and say make this into a deck. Or if you have the card in inventory and you want to move it into the trade option you cannot simply select it and say trade and it goes into the trade menu you have to re-enter it into the trade menu. It seems to me it should be fairly easy to be able to move the cards around within MTGScanner however they do not provide that simple service and because of it it is a major drag.

So before dragon shield took over, you would need to purchase the database to add the latest set, usually for a couple buck. Not a big deal when only 4-5 sets come out a year. Now with their subscription model? Totally a cash grab. Not sure why it didn’t properly track my previous inventory as well...it transferred over all my cards but doesn’t give me any space? I originally had about 7000 available inventory slots and now I can’t add new cards because I am “over” my free 100 card limit.

Dragon Shield - you are being way too greedy with your pricing model for what MTGScanner is designed to do, and especially because there are so many other reviews complaining about your scanner quality. I would gladly pay $3-4 per set like it originally was, but if you think people are gonna blindly sign up for subscriptions with features listed as not even available yet? Set some better expectations for what MTGScanner is and does, and price it accordingly. Love your other products and sleeve, but this is completely off the mark.

[edit: developer responded that the technology is limited to scanning the art only, so I’ve increased my rating by one star. But I guess, then, why can’t that be expanded to scan the rest of the card, to detect variants and promo stamps? Regardless, the issue of displaying mismatched thumbnail/variant name pairings needs to be addressed. And maybe the default should be regular versions of cards.]
The scanner works extremely fast at pulling up the card you’re pointing it at… but it’s terrible at selecting the correct version. With Wizards printing regular, borderless, extended art, alternate art, alternate frame, and promo versions of every card nowadays, any card scanner needs to be able to detect these subtleties in order to pull up the right version of a card. Sadly, MTGScanner is unable to do this with much accuracy. It also often displays mismatched card thumbnails and card version names when scanning. And changing to a different version from what it mistakenly auto selects is cumbersome (as are many many other features in MTGScanner). Needs some work.

MTGScanner used to crush other scanning apps, especially the very picky and battery consuming TCGPlayer app. But since the acquisition by Dragon Shield, MTGScanner has become notably worse over time image scanning cards. Sure, WOTC has been absolutely dumping new cards and art onto the market at warp speed, but if you’re going to acquire a startup app for its visual scanning capabilities, you might want to continue investing money in that technology, especially when it (used to) generally destroys TCGPlayer’s own app on accuracy and battery consumption? Don’t even get me started on the unusable web app manager, that’s so bad it’s not even a feature worth discussing. Get it together Dragon Shield, you’re better than this.

Got MTGScanner a long time ago before it was bought out by its current owners. Previously MTGScanner would let you purchase quantities of card slots so you could permanently own a certain amount of card space for your collection. However, since then they have stolen those previous purchases away from me and now only offer a subscription for stuff I already owned and payed for. If you want some kind of collection manager where you can trust the developer this is not the one. Complete scam. I want my money back.

Update: have tried multiple times to get fixed by contacting developer. Still not fixed and when I try replying to any emails they do send me they don’t respond back.

Update: Support managed to get me my previously purchased collection slots added to my account for me after several emails back and forth. Changed my rating from 1 to 3. Will have to wait and see how the new app feels before I decide if it deserves more.

The primary thing I love about MTGScanner is the speed of the bulk scanning, haven’t found one that is faster, just be sure to sort out foils into a separate pile. I haven’t had much success using it with with showcase cards, and for some reason black cards regardless of what lighting or position I use are incredibly difficult to scan, sometimes impossible. I usually have to switch to ManaBox which is slower compared to bulk scanning feature MTGScanner has, but you can only scan what you scan! I’d honestly consider premium if I could use this scanner for all my needs, and didn’t have to edit my cvs sheet to export for moxfield. As is, I can only entertain it for tracking high value cards, since I can’t scan any of my bulk black cards.

The whole profit system is confusing. What if we don’t remember how much we paid for cards? There is just way too many variables in the mix, why can’t we just have an app where we add our cards and into the inventory and just use it as a database and market price catalog?

