How Dans MTG works

Everything you need to know — from installation to identifying your first card and managing your collection.

What is Dans MTG?

Dans MTG is a Chrome browser extension designed for Magic: The Gathering players who buy and sell cards online — Facebook groups and auction pages, eBay and marketplace listings, store sites, forums, anywhere a card gets photographed.

When you see a card photo, right-clicking it instantly identifies the card and pulls up live pricing from more than a dozen stores across Australia, New Zealand, the US and Europe — all without leaving the page. No searching, no typing the card name, no switching tabs.

It also connects to your personal card collection, so you'll know immediately whether you already own that card or a similar version of it before you decide to bid.

Installing the extension

1. Open the Chrome Web Store listing — or search the store for Dans MTG.
2. Click Add to Chrome, then Add extension when Chrome asks you to confirm. (If Chrome shows a "Proceed with caution" note, see below — it's expected for a new listing.)
3. A small 🃏 icon appears in your browser toolbar — pin it from the puzzle-piece menu so it stays visible. Click it to open the Dans MTG side panel.
4. Choose the Sign Up tab, enter your email and a password (min 8 characters, 1 uppercase, 1 number), then click Create Account.
5. Enter the 6-digit verification code emailed to you and click Verify Email. If it hasn't arrived after a minute, check your spam folder.
6. You receive 150 free credits automatically the moment your account is confirmed — you're ready to scan.

Signing in on a second computer is the same panel, just the Sign In tab instead — your credits, collection and groups follow the account, not the browser. Forgotten your password? Forgot password? on the sign-in tab emails you a reset code.

"Proceed with caution" during install

Chrome may show "This extension is not trusted by Enhanced Safe Browsing" on the listing. It's worth knowing exactly what that does and doesn't mean:

• It isn't a finding about Dans MTG. Chrome shows this on listings from any developer account that hasn't been publishing long enough to have built up a track record. It's about the age of the publisher, not the contents of the extension.
• The extension still passed Google's review. Nothing reaches the Chrome Web Store without being reviewed against the Developer Program Policies first.
• It goes away on its own. Google's guidance is that new developers generally become trusted after a few months of policy-compliant publishing. There's no button to press.
• You can check the permissions yourself. Dans MTG only sends the single image you right-click, never stores images, and never watches your browsing — see the Privacy Policy.

Identifying a card

1. Go to any web page showing Magic cards for sale — a Facebook group, an eBay listing, a store's product page, a forum thread.
2. Find a card photo.
3. Right-click directly on the card image.
4. In the context menu, select Identify MTG Card.
5. A dark overlay panel appears showing:
   • Card name, set code, and collector number — in English, even when the card isn't (see below)
   • Foil or non-foil (detected from the ★ symbol in the card's bottom-left stamp)
   • Frame treatment (normal, extended art, borderless, showcase, etc.)
   • Type line, power/toughness, and artist
   • Live prices from more than a dozen stores
   • How many copies you own of this version, and how many other versions you hold

Which sites this works on — all of them

Dans MTG started as a Facebook tool and that's still where most people use it, but the Identify MTG Card option is registered against images generally, not against a list of approved sites. It appears in your right-click menu on every website. If you can right-click the card photo, Dans MTG can read it:

• Facebook group posts, auction albums and Marketplace listings
• eBay, Gumtree and other marketplace listings
• Online store product pages, when you want a second opinion on the asking price
• Forum and Reddit threads, blog posts, wanted-to-buy lists
• A photo someone sent you, opened in a browser tab

The result is saved against the page's address

When a card is identified, the card name, set, number, foil status and frame treatment are stored keyed to the URL of the tab you had in focus when you right-clicked. That's what makes the rest of the extension work off Facebook too:

• Reopening the page is free. Come back to that eBay listing tomorrow and the card is already identified — you don't pay to scan it twice.
• Other people get it cheaply. The next person to open the same URL sees your result without running the AI again, and refunds part of what you paid. This is the community credit system, and it applies to any URL, not just Facebook posts.
• Groups follow the URL. Cards you save into a group are attached to the page they came from, so a group can hold a Facebook auction post, an eBay listing and a store page side by side.

