Magic the Gatherig Card Slinger

Sorting Magic: The Gathering cards can be a tedious and time-consuming task. If you've been playing for a while, chances are you've accumulated hundreds of random cards, maybe even more. Before long, it becomes difficult to keep track of what you actually have in your collection. That’s why many people use apps like ManaBox. With its built-in card scanning feature, ManaBox makes it easy to catalog your cards and see exactly what’s in your collection. But as helpful as it is, the scanning process can still feel slow and repetitive, especially when dealing with bulk cards.

That’s where the Card Slinger comes in: a clever, 3D-printable tool designed to speed up the scanning process and keep your cards neatly stacked along the way. In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to print, assemble, and use the Card Slinger to quickly sort and catalog your Magic cards with way less hassle.

The only tools you'll need for this are a 3D printer, white filament, and the Card Slinger Cura files. Cura files that work with most phone types have been provided. As for the 3D printing requirements, I used Elegoo white PLA filament on an Elegoo Neptune 3 Pro 3D printer. However, any combination of filament and printer should work just fine. That said, it's important to use white filament for the best results—especially in darker environments where lighting may affect scanning performance.

First you need to make the gcode for the 3D printer. The important things to change in Cura, or whatever splicer software you are using are the wall and floor thickness, as well as the infill density. For wall density I would recommend 7 and for floor density I would recommend 9. For infill density I used 20%, however that is pretty overkill and you can get away with using 10% pretty easily.

Next thing is to start the 3d print. My print between the two pieces took about 24 hours. However this is because I printed them fairly slow and at such a high infill density. A print time of 18 hours is more realistic.

After you're done printing, you need to insert the phone stand into the holes. It is very sturdy, so you don't need to worry about it falling. Once you set up the stand, you are ready to start scanning cards!

This is the fun part. Make sure you have ManaBox, or another Magic card organization app. Position your phone camera so that it stares straight down into the card shoot, getting the camera as close to the center as possible. After that, all you need to do is steadily slide cards into the shoot, and the cards will automatically scan.