Also, show the cards current value in the inventory lists page, why show what I paid for it? Most of my cards I do not know what I paid for them so showing me that info doesn’t help me. Just a bunch of $0.00 values all the way down.

Ex. if I group by none, and the sort by current value in my library, why does it show the price I added when I added the cards when scanning? Why can’t it display the current value of the card in the market? I didn’t add prices that I paid for these cards

The database is sufficient; would be fun to see Arena exclusive cards added. The UX is amazing; I especially like how MTGScanner doesn’t promt you to turn on notifications until you first visit the notifications menu. I do wish that after adding a card to a deck and returning to the text card search that the existing text in the search bar was autohighlighted so that I could immideately start typing the next card I want to search. All searches might be even better if they incorporated fuzzy searching. Additionally, MTGScanner desperately needs background app refresh downloading to decrease wait times at launch.

Pros:
-Scanner is insanely fast, accurate, and works on virtually any surface.
- gives you high, low, and market prices, along with win/loss percentages and other valuable tools for analyzing your investment.
-allows you to create custom deck and inventory folders to suit your sorting needs.
Cons:
- My biggest complaint *by far* is that there is no export/import function. You can save or send your lists as text documents, and that’s it. This is a major issue considering you’re spending countless hours scanning, and can only use them for MTGScanner.
- the decklist function is very barebones, and is essentially just a separate inventory folder. Very little analytics or tools for deck building.
Conclusion:
MTGScanner has probably the best scanner out of them all, and is primarily designed for value tracking, with its robust monetary analytics, but is very lacking in deck building and player features. The absence of an import/export function is almost a dealbreaker, as there are many other apps with different useful features and purposes that would accept these files.

Overall, very useful app. I like that it allows me to sort my cards easily and move them between folders. The win or loss percentage is also helpful. I have scanned my entire collection with very few problems. There are a few things that prevent it from getting the fifth star, though. For some reason, it keeps thinking things are the card “Savannah” multiple times when using the scan feature. It is also very bad at scanning Saga cards. Finally, it would be really helpful if there were a way I could access statistics such as colors and rarity percentages for the whole collection. I can do it for individual folders and decks, but there isn’t a way to export the list of cards and import it into a new deck.

I really like the way MTGScanner is laid out and how easy and straightforward the scan feature is. It’s already helped me sort my 30k card collection and find the high value cards.

My issue with it is that it seems buggy. There are some cards it simply refuses to scan no matter what, and it occasionally gets “stuck” where every scan results in showing the same random card, which can only be fixed with a restart. The other thing is that text search seems painfully slow to get results, and those seem buggy as well, like cards that don’t include the search terms showing up in the results, but only sometimes.

Ultimately I’m really glad MTGScanner exists, and it does what it’s supposed to, it just needs a few wrinkles ironed out.

I used to keep track of my collection via mtgprice’s website but after they changed their policies to a subscription service I ended up just being locked out of my data. I happened upon MTGScanner a while ago and while the UI is a bit touchy it fits with what I needed. Pros: •Inventory tracking •Price Tracking •Card Scanner •List Creations •A variety of filtering/sorting options •Deck creation •A fair subscription price for ad-free management, price alerts, price charting, and updates Cons: •Deck Creation is not adjustable for EDH/Commander format •Scanner is very quick with the capture feature and sometimes (rarely) doesn’t know what the card is I’m still testing it out but over the last month of using it I decided to try out the subscription service. I’ll may update later.

Got MTGScanner recently and it works pretty well! You may have to double check that MTGScanner gets the correct set for each card though, which will slow you down a little. Overall very pleased with the scanner part of MTGScanner , though. Scanned 2,000+ cards this past weekend by myself!

Just one thing I wish MTGScanner had…it would be so, so helpful if the deck building function gave you the ability to add cards straight from your “inventory” lists, rather than having to re-scan or search cards by name from the entire library. As far as I can tell, you can’t even filter your search results to show only cards that you own in your inventory. Imho, this would be a HUGE help to users who are interested in building decks using cards that they’ve already scanned into their inventory.