Sites that hide their images

A few sites deliberately make the photo hard to right-click — Facebook's photo viewer lays a transparent sheet over the image so it can't be saved, Card Kingdom renders foil and Oil Slick cards as a web component rather than a picture, and Steel City's storefront puts a zoom layer over the product shot. On those three sites Dans MTG handles it for you: right-click anywhere on the card and it digs the real art out from underneath.

Everywhere else, right-click the image itself. If Identify MTG Card doesn't appear in the menu, that page is hiding its image behind something in the same way — tell Dan which site it was and it can be added to the handled list.

Cards printed in another language

A card doesn't have to be in English for the scan to work. The AI reads the card in whatever language it was printed in — Japanese, Chinese, Korean, Russian and the rest — and gives you the card back in English:

• The name is translated. Scan a Japanese Ultimate Masters card and the panel shows the English card name, not the printed Japanese one — so you know what you're actually looking at.
• So is the rest of the card. The type line, rules text, flavour text and artist all come back in English, taken from the official printing rather than transcribed off the photo.
• Pricing works the same. Once the printing is pinned, every store and price index is checked exactly as it would be for an English copy.
• The language is read too. The two-letter language code in the card's bottom-left stamp (EN, JA, DE, FR …) is part of what the scan reads, so the panel knows which printing you're holding.

This is the fastest way to deal with a foreign-language card in an auction post: right-click it, and instead of squinting at unfamiliar text, you get an English name, the exact printing and a price to bid against.

Look up a card by name (no photo)

Don't have a clear photo, or just want to price a card you already know? Open the Card tab and start typing the card's name — a type-ahead list suggests matching cards as you go. Pick one and you get the same full details and live pricing as a photo scan, without running the AI. Because there's no AI cost, a manual lookup is only 5 credits (versus 30 for an image scan), and — just like a scan — the next few people who view that same card refund you 1 credit each, down to a 1-credit net cost.

Reading the scan result

Card details

Shows the card name with foil/non-foil and frame treatment badges, the set and collector number, type line, power/toughness (for creatures), loyalty (for planeswalkers), and artist credit.

Your collection

Shows whether you own this specific version (e.g., foil extended art) and how many copies, plus a total count of other versions of the same card name you hold. You can add, update, or remove cards directly from this panel without leaving the page you're on.

Live pricing

Prices are fetched in real time from official card databases and a growing list of retail stores, then cached for 24 hours so repeat lookups are instant. Each price is shown with a direct buy-link back to the store's own product or search page, so the retailer always gets the referral.

Where prices come from

There are far more than six sources now — sixteen in all: eleven storefronts, four official data APIs and one price index, spanning several regions and currencies. Every one of them returns a live price — a source that won't let us read it is removed rather than left showing you an empty row:

Source	Region	How it's read
Scryfall (USD + TCGPlayer)	US	Official API
Mana Pool	US	Official API
CardTrader	EU	Official API
Card Kingdom	US	Public product page
MTGGoldfish (price index)	US	Public price page
Good Games	AU	Public store JSON
Steel City	AU	Public store JSON
The Card Hub	AU	Public store JSON
MTG Singles	AU	Public store JSON
Jenes MTG	AU	Public store JSON
GUF	AU	Public store JSON
TCG Singles	AU	Public store JSON
Kastle	AU	Public store JSON
Plenty of Games	AU	Public store JSON
General Games	AU	Public store JSON
Card Merchant	NZ	Public store JSON

Four sources have been removed. Star City Games disallows the search endpoints a lookup needs. Pro Gamers disallows /search, which on its storefront is the only way to turn a card name into a product page. MTGMate disallows /cards/search and asks for 60 seconds between requests, which can't be honoured inside a live lookup. MTGStocks rejects any client that identifies itself honestly, and only ever worked because of a disguised User-Agent we no longer send. Each said no in a machine-readable way, so each is gone — we'd rather drop a source than argue with it or show you a row that can never fill in.

