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Home > About > News > When Magic meets machines: Calgary’s role in a $300B collectibles boom
April 8, 2026
From left to right: Daniel Osafo-Mensah, Ramin Asadpour, Joseph Shaheen, Antoine Fecteau, and Emily Wiebe.
Calgary-based TCG Machines is exporting advanced automation technology around the world, helping trading card retailers and distributors process massive volumes of cards while creating high‑value manufacturing and engineering jobs in Alberta. The company’s robotic sorting systems are now operating in 20 countries, have catalogued almost a billion trading cards, and underpin a fast-growing export business tied to a global collectibles market valued in the hundreds of billions of dollars.
At the centre of this impact is TCG Machines’ proprietary hardware and software platform, designed to automate what was once a labour‑intensive, manual process. By dramatically increasing speed, accuracy, and scalability, the company’s technology is reshaping how trading card games (TCGs) are bought, sold, and managed worldwide.
TCG Machines designs and manufactures robotic card‑sorting systems in Calgary, shipping approximately 95 percent of its hardware outside Canada. These systems are now deployed across North America, Europe, and Asia, with planned expansion into additional international markets including Australia and Japan.
The company’s flagship system, the PhyzBatch‑9000, integrates robotics, machine vision, and custom software to sort, catalogue, and organise trading cards at industrial scale. To date, the platform has processed more than 750 million cards, the equivalent of over 1,500 tonnes of cardboard, highlighting both the demand for automation and the scale at which the technology operates.
International demand for TCG Machines’ technology has translated into a growing export‑oriented manufacturing business. While specific revenue and export figures remain proprietary, the company reports multi‑million‑dollar annual revenues and a steadily expanding global customer base.
This growth has driven job creation in Calgary across advanced manufacturing, robotics assembly, software development, engineering, and customer support. From a small founding team, TCG Machines has scaled into a multi‑disciplinary workforce supporting both hardware production and ongoing software innovation.
The company began when founder Graeme Gordon, an engineer based in Calgary, sought a better way to sort his own trading card collection. What started as a personal solution evolved into a commercial product after early prototypes demonstrated dramatic efficiency gains for hobby shops and distributors.
An early prototype sorted more than one million cards in a single Calgary comic shop, validating both the technology and the market need. That proof point helped accelerate the transition from prototype to production and laid the foundation for international sales.
TCG Machines’ growth is aligned with broader market trends. The global trading card games market is estimated at roughly USD $7.8 billion in 2025 and is projected to reach approximately USD $11.8 billion by 2030. Beyond games, the wider collectibles market, encompassing trading cards, memorabilia, and related categories, was valued at more than USD $300 billion in 2024 and is forecast to exceed USD $500 billion in the early 2030s.
As trading cards increasingly function both as entertainment and investment assets, demand for reliable, high‑throughput processing infrastructure continues to rise, creating a durable market for automation technologies like those developed in Calgary.
Early public‑sector support played a key role in helping TCG Machines move from prototype to commercial production. Founder Graeme Gordon credits Alberta Innovates with supporting early validation, real‑world testing, and responsible scaling.
“Alberta Innovates has been a huge pillar for this business as we’ve grown,” says Gordon. “Their support helped us move from an idea to a product that could scale globally.”
That early backing enabled the company to refine its hardware, strengthen its software capabilities, and build confidence with early customers, laying the groundwork for export growth and sustained job creation in Alberta.
With continued software development and potential expansion into adjacent markets such as sports card automation, TCG Machines is positioned to grow alongside the global collectibles’ ecosystem. As demand for automated trading card infrastructure increases, Calgary‑built technology is playing a quiet but increasingly influential role on the world stage.