TCG Bulk Kings

WEekly Grindstone – GAMA 2026 and Periods 1 & 2

tcgbulkkings — Tue, 10 Mar 2026 04:03:20 +0000

Hey, so, the reality of this is that “weekly” is an intention, a target, and it will take me a bit to be consistent at this. Starting and adjusting ADHD medication is a rockity ride, even when I’m having a hard time feeling the ride in the moment.

That said, I haven’t been sitting around not doing anything. There’s been a lot going on. Period 1 (Jan 4-Jan 31) and Period 2 (Feb 1-Feb 28) have been a lot about setting things up and getting my brain screwed back on right. This culminated in the GAMA 2026 Expo, which I attended last week, in Period 3 Week 1.

Let’s be vague and unspecific and say a *lot* happened at GAMA this year. Obviously in our space, the biggest splash was made by TCGplayer announcing their Roca Sifter. They have released some specific details about it here, but I’m holding out on judgment until I can get one in my hands (so to speak, they are as big as my EcoTank printer) to really see what they can do.

Of course, CardCastle again sponsored me to come out and give a presentation this year. My presentation was on the Chaos Engine and how I use it to scale a massive trading card inventory leanly. Been a lot of buzz lately around chaos warehousing for trading card inventory, and I jumped on the train to really get my hands dirty and figure it out a few months back. Excited to share the culmination of these few months of experimentation with you all shortly, as I really get the public-facing version of it all nailed down.

There were some very interesting new TCGs being showcased at GAMA this year. My personal favorite was The Journey TCG (check it out here), which not only has an awesome pixel art 8-bit style, but also features gameplay very strongly influenced by old school SNES and PS1 era RPGs (i.e., my *jam*). Another interesting game was Hellbreak TCG, which pits classic movie monsters against each other in a Star Wars Unlimited style gameplay. The demo deck was Jaws vs. Dracula, a combination I would never have thought of with my own brain, so lots of fun and hilarity.

There were also, unsurprisingly I guess, a lot of great accessories on offer at GAMA this year. I went in looking for anything interesting I might be able to use to expand some of the offerings in the Shop here, or ideas for custom items that you all might appreciate. Lots of great ideas have come from this. I really liked Die Hard Dice’s magnetic life counters, in the style of the Archenemy: Nicol Bolas plastic life counters everyone was freaking out about. Also Mystery Dice Goblin has a super cool aesthetic and the mystery dice sets are great! I’m looking into some custom playmat and custom sleeve ideas too, and there were also interesting basic supplies on offer from ProSafe and the premium player sleeves from Curator looked great.

Weekly Grindstone – Period 1 Week 1

tcgbulkkings — Mon, 12 Jan 2026 04:51:30 +0000

I’m sorry.

Of course, out of the blue, you have no idea what I’m apologizing for. But I do owe you all an apology nevertheless.

Many things came together over the last several months that made me not a very effective website runner, business operator, and other things, especially to those of you who have gone out of your way to interact with me here, in my self-created space.

So some explanation is in order.

There has been an apparently long ongoing issue with the backend of the website that has prevented any kind of automated messaging from happening. All the emails I’m supposed to get that tell me about things happening here (e.g., people signing up for memberships, people placing orders, people sending bulk submissions, &c.), have been failing to send properly. This appears to have begun early last summer, as in June 2025.

I have also been struggling with mental health issues a bit. Not in a scary kind of way, but definitely in a debilitating, can’t seem to get done all the things I plan to get done kind of way. I have been aware that I am autistic for a few years now, but in taking care of myself as best I can, these new issues, or different forms of the same issues, have started cropping up. After seeking some guidance, I have come to be diagnosed officially as both autistic and having ADHD.

Certainly explains a lot.

Anyways, with medicine starting to help me with the executive functioning, and the website issues solved, I’m going to plan (with a big dollop of grace for myself if I’m not hitting all the plans just so) to renew this blog starting this week. Daily entries as I had tried to do before were, in retrospect, obviously too much for me, on top of everything else. But I’m hoping a weekly update of new happenings on the site, some BTS of what I’m working on, and just some random musings, philosophical brain dumps, and thoughts about what’s happening in our little corner of paradise, won’t be too lowly regarded by you all.

