Managing Your Bulk Cards
You’re having that dream again—the kind where you are a helpless bystander, observing as the chaos in your unconscious mind unfolds around you. Thousands of bloodthirsty orcs with glowing red eyes march towards the mountain pass, like sand tumbling through the middle of an hourglass. The old, frazzled wizard in the blue cloak frantically waves his staff back and forth, shouting, “YOU SHALL NOT PASS!”, but it is a futile effort. The orcs rush through, throwing the sharpest daggers and spears you have ever seen. Wait, those don’t look like daggers at all. Are those…cards?
The wizard begins to sink under the endless sea of Magic: The Gathering cards, but you observe his gnarled hand holding a paper scroll and frantically waving it at you. Your disembodied dream-form floats over and grabs the scroll just before the wizard disappears completely under the sea of brown. You break the wax seal and unfold the papyrus and read the bold, ancient text:
You immediately bolt awake in bed, a layer of sweat covering your furrowed brow. “This is the fourth time this week, and it’s only Monday,” you mutter to yourself. You quickly dress in your Middle Earth Game Emporium polo shirt and head into work. When you arrive, the store is quiet. It’s TOO quiet, in fact, and you rush to the back storeroom.
“Mr. Gimli! NOOOOO!”
Your boss lies on the floor, buried under a heap of white cardboard bulk boxes. The note still hangs on the storeroom door that says, “No admittance except for bulk business,” but your boss didn’t heed the warning. Your nightmare has come true, and now you must grapple with the eternal consequences of having to get rid of this bulk on your own.
Or you could just get a Roca Sorter.
The Roca Sorter is the only robotic card sorter of its kind on the market, offering both Sift and Sort capabilities. So how will this help you to reduce your bulk problem? There are a few paths forward that might make sense for your business:
1. Start by sifting out the valuable cards. Choose from one of Roca’s Bulk Sift options, which can quickly scan and value your cards and remove the chaff. You can do this at a single price point or at multiple price points within the same sift. For example, if you want to only keep the cards that are worth $1 or more, a Bulk Sift would work great. You could also use a Multi-Sift and separate cards that are worth $1-$5 into one pile and cards that are worth $5 or more into another pile while keeping all of the invaluable (less than $1) cards separated. There are several options just for price sifting alone, which would be an ideal step one toward lessening the burden of the bulk.
2. Take your invaluable cards and sort them by the categories of your choice. Want to sort all your invaluable MTG or Pokémon cards by color to make booster packs? Simply process the invaluable cards from step 1 through a Color Sort. There are a variety of options to sort by, including Rarity, Name, Set, Price, and Number, as well as combinations of these categories. These options vary by game type.
(Note: Roca also offers a Sift THEN Sort option, which does both in the same run. For example, you could run a ‘Price Sift, Rarity Sort’ which would first filter out the valuable cards and then sort them by rarity. Or, you could run a ‘Price Sift, Unvaluable Name’ which would sift out the valuable cards and then sort the unvaluable cards alphabetically by name. There are a variety to choose from! If you have a large quantity of cards, I still recommend running steps 1 and 2 individually, as it allows you to process more cards at a time than running the Sift/Sort combined option.)
3. Sprinkle a few of the “valuable” cards you had separated in step 1 into your booster packs for resale in your shop.
4. Or use the Random Sort function (also available in ‘Random, Group Duplicates’), and create totally random packs of cards for resale!
Take your newly created bulk packs and offer them for sale in your shop as a last-minute item by the register or host a draft night where your guests can win prizes for competing with the packs you’ve created.
The Roca offers more than 55 unique sorts and sifts to help digitize and organize your Magic, Pokémon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! trading cards. Each sort and sift performed automatically generates a CSV file, so if you are interested in listing your cards for sale online you can work with an e-commerce platform of your choice. We currently support TCGplayer, eBay, Crystal Commerce, Binder POS, and Card Market. Don’t be a victim of a nightmare-come-true; contact us through the button below to get in touch with a sales representative.