Overseas prices (USD, EUR, NZD) are converted to a common currency so you can compare them at a glance. Not every store carries every printing — a source that doesn't stock the exact card is simply left out of the results for that scan.

One of those is an index, not a shop. MTGGoldfish doesn't sell anything — it publishes what a printing is trading at, which is the number the trade quotes when valuing a card. It's there as the reference to sanity-check a store's asking price against, so it never shows a stock count and is never a "buy here" answer.

How the exact card is looked up

The hard part of pricing isn't finding a price — it's finding the price for the exact printing you're looking at. A card name like "Lightning Bolt" can have dozens of printings across sets, frames and finishes, each worth wildly different amounts. Dans MTG anchors every lookup to a single, unambiguous identity:

• When your card is identified, it's resolved to its Scryfall printing — a specific set code, collector number and unique Scryfall ID (e.g. the borderless foil #299, not the plain #38).
• Official APIs (Scryfall, Mana Pool, CardTrader) are queried directly by that Scryfall ID, so the match is exact by construction — Mana Pool takes the ID as-is, CardTrader maps it to its internal blueprint.
• Store lookups search each shop's public catalogue by card name, then score the candidates against the resolved set name, frame treatment and collector number to pick the right listing — and reject a result that carries the wrong collector number rather than guess.
• The price index (MTGGoldfish) is addressed by set code and collector number, which it publishes per printing — so a showcase #429 is never priced off the plain #227 sitting next to it.
• Foil, frame and special finishes (borderless, extended art, showcase, etched, rainbow/halo/surge foil, serialised) are all part of the match, so a foil borderless scan won't be priced against the cheap non-foil normal printing.

Playing fair — robots.txt & store terms

Dans MTG is a price-comparison and referral tool, and it's built to respect what each store actually permits. This isn't a promise we made once when a store was added — it's enforced in code on every single request:

• Official APIs first. Where a sanctioned data source exists — Scryfall, Mana Pool and CardTrader all publish public APIs designed for exactly this — we use it instead of scraping a web page.
• Only allowed paths are read. The participating stores publish an agents.md that explicitly permits read-only, non-transacting access to their public product and search endpoints — the only endpoints Dans MTG touches. We never place carts, checkouts or orders.
• robots.txt is checked before every fetch, automatically. Each store's robots.txt is read, cached for a day and consulted before each request; if it disallows the path, the request is never made and that store simply reports no price. It fails closed — if we can't read a store's robots.txt at all, we don't fetch that store. It's why Star City Games, Pro Gamers and MTGMate are no longer listed at all, and it means a store can change its mind at any time and we'll follow within a day, without anyone emailing us.
• Crawl-delay is honoured. A store that asks for a gap between requests gets it. If the gap it asks for is longer than a live lookup can wait, we don't fetch it at all rather than fetch it too early — that's exactly why MTGMate, which asks for 60 seconds, was dropped.
• "Slow down" is obeyed. A 429 or 503 parks that store for the duration it asks for in Retry-After (five minutes if it doesn't say), and nothing is sent to it until that passes. We never retry straight through a rate limit.
• Cached, and never bulk-crawled. Prices are cached for 24 hours — and a definitive "this store doesn't carry this printing" for 7 days. Lookups are per-card and on-demand: we never crawl a store's catalogue, never enumerate its products and never build a copy of its database.
• We say who we are. Every request identifies itself as MTGIdentifier/1.0 with a contact URL, rather than posing as a browser. A store that would rather we didn't fetch its pages can therefore recognise us and block us — and if it does, we drop the source or ask for access.
• We store facts, not content. Only the price and the card's identifiers are kept — never a store's descriptions, images or page layout — and every result links back to the source.
• Never behind a login, never defeating protections. Dans MTG only reads public pages and never attempts to bypass logins, CAPTCHAs or anti-bot measures.

