ScanBattle — Tournaments and intake bench

Get out your old cards for identification

Hold an old trading card up to the camera. It will tell you what the card is and where it came from — including games nobody has printed for thirty years.

Zed vs Shen: We Got Hooked on the Riftbound Showdown Box

Riftbound · League of Legends TCG · Showdown decks

The Showdown box with the two champion decks: Shen on the left, Zed on the right.

A few friends, one box, and an evening that took longer than planned. Worth it, though.

First, the confusion

Honestly, the first game was a mess. We restarted twice, watched a handful of YouTube explainers and ended up asking Alexa to settle rules arguments. What trips you up is the wording. Legend, Champion Unit, Conquer, Recycle, and then Vendetta adds Empower and Flow on top. None of it explains itself. But by game three everything made sense, and suddenly the game showed what it can do. Fights matter, abilities matter, and there's a lot of detail hiding in these two decks. We wanted another round right away, same decks and all.

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The cards that carry each deck

Shen is the easier one to pick up. His Legend gives a unit Tank, and his champions want you sitting on a battlefield with exactly two units. Discipline, Ki Barrier and Shadow Dash are good enough that tournament players still run them. Zed asks more of you. His Legend gets stronger when you banish cards and lets you swap a card in hand for a fresh one. Zed, Without a Sound, Death Mark, Perfect Execution and Traveling Merchant all show up in competitive lists too.

Don't expect to take these to a tournament as they are, though. The top decks right now are Irelia, Akali, Master Yi, Rengar and Kennen, and both Zed and Shen sit near the bottom of current tier lists.

If you want to upgrade

Deck	Card	Approx. price
Shen	Defy (×3)	$2–3 each
Shen	Kennen, Keeper of Balance / Fiora, Victorious	$0.30 / $1.10
Shen	Vi, Peacekeeper	$4–5
Zed	Death Mark (up to 3), Up from the Deep, Ride the Wind	under $1.50
Zed	Tideturner / Switcheroo	$2–3
Zed	Kai'Sa, Survivor	around $70

Is it worth the money?

For $34.99 (€36.99 here) you get two full decks and two boosters. The cards themselves aren't worth much on their own, about $11 for Shen and $8 for Zed. You're paying for something you can play with a friend tonight. Spend another $15 to $25 per deck and both get noticeably sharper. Kai'Sa is the only card that really hurts the wallet.

Prices: market prices in USD, as of September to October 2026, subject to change. Meta placement based on the riftbound.gg tier lists (Vendetta, October 2026). Sources: riftbound.gg, riftdecks.com, mobalytics.gg, magicalmeta.ink.

Upcoming tournaments

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Grading, and the wear that really hurts a photograph

Condition · edges, centering, surface

Grading judges a card on four axes: centering, corners, edges and surface. All four count towards value. For a usable photograph three of them matter far more than the fourth — for optical reasons, not aesthetic ones.

Edge wear is the most underrated. Finding a card in an image starts with its outline: a closed, reasonably straight contour. A frayed edge no longer has one, and on dark-bordered cards the abrasion flashes pale on top of that — the contrast against the background locally inverts. What helps: a dark, matte surface underneath and room around the card.

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Centering looks harmless. It is still the reason some cards are misidentified from a flawless photograph. Identification from layout assumes certain elements sit at certain relative positions. Shift the print by two millimetres and everything shifts with it. With badly off-centre copies, crop more generously — do not cut tight to the border.

The surface is the hardest problem. Gloss, foil stamping and scratches produce reflections, and a reflection is not a blemish but a loss of information: where the light comes straight back, the spot is white and whatever was printed there is gone. It takes out the fine print along the bottom edge first. The remedy is light from the side rather than the front, two soft sources instead of one hard one, and tilting the card until the reflection walks out of frame.

A fourth point appears in no grading scale: the sleeve. Photographing through a soft sleeve and a toploader lays a second reflective layer over the card, often with scratches that are not the card's. For a picture it is worth unsleeving it briefly.

Corners barely matter here. They are decisive for value and almost never for legibility — a crushed corner costs points at grading and not a single letter.

Archive: earlier articles

What is actually in that drawer of yours?

Hold an old trading card up to the camera. The intake bench works out the game, the year and the publisher — including series nobody has printed for thirty years.

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