You just opened your sealed pool. Eighty cards. The old way to enter them into your league is to type each name into a search box, set the quantity, click add, repeat. The new way is to take a photo. Draftalot reads the cards, you confirm the list, and the pool is in the system in under a minute.

This is one of the biggest workflow upgrades we have shipped, and it is live now.

How It Works

Open the card pool import page in your league, point your phone camera at your cards, and take a photo. Draftalot sends the image to Google's Gemini AI, which reads the card titles. The result comes back in a few seconds.

You see a confirmation screen showing every card the AI detected, with the suggested match and a few alternatives. If a card is wrong (sometimes the AI guesses a similar name) you click the alternative. When the list looks right, you commit. The cards land in your pool, your deck, your sideboard, or the draft pool, depending on where you told it to go.

What works best:

• A clean, well-lit shot
• Cards laid out flat with the title bars visible
• Stacks fanned out so titles overlap but stay readable

The system handles roughly twenty to thirty cards per photo comfortably. For larger pools, take a few photos and import them in batches.

Why It Took So Long

We have been talking about photo import for years. The reason it never got built was that older OCR was not good enough at MTG card titles. Generic OCR can read a license plate, but Magic cards have stylized fonts, foil distortion, weird angles, and a card database in the high tens of thousands to match against.

Modern AI vision models changed this. They can read the title, understand it as text, and reason about which card it matches even when the photo is partial or imperfect. We tested several options. Google's Gemini gave us the best accuracy on MTG card photos.

The Limits

Photo import is in paid leagues only. We pay per image, and the AI is not free.

There is also a card list size cap. If your league has more than 2,000 active cards (an extremely large multi-set pool), photo import is disabled. The AI gets less accurate when it has too many possible matches to choose from.

If the import gets a card wrong, just pick the right alternative in the confirmation step. Your corrected list is what gets saved to your pool. We track accuracy across imports and tune the matcher when we see patterns, so the system gets better over time as more leagues use it.

What's Next

Async imports are coming. Right now you wait for the AI to finish before you can do anything else. Soon you will be able to upload a stack of photos, walk away, and get a notification when the import is ready to confirm.

Photo import is live now. Try it from your league cards page.