If you run a store and you'd rather we didn't

You don't have to ask. Adding a Disallow for the paths in question to your robots.txt is enough — it's re-read at least once a day and honoured automatically, and your store will drop to a plain search link with no price. That's the fastest route and it needs nothing from us.

If you'd rather be removed altogether — including the search link — or you want to talk about it first, email support@dansmtg.com from an address at the store's domain and say so. We'll action it within 5 business days and confirm when it's done. No justification needed, and we won't argue the point.

Managing your collection

Import from ManaBox

1. In ManaBox, go to your Collection → tap the menu (⋮) → Export → CSV.
2. Open the Dans MTG side panel → Settings tab → Import Collection.
3. Paste the CSV text and click Import. Your entire collection syncs in seconds.

Add cards manually

From any scan result overlay, use the + Add to My Collection button to record a card with your chosen quantity and condition. Update or remove cards from the same panel.

Browse your collection

Open the side panel and the My Collection tab shows all your cards with a live search box. Tap ✕ next to any card to remove it.

Understanding credits

Running AI-powered card identification costs money (cloud computing and AI inference fees). Dans MTG uses a community credit system so the cost is shared fairly and the service stays funded — every scan or view contributes a little, so nobody rides entirely for free on the people who pay.

How you earn and spend credits

• +150 credits free when you first sign up.
• −30 credits when you are the first person to scan a card on a page URL nobody has scanned before — a Facebook post, an eBay listing, any page (this runs the AI).
• −5 credits when you look a card up yourself by typing its name (the type-ahead search) instead of scanning a photo — no AI needed, so it's much cheaper than a scan. Others repay you the same way: you're refunded 1 credit for each of the next 4 people who view that card, leaving the same 1-credit net cost everyone pays.
• −1 credit the first time you view a post someone else already scanned. A view is never free — and the first few viewers of a freshly-scanned post pay a bit more (15, then 7, then 3) to repay the scanner quickly, then are refunded back down to 1 as more people view. Re-opening a post you've already viewed costs nothing.
• +credits back as new people view a post you scanned — repaid fastest by the first few viewers — until you're left with just a 1-credit net cost. If you paid extra as one of those early viewers, you're refunded back down to 1 the same way. After that, further views go toward keeping the service running.
• +monthly credits with a subscription, or a one-off boost from a credit pack (see below).

Running out of credits

If you don't have enough credits for a scan or a view, you can subscribe or buy a credit pack from the extension for a top-up. Credits also trickle back to you whenever other people view posts you scanned earlier, so an active community keeps everyone topped up.

Subscriptions & credit packs

If you scan a lot, a monthly subscription is the cheapest way to get credits. There are four tiers — Common, Uncommon, Rare, and Mythic — each granting a recurring monthly credit allowance. Prefer to pay as you go? Buy a one-off credit pack whenever you need a boost.

Subscribe, top up, change tier, or cancel from the Settings area of the extension. Payments are processed securely by Stripe — your card details are entered on Stripe's checkout and never touch Dans MTG (see our Privacy Policy). You can manage or cancel your subscription at any time through the Stripe customer portal, linked from the extension.

Dans MTG is in early development — plans, prices, and credit amounts are subject to change.

Foil detection

Foil status is detected from the card's own printed text, not from the reflective sheen in the photo (which varies too much with lighting to be reliable). The bottom-left stamp on every Magic card contains the signal:

• SET • EN — bullet/dot = non-foil
• SET ★ EN — star = foil

Seller labels in the photo (e.g. a "FOIL" sticker) are used as secondary confirmation.

Supported frame treatments

• Normal — standard bordered frame
• Extended Art — art spills into the side borders
• Borderless — art covers the full card edge to edge
• Showcase — special stylised frame unique to the set
• Retro — old-border style frame
• Etched — foil-etched commander frame
• Serialised — printed /XXX serial number