That all being said, you may have noticed some changes here. There is a freshly updated Home page, which shows the newest things I’m adding to the website inventory. Speaking of website inventory, there is a lot being added all the time now. I had been pretty lax in my updates here, but I’ve finally got processes figured out that let me do a much less labor intensive set of activities to get all kinds of cards up here. You may notice that there is a Newly Listed section as well – this section is currently a bucket for newly listed items on other platforms, but I’m still displaying here in case anyone is interested in them. If you see something you’d like, but it is out of stock, there should be a button that will allow you to inquire after it. Assuming it all works like it should (it did in testing, but recent website issues have me pessimistic about anything working the way it’s supposed to when actually public-facing), it should send me a message, and we can work out a price or whatever.

I have updated the Bulk Buylists page, so the prices there are accurate as of 1/10/2026. I’m not very flush with cash at the moment, but we of course still offer store credit for any bulk submission, and can do a small bit of cash before long.

Finally, I’m excited to let you know that either this week or next week I’ll be launching the next tier of my inventory system, Bulk Inventory Pro. If you’ve used the Starter version, please let me know how you’ve liked it and if you have any questions or comments.

Oh, finally (for real this time), a note: I’m calling this entry “Period 1 Week 1” because I’m using a Fiscal Year calendar that breaks the year up into 13 equal Periods of 4 Weeks each. This allows for better comparisons over time and year-over-year, since months are all different in length. Period 1 this year began on Sunday, 1/4, and will end on Saturday, 1/31. The only weirdness is that Q4 has 4 Periods in it, while the other quarters have 3. But if we’re consistent going forward, that shouldn’t be an issue.

I hope to be able to bring more value to you all in these posts going forward, but this first one really just needed to get done and be out of the way, so we can roll off into the new year.

Cheers!

Daily Grindstone #22 – Summer is Hot

tcgbulkkings — Fri, 15 Aug 2025 23:46:15 +0000

At the risk of sounding repetitive, it’s been a while. I’ve been grinding away, but due to many many factors, keeping up with this daily little blog has eluded me. Here’s to trying to kickstart it up again.

Back to school time has come and gone for us here in our school district, so I’m now settling into the new routine. Been tough, with the temperatures being what they have been, but it’s mellowed out a bit with some monsoons here in southern AZ.

While I’m not trying to sound whiney, I had a recently published video taken down for “harmful or dangerous content” today. They can’t explain what was harmful or dangerous about TCGplayer’s Pro Seller features, but I’m waiting to hear from some kind of supervisor. Hoping that gets ironed out.

Been listing a lot of new stuff on TCGplayer and Ebay lately. Notably got a lot of bulk Lord of the Rings listed today to TCGplayer, and some sweet Pokemon Pokeball holos from recent Japanese sets. Have a look at them if you’re interested.

Also have bulk lots of Magic in the shop again – get them before they are gone!

If you have submitted a buylist offer to me and I haven’t yet responded, be assured I will be getting to them in the next week or so. Look for a response soon.

Cheers!

Daily Grindstone #21 – Been Awhile

tcgbulkkings — Tue, 01 Jul 2025 06:08:59 +0000

I know, I know, I’ve not really said anything all summer.

But summer’s about to end, and I’ve been doing a lot. But from here this *should* go back to being a daily activity log.

By summer ending, I mean, here in Arizona, the school year begins in the middle of July. And to think, all the school birthdays I missed out on by having a late July birthday in an area where school doesn’t start till late August.

Anyway. You may have already seen, I’ve updated the UI on the Checklists page before I put out my video about it a few days ago. Hope that’s working out for everyone – if not, please leave a comment or send me a message.

It’s been HOT here, but we managed to get away from the hot a bit during our summer trip. We took the kids up on a tour through Arizona, including 3 nights at the Grand Canyon. None of us had been before, and of course it was truly amazing!

In more card-related news, I’ve made some rearrangements in my office that will greatly enhance my ability to process cards swiftly and in a more procedural kind of way. Think The Toyota Way for cards. I had allowed myself to get bogged down in a lot of ways in the spring, and it took a while to see just where the bottlenecks were, as well as to pull myself out of the resultant burnout. I’m also hoping to literally rearrange the furniture in there sometime this week, just to improve things a bit more. More on that when it happens.

