CT Scanning Trading Cards: What You Need to Know

Reselling 101

By RC Staff

20 August 2024

In the last few weeks, we’ve seen a lot of noise in various collectable card communities around one topic: CT scanning. While you might be familiar with CT machines in hospital settings, it can also be used to look inside unopened packs of trading cards. This goes beyond the traditional methods of weighing packs or examining barcodes, and has some collectors worried about the future of their hobby. Today we’ll be taking a closer look at this phenomenon, and talking about how it might affect resellers.

Trading Cards and CT Technology

Okay, let’s cover some of the basics. CT is short for “computed tomography”, a technology developed for and extensively used to image the human body. You or someone you know may have undergone a CT scan before during a hospital visit.

The incredible aspect behind a CT scan is its ability to create individual “slices” of the scanned subject. If you’ve ever had the opportunity to view a CT scan, you’ve probably seen how it can break down and individually examine every part of a person’s body, millimeter by millimeter.

Okay, that’s cool and all, but how does it apply to cards? Well, CT technology isn’t just used in hospitals. It’s also perfectly applicable to non-human and inanimate objects, like a deck of cards.

So, someone with a personal CT scanner could theoretically buy an sealed pack of trading cards and run them through the machine. They could adjust to individually scan slices of each and every card in the pack, with enough detail to tell exactly what’s inside without ever breaking the packaging.

And someone has done exactly that. Several someones, in fact. Last month, the YouTuber Ahron Wayne uploaded a video that showed him picking through an entire pack of Pokemon cards with a CT machine.

This immediately lit up the Pokemon TCG community. While techniques like this are nothing new (weighing packs has been a thing for years), this particular application seemed almost unbeatable.

Will CT Scanning Change Card Collecting?

Most collectors believe CT technology is most useful for evaluating sealed, out-of-print packs that are still in circulation. These are still a common sight online, and card shops routinely sell these for hundreds of dollars.

With a CT scanner, a smart scalper could simply buy these packs in bulk, scan for valuable cards, and then resell the sealed packs that didn’t have anything special. If this strategy actually took off, it would massively devalue current packs on the market, as most collectors will assume they’ve been scanned and are worthless.

Altogether, it’s part of a larger trend among card collectors towards single card sales. After card collecting and reselling blew up during the pandemic, we’ve seen a lessened focus on selling and ripping packs, and more on single cards, especially with the rise of high profile fakes.

Why? Well, it’s less risky. When you buy a pack, you’re gambling that something good might be inside. When you buy a card, you know what you get.

Long term, serious investors are making the smarter play and sticking with what they know will hold value. Technology like the CT scanner just reinforces this viewpoint.

But don’t expect to see CTs become commonplace just yet. In his video that sparked the current controversy, Ahron Wayne admits that the project took several months and thousands of dollars to get into a working state.

And speaking of which, you should check out Wayne’s recent video explaining how TCG manufacturers can defeat the technology.

He’s currently working on getting his CT scanner patented, specifically for use scanning trading cards. It’s possible we’re on the edge of a whole new era of card collecting, one that we’ve already been heading towards for some time.

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