Best MTG Collection Trackers Compared

If you own more than a couple hundred Magic cards, you've probably lost track of what you have. Maybe you bought a second copy of Smothering Tithe because you forgot you already had one. Maybe you're sitting on a Dockside Extortionist that's doubled in value since you pulled it and you have no idea. A good MTG collection tracker fixes both problems. It tells you what you own, what it's worth, and how that value changes over time.

But picking the right tracker is harder than it should be. Some apps scan fast but can't export. Some track prices well but don't have a mobile app. A few are free but cap your collection at a few hundred cards, which is useless for anyone with more than a starter kit.

I've spent real time with all of these. Not just downloading them and poking around for five minutes, but actually scanning cards, importing lists, checking prices against TCGPlayer, and trying to export data back out. Here's what I found.

What actually matters in a collection tracker

Before getting into individual apps, here's what separates a good MTG collection tracker app from a bad one:

Price accuracy and sources. Your collection value is only as reliable as the price data behind it. TCGPlayer market price is the standard for North American collectors. Cardmarket matters if you're in Europe. Some apps pull from both, some from neither.

Scanner speed and reliability. If it takes three attempts to scan a Sol Ring, you're going to give up 200 cards in. The scanner needs to be fast, accurate on set identification, and able to handle foils and variants.

Export options. This is where a lot of free apps get you. You build a 3,000-card collection and then realize you can't get your data out without paying. CSV export should be standard. Bonus points for direct export to TCGPlayer, Moxfield, or other platforms.

Platform availability. Some people want a phone app for scanning at the LGS. Others want a desktop interface for bulk management. The best tools give you both.

Collection size limits. Free tiers that cap you at 360 cards aren't real collection trackers. They're demos.

Manabox

Manabox is the app that most people try first, and for good reason. It's available on iOS and Android, the interface is clean, and the free tier is genuinely usable. You can search every card and set offline, which is surprisingly rare.

The scanner is solid. It identifies set and printing correctly most of the time, and you can adjust if it guesses wrong. Prices pull from TCGPlayer, Cardmarket, Card Kingdom, and Cardhoarder, so you get a good spread of market data regardless of where you buy.

Where Manabox gets interesting is the Collector feature. It tracks your progress toward completing entire sets, like achievement hunting in a video game. If you're the type who wants to own every card in Innistrad: Crimson Vow, this feature will show you exactly how close you are. It also tracks which cards have gone up or down in value since you scanned them, and by how much.

Premium runs $2.49/month or $22.99/year. The free version handles collection tracking and basic price checks, but premium unlocks advanced filters, collection stats, and removes ads. For a mobile-first tracker, it's hard to beat on value.

Best for: Mobile-first collectors who want a clean, fast app with good price data.

Weaknesses: No web interface (a desktop app is planned but not shipped yet). No multi-device sync at time of writing, which means your collection lives on one phone.

Dragon Shield Card Manager

Dragon Shield makes sleeves. Everybody knows that. But their card manager app is legitimately good, and it's not just a brand extension cash grab.

The scanner works across all languages, which is a nice touch if you've picked up foreign-language cards at GPs or from overseas sellers. Real-time price tracking pulls from major marketplaces, and the app shows format legality and rulings right on the card page. There's a trade tool that compares the value between two players' cards side by side, useful for in-person trades at your LGS.

One feature I haven't seen elsewhere: weekly collection emails. The app sends you a summary of your collection's value changes, new additions, and pricing trends. You don't have to open the app to stay informed.

Dragon Shield also has a web platform alongside the mobile apps, so you can manage your collection from a browser. The mobile app handles scanning, and the web interface is better for browsing and analysis.

Premium is $2.99/month or $29.99/year. The free version lets you scan and track, but premium adds collection value emails, top movers in your collection, and advanced wishlist features.

Best for: Players who trade regularly and want trade tools built into their tracker.

Weaknesses: The app can feel bloated. Some users report slower scanning compared to Manabox or Delver Lens.

EchoMTG

EchoMTG is for collectors who think about their cards as financial assets. It's the most finance-oriented tracker on this list, and it leans into that identity hard.

The platform tracks your collection value with daily price updates and sends weekly email reports breaking down gains and losses. If you want to know that your Rhystic Study went up $2.37 this week, EchoMTG will tell you every Sunday. Higher-tier plans add Tuesday and Thursday reports too.

You can organize cards by set, view completion percentages, and export printable checklists for tracking during trades. There's a watchlist with SMS price alerts on the Mythic plan, which is useful if you're watching specific cards for buy or sell targets.