You may notice a huge number of adds to the Newly Listed section of the Shop. This is a lot of cross-listed inventory from Ebay. I will be back to adding more bulk-type inventory here as well starting this week. I will also be sorting these Newly LIsted cards out into their respective categories this week, with new additions to be added every Friday going forward.

I can’t really think of much to say as far as a big damn update for this one, so I’ll keep it short today. Tomorrow will be more specific and interesting, hopefully, maybe.

Cheers!

Daily Grindstone #20 – Launching Checklists

tcgbulkkings — Fri, 16 May 2025 19:27:19 +0000

Okay, I’ve been out a few… weeks….

Sometimes the brain weasels won’t let you do a lot of things, and you have to grit your teeth and do the most important things first.

But I’m doing better and am back to trying to be back to making content. (lol)

So – what HAVE I been up to?

Savvy website users may have noticed a new option in the top menu. We have added a Checklists feature to the site! Currently this has information from all of Magic, Pokemon, and Yu-Gi-Oh! Please feel free to play around with it and leave a comment here with any troubles, feedback, feature requests, or anything at all related to it. It is usable without logging in, though there will be future features that require logging in

Note also that this is the minimally viable version of this. The ultimate plan is for this to be the best possible checklist solution available for trading cards of any kind. Over the next few weeks we will be adding lots of other TCGs, and then will start adding data for sports cards and other non-sport, non-tcg cards as well. There are currently an HTML and a printer-friendly PDF option for the checklists, but a CSV option will be added soon also. I’m hoping to turn this into a collection tracker too, with all kinds of interesting features related to that, but that’s a bit further down the pipeline. In the meantime, I hope you all can find some usefulness with the currently available features.

More news about this and many other things will be coming soon. Looking to get back to M-F posting starting next week or the following week if next week proves too difficult. It’s the last week of the school year and schedules are accordingly crazy-go-nuts.

Cheers!

Daily Grindstone #19 – Process of Making Processes

tcgbulkkings — Thu, 03 Apr 2025 21:15:54 +0000

What’s up Grinders?

In preparation for the end of Q1 and the beginning of Q2, I’ve been doing a lot of process auditing and realizing that I don’t have processes firmly in place for a lot of activities. So I thought I’d talk a bit about my process for developing a process.

Now I get it, this is somewhat of an esoteric, academic exercise. But it does allow me to unironically use this picture.

First, I realize that I’m struggling with something. Something that I do a lot. Something that I may need to explain to someone else someday. I put on my manager hat and thing – if I were training someone to do this for me, how would I tell them to do it?

Usually, if it’s something I’m struggling with, I don’t really have a good explanation for how to do the task.

Then I spend some time thinking about exactly what I *actually* do when I’m doing the task. I write it out in a flowchart. Usually this is hastily scribbled in my notebook, and is really usually only legible to myself.

Then I look at this workflow, and I really sit and think if any of these steps can be improved. For this process, in which I’m recording my sales on Whatnot in my inventory management system, I’ve determined that it would be simpler if I put steps 1-3 into a process that I do *before* the Whatnot stream. That way I’m not unable to ship the cards until after I’ve gone through and conditioned and listed them in my system. Then I’m left only with steps 4-7. I’ll reevaluate these steps after effecting the changes determined in this first modification.

I try to only create one major modification per iteration, so I can really see how well it helps or doesn’t. Once I’ve settled on that change being worth keeping, I redo this process: draw it out, look at each step and see where the hold-ups are, float some kind of solution, test it out.

The end result is, well, it’s a never-ending process, but the output eventually is a pretty good process. I did a short video about my back stock pulling process recently. Check it out here: https://youtube.com/shorts/gVswpu5_2W4?feature=share

Video about Q1 into Q2 coming soon. I wasn’t able to shoot it last night, so I’m hoping I can tonight, or tomorrow during my midday break. Until then, keep Grinding!

Cheers!

Daily Grindstone #18 – I Wish to Register a Complaint

tcgbulkkings — Tue, 01 Apr 2025 20:47:07 +0000

Hey there Grinders! Q1 is gone and Q2 is upon us!

