AI Card Vault vs CardLuma — the comparison after their April 2026 TCG release

For the better part of a year, the easy argument against CardLuma was "they're sports-only and English-only." That argument is gone. On April 18, 2026, CardLuma's v1.5.0 shipped TCG/CCG support: Pokemon TCG, Magic: The Gathering, Yu-Gi-Oh!, Lorcana, One Piece, Flesh and Blood, Digimon, Weiss Schwarz — eight games at launch.

This changes the competitive landscape. The