The pricing tiers: Free tracks 360 cards with basic features. Uncommon ($2/month) bumps you to 5,400 cards. Rare ($3/month) gives you 11,520 cards plus a watchlist and sealed product tracking. Mythic ($7/month) maxes out at 36,000 cards with SMS alerts and advanced export data. Annual pricing saves about 16% on all tiers.

That free tier cap of 360 cards is the biggest problem. If you're a serious collector, you're paying from day one. And even the $7/month Mythic plan caps at 36,000 cards, which is real money for what's still a limited database.

Best for: Finance-minded collectors who treat their collection as an investment portfolio.

Weaknesses: 360-card free limit is restrictive. The UI feels dated compared to newer competitors. No built-in card scanner.

Deckbox

Deckbox has been around forever. It's one of the oldest MTG collection trackers still actively maintained, and it has a loyal user base because it does the fundamentals well.

Collection management is straightforward. Add cards, track conditions, manage wishlists and trade lists. The trading system is where Deckbox separates itself: you can find trade partners on the platform, match wishlists automatically, and negotiate trades without leaving the site. There's a small but active marketplace for buying and selling directly.

Deck building is integrated, so you can pull from your tracked collection when building decks. You can also track edition and condition for each card, which matters if you care about the difference between a Revised Birds of Paradise and a Fifth Edition one.

The free tier is functional with reasonable limits. Premium runs $3.99/month ($47.88/year billed annually) or $5.99/month on a monthly plan. Premium adds advanced filtering, priority support, and more deck building tools.

The biggest gap: no card scanner. Deckbox is a web-only platform, so every card goes in manually or via import. If you have a couple thousand cards to catalog, that's a significant time investment. There's no mobile app either, so you're doing everything in a browser.

Best for: Traders who want a built-in community and marketplace for buying, selling, and swapping.

Weaknesses: No scanner. No mobile app. Manual entry only. The interface is functional but hasn't been modernized.

Archidekt

Archidekt is known as a deck builder, but it has a collection tracker built in. If you already use Archidekt for Commander deck building (and a lot of people do), having your collection on the same platform removes friction.

The collection feature lets you track paper, MTGO, and MTGA collections in the same account. That's a nice touch if you play across platforms. When building a deck, Archidekt can show you which cards you already own and which you'd need to buy. For Commander players who maintain multiple decks, that saves real time and money.

The entire collection tracker is free. No paid tiers, no card limits. That alone puts Archidekt ahead of several competitors on this list.

But adding cards manually is clunky. You type the card name, select the edition, confirm the printing. There's no scanner, no mobile app. For a 50-card deck, fine. For a 5,000-card collection, painful. It also lacks set completion tracking, so if you're trying to finish a set, you'll need a second tool like MTG Collection Builder.

Best for: Commander players who already use Archidekt for deck building and want collection tracking in the same place.

Weaknesses: No scanner, no mobile app, manual entry is slow for large collections. No set completion tracking.

MTG Collection Builder

MTG Collection Builder (mtgcollectionbuilder.com) does one thing that no other tracker on this list does well: set completion tracking. If you're the kind of collector who wants to own every card in a set, this is your tool.

The site shows every card in every set with checkboxes. You mark what you own. It calculates completion percentage, shows you what's missing, and gives you a total value based on TCGPlayer prices. It's simple, focused, and it works.

The downside is that it's simple to a fault. There's no scanner, no mobile app, and the deck building features are minimal. You can't track card condition. It's purely a web-based checklist with pricing attached.

It's free to use, which is great. But if you need anything beyond set completion, you'll need to pair it with another tool.

Best for: Set completionists who want to track exactly which cards they're missing from every printing.

Weaknesses: No scanner, no mobile app, no condition tracking, no meaningful deck building. Purely a web checklist.

CardCastle

CardCastle has one of the better card scanners in the MTG app space. The recognition is fast, handles most printings accurately, and works well enough that you can plow through a binder without constant corrections. Multiple user reviews call it the best scanner they've tried, and from my experience, it's in the top tier alongside Delver Lens.

The app is free to download on iOS and Android, with scanning and basic collection browsing included. Real-time prices come from TCGPlayer market data. You can view your collection on the web platform and build decks there too.

Premium runs roughly $4/month or $40/year, and it unlocks deck building, advanced stats, and additional collection tools on the web platform. Without premium, the mobile app is mostly a scanner that feeds into a web collection you can browse but not deeply analyze.

Best for: People who want a fast scanner with straightforward collection management.

Weaknesses: The web platform feels underdeveloped compared to the mobile scanner. Premium is required for most useful web features.

Delver Lens

Delver Lens is a scanner-first app. It exists to get cards off your table and into a digital list as fast as possible, and it does that extremely well.