Weird, I know. The year is flying by (and yet dragging all the same). I’m currently scripting a relatively informal video I’m hoping to shoot tonight/tomorrow, and then to post tomorrow/Thursday giving kind of an update of the world of TCG Bulk Kings after Q1 and looking at where we are aiming for Q2 and beyond. So be on the lookout for that.

But I’ll go ahead and talk about one of those things here, to give you all a bit of a sneak peek behind the curtain. I am looking in the future to make developing the website a bigger priority. And one of the ways I wish to do that is to make the website more friendly to card buyers and collectors. I love collecting, even more than playing. That’s why I can mess with sports cards as well as the cards that are neither sports or game related.

So, please, tell me: are you a collector of cards? And if so, what manner of collector are you? I’d love to showcase some collections or collecting styles here. I personally like collecting things I’ve found in bulk, especially things like autographs, misprints/miscuts, and oddities (like the Theros Hero’s Path cards, or the Magic Mini Game cards). I also love to try to complete sets from only bulk purchases. I would love to hear what you like to collect – feel free to comment.

Now, as for the complaint in the title. Another thing I’m working on is to streamline some of my repetitive tasks. One of the largest speed bumps for me right now is in recording sold cards in my inventory system. Unfortunately, no platform does an excellent job of putting all the info we need at our fingertips in any kind of scalable way. Ebay is pretty close – you can export your orders into a spreadsheet and that has 95%+ of the info needed. But they don’t include the fees AND the ad fees in this, which means you have to check for those manually.

The worst is Whatnot, but mostly because of the nature of the platform. It is still doable, it just takes a good chunk of time to sit down and power through it all. The info from each order is available, but not in a spreadsheet-exportable form. But you can tab through each order and type it all out pretty quickly. 30 min to an hour to knock out a typical show.

Which leads me to TCGplayer. I really REALLY wish TCGplayer weren’t almost but not quite there. Be awful or get over the finish line. There are two problems for me with the availability of information from TCGplayer. You have a couple options of what you can export from their backend. You can export all the cards sold over a number of orders, to generate a pull sheet. That’s great. You can also export your shipping, so you can import it into a shipping software. Also great. Finally, you can export the info from your orders, which gives pieces of info like product total, shipping credit, order number, how many cards in the order. &c.

But.

My first problem lies in the fact that none of these exports will tell you the fees on the order. Not one. The only way to see what the fees are on any particular order is to open up the order itself. Which, when all this other stuff is readily available, feels like a big time sink. You can copy and paste over lots of info from these other spreadsheets you can get, but not the fees. That you have to go through the orders one by one (with no arrows to jump to the next order).

Second problem: there is again no way to tie which cards were sold with which order. You can get the sheet with all the cards sold, you can get the sheet with all the orders and their respective pieces of data. But you cannot get a breakdown of what cards were on what order. You may have sold 10x Kabira Takedown, but did you sell them all on one order, or one at a time to 10 different customers? These are important pieces of info. Also, without knowing which cards are on what order, subject to which shipping fees, credits, or transaction fees, it is impossible to track profitability and sales velocity by card, which is very important to us as sellers. So, to get this info, again, it requires manually slogging through each order and manually typing them all down. There is no possible option to automate this process entirely.

If anyone has any tips or tricks out there for how they manage this, please feel free to share with the class.

Anyways, keep on grinding! And cheers!

Daily Grindstone #17 – Sold Inventory Recording Woes

tcgbulkkings — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 21:16:32 +0000

Hey there Grinders!

I’ve realized that, while I love my process for adding listings to my inventory system, I really REALLY don’t love adding sales to my inventory system, as it adds a lot of extra steps to the process of shipping orders. Or else it’s super tedious.

So I’m trying to figure out a way to automate to some extent the extraction of all the info I need in order to add sold cards to my Sold page, and thus have it auto populate through to my Master sheet.

It would be super nice if there were some kind of extractable csv that had selected orders on it, and what cards were sold on each of those orders, and what the price breakdown was between each of those cards. But that’s not available from TCGplayer. The best version of this involves getting some info from csv’s to download, and the rest of the info from either the packing slips or else the order pages themselves. But manually typing all this adds a huge amount of work to each order, far outweighing the work involved in actually pulling, packing, and shipping said orders.