MTGScanner does really well at cataloguing and keeping track of prices for your cards and helps keep it all organized. Love how quickly the camera picks up on cards most of the time and changing editions is honestly relatively easy.

My biggest issue is the lack of sync between inventory and deck lists. While I get there may be some nuance to deck lists that may make it difficult to have them transfer 1 to 1 (e.g. your deck list has cards you want to get but don’t have), it would be easier to be able to have that synchronicity and just adjust as needed in one tab or the other. It feels very much of a hassle to essentially scan a card twice for it to show up in two places. I don’t know anything about app coding, so it could be more difficult than I understand. But it’s a feature that’s making it difficult for me to want to continue updating MTGScanner with my deck collection, even if it’s such a useful tool to do so

MTGScanner is amazing! I love the all features and ease of use! I can’t recommend it enough to anyone who likes to keep track of what cards are in their collection and especially if you buy and sell cards, it makes it so easy to track prices! If I had any criticism it would be that there is no option to add your deck files into your collection easily so you have to scan it all in twice. It would also be nice if it would give market value on your deck folders so you don’t have to duplicate it in your collection if you want to know the value of a deck.

I use MTGScanner to keep track of an 8,000+ card collection. The amount of relief this product has brought me is tremendous. Dragon Shield has set themselves apart from others in a number of ways with this scanner.

The seamless accessibility and ease of navigation is definitely noteworthy. I am able to customize the way I store and organize my cards, keep track of the decks that I have my cards in, and monitor the ebbing and flowing values of my individual cards, as well as my collection as a whole. MTGScanner has everything I could possibly need, except ONE feature (which I hope to see added, eventually).

The only thing MTGScanner is lacking is a way to add MTG products to your inventory, aside from individual cards, that would otherwise be for sale on sites such as TCG Player, Card Kingdom, etc. It would be helpful to keep track of my inventory and the value of items such as unopened precons or booster boxes. I’m not sure how realistic or easy it would be to add such a feature, but I would love to see it!

I've already recommended MTGScanner to my entire playgroup, and even offered to help them get their collections organized. Absolutely top product here.

Device: IPad Pro 2020

Length of use: 2 months

Disclaimer: *subscriber*

This review will focus on my experience thus far as a paid subscriber.

If you are like me, you have probably tried out many different card management apps that offer a scan method for ingesting your card data. To make it short, this is no difference. We all know that the scan method is a gimmick. Under the right circumstances you can scan cards as expected. Once you throw in some off angled lighting, sleeved cards or even a backdrop of carpet the scan method seems to stop working. I use the text method for searching for cards. It is by far the easiest way I have found. Better than the competition. What I like about this application over the rest is the user interface. Time and research was spent on making this as user friendly as possible. All I can say is try this out. So far I am very happy and will continue to support MTGScanner by subscribing.

I am a huge MTG collector. I have over 20k cards. I have given up so many times on apps because of the time sink. DragonShield truly put effort into this scanner. It scans almost faster than I can put the card in front of it. The database is huge and I like that I can make adjustments to my scanned card on the fly. I am having fun again and the options for sorting made my day. Thank you for MTGScanner!

I’ve followed MTGScanner since the legacy MTG Manager app, and was so disgusted with the pricing model the previous developers came up with that I actually stopped cataloging my cards despite being half way through my collection of 20,000+ cards into this database. It was literally more worth it for me to abandon all that time spent scanning than to use MTGScanner. That has changed. I see dragon shield has made this free to catalog, and all other features are bundled into a premium subscription, at $20/year. (Previous developers were asking $100+/ year subscription JUST to have your card slots available for scanning. THANK YOU for making MTGScanner accessible and FAIRLY priced. I am excited to start cataloging my collection again. With the right marketing this platform could quite honestly revolutionize card collecting, i have always seen so much potential in MTGScanner!!