The scanner is the fastest I've tested. You can fan out a handful of cards and scan them all at once, which changes the game when you're cataloging draft leftovers or sorting through a bulk purchase. It recognizes cards from Alpha through the latest set, and it pulls prices from TCGPlayer, Cardmarket, Card Kingdom, Cardhoarder, and MageMarket (for Brazilian users).

You can sell directly to Card Kingdom through the app, which is a nice shortcut if you're looking to turn bulk into store credit. Export options cover CSV and several deck list formats.

The app is available on iOS and Android. Premium is $4.99/month or $49.99/year, which unlocks unlimited exports and image backups. The free version handles scanning and basic tracking well, though export limits will frustrate power users.

Best for: Speed scanners who want to catalog cards as fast as physically possible.

Weaknesses: Collection management beyond scanning is bare bones. The premium price is the steepest on this list for what amounts to export unlocks. No web interface.

GrimDeck

Full disclosure: this is our app. I'm not going to pretend to be unbiased here, so I'll tell you what we built and why, and you can decide if it fits what you need.

GrimDeck combines collection tracking, deck building, and a card scanner in a single web platform. The idea was to stop needing three different apps for three different jobs. You scan your cards, they go into your collection, and you build decks from that collection without switching tools.

Prices come from TCGPlayer with daily updates. You can track your collection's total value and see price movements on individual cards. The scanner runs in your browser, so it works on any device with a camera without downloading anything.

We added TCGPlayer affiliate integration, so when you find a card you want to buy, you can jump straight to TCGPlayer to purchase it. Set browsing lets you explore every card in every set with pricing and art.

The deck builder is built for Commander players. You can pull from your tracked collection, check prices per card, and see your mana curve and color distribution as you build. If you're running budget mana rocks or trying to figure out if you own enough card draw for your list, the collection integration makes that easy.

GrimDeck is free for basic use. Premium is $3.99/month or $39/year and unlocks additional features like advanced collection analytics and portfolio tracking.

Best for: Collectors who also build decks and want scanning, tracking, and building in one place.

Weaknesses: Newer platform, so the user community is still growing. Mobile experience is responsive web rather than a native app.

Comparison table

| App | Platform | Scanner | Free tier limit | Price sources | Export | Premium cost | |---|---|---|---|---|---|---| | Manabox | iOS, Android | Yes | Generous | TCGPlayer, Cardmarket, CK, Cardhoarder | Yes | $2.49/mo, $22.99/yr | | Dragon Shield | iOS, Android, Web | Yes (multi-language) | Functional | Major marketplaces | CSV, text | $2.99/mo, $29.99/yr | | EchoMTG | Web, mobile apps | No | 360 cards | TCGPlayer (daily) | CSV (paid tiers) | $2-7/mo | | Deckbox | Web only | No | Reasonable | TCGPlayer, own marketplace | CSV | $3.99/mo, $47.88/yr | | Archidekt | Web only | No | Unlimited | Yes | Yes | Free | | MTG Collection Builder | Web only | No | Unlimited | TCGPlayer | Limited | Free | | CardCastle | iOS, Android, Web | Yes | Basic scanning | TCGPlayer market | CSV (premium) | ~$4/mo, ~$40/yr | | Delver Lens | iOS, Android | Yes (fastest) | Functional | TCGPlayer, Cardmarket, CK | Limited free | $4.99/mo, $49.99/yr | | GrimDeck | Web (any device) | Yes (browser) | Functional | TCGPlayer (daily) | Yes | $3.99/mo, $39/yr |

Which MTG collection tracker should you actually use?

There's no single best MTG collection tracker because collectors have different priorities. Here's how I'd break it down:

If you want to scan cards on your phone at your LGS and check values on the fly, Manabox or Dragon Shield are your best options. Both have solid scanners and usable free tiers.

If you care about the financial side and want weekly portfolio reports and price alerts, EchoMTG goes deeper than anyone else. Just be ready to pay, because the free tier is barely a taste.

If you trade a lot in person or online, Deckbox's built-in trade matching and marketplace are hard to replicate elsewhere.

If you're a Commander player who builds decks constantly and wants collection data tied directly into deck building, Archidekt (if you're already there) or GrimDeck (if you want scanning and budget building tools too) are the most practical choices.

If you just want to scan cards as fast as possible, Delver Lens wins on raw speed. Nobody else comes close.

And if you're chasing set completion, MTG Collection Builder is purpose-built for exactly that.

Most serious collectors end up using two tools. Maybe Manabox for scanning on the go and Archidekt for deck building. Or Delver Lens for intake and EchoMTG for portfolio tracking. The ideal setup is one app that handles everything, but the MTG tool space hasn't fully consolidated yet.

We built GrimDeck to be that one-stop platform: scanning, collection tracking, price data, and deck building together. We're still early and adding features constantly. If that sounds interesting, give it a try and tell us what's missing.