Trying to do something with Character Recognition to extract text from the PDF, but it’s really inelegant and kind of driving me up the wall.

If you have any suggestions, any processes that work for you, feel free to let me know.

Cheers!

Daily Grindstone #16 – Working Hard is Hard Work

tcgbulkkings — Tue, 25 Mar 2025 20:57:35 +0000

Hey there Grinders.

No exclamation point today because I’m tired. -_-

Lol. I did the classic mistake of listing too much over the weekend and not catching up on all my orders. And now I have a *lot* of orders to ship. I’ve been trying to get them shipped, but it’s been hard.

Not only is working hard hard work, but also working from home means dealing with home while you’re working. Not that I would have it any other way – I absolutely love being able to work at home, and being able to do something I really enjoy in a way that is self-sustaining.

But sometimes working hard is hard work.

Whoever said “Love your work and you won’t work a day in your life” obviously never had to ship orders.

Normally I really don’t mind shipping orders. I enjoy it even. But I’m tired. Spring Break is over, which means back to my square job for a bit, which involves getting up early and physical demands. I’m a bit Krabby.

Anyways, I’ll stop complaining.

I did manage to list a bit of Pokemon reverse holos to the Ebay store today. Last bit was a bunch of very nice looking Sun & Moon Base Set reverse holos. Hope they do really well.

Tonight I should have time to finish up my various order shipping along with recording the sales in my inventory spreadsheets. Hopefully I’ll have enough time after that to get some more listing done – got lots more to list T.T

Cheers!

Daily Grindstone #15 – Break is Over

tcgbulkkings — Mon, 24 Mar 2025 20:57:14 +0000

Hey there Grinders!

So, our Spring Break is over here in Vail AZ. So we’re back to regularly scheduled programming. (As best as I can approximate it anyways x.x)

I want to go ahead and announce that I’m going to be starting up some new features for Q2, I haven’t nailed them down entirely, still got some ideas and implementations of them cooking, but come April 1, there will be some new things going on =] Some new engagement, more content, and most importantly MOAR CARDS!

Over the last few days of Spring Break, I finally finished organizing the cards in my massive pile of unlisted bulk. Got everything a lot more set up so that I can really dig into listing, and have been pretty successful at getting lots done. TCGplayer current inventory at the time of this writing is over 15k; Ebay is over 2600. Feeling really good about that and the sustainability of continuing to add to that total daily. Now I just need to create the discipline and systems that keep me keeping up with it and with the resultant orders.

The video I put out last week about using TCGplayer’s Scan and Identify tool has been very popular, though it’s been a bit contentious. I’ll do a follow up video about this soon, but I wanted to clear the air. This tool is really really good, but my video didn’t give it the best representation of that. I was specifically trying out their newly added ability to do One Piece cards through that system, and it didn’t perform super well. It does excellently on Magic, Pokemon, and YuGiOh. I can’t speak for the also newly added Lorcana, as I haven’t gotten to my Lorcana cards in the pile of bulk to be listed yet, but that will happen soon.

I put out a short earlier today, while I was shipping orders, with a question for sports cards collectors: how do you all interact with the massive amount of parallels that exist in newer sets? I know people don’t really do set collecting anymore, like was (and is still) done for older sets, and for Pokemon and to a lesser extent other TCGs. But do people try to collect one representation of each parallel type? Do people try to get a set or team or player collection, regardless of parallel type? I have so many questions, because I don’t really get how this aspect of the collectible market for sports cards really works. If you have any insight, and would rather leave a comment here than on the video itself, feel free, I’ll read it wherever. I know there are people who buy low end sports cards, just want to understand this aspect of the market better.

I’m planning to finish shipping this weekend’s orders this evening, and get my listings in. Tomorrow I’m hoping to get a lot of stuff uploaded to the WooShop that has been on the back burner during Spring Break. And I’m putting in lots of brain work for how I can bring you all more value, so be on the lookout for lots more interesting stuff coming up. And of course, if you have any suggestions on ways I can bring value, whether it’s content ideas, website features, or anything else, please feel free to let me know. The worst that can happen is I won’t think it’s something I can or want to do; and the best that can happen is that I can just easily do so and haven’t thought of it yet, so then I can bring that value to you. Just let me know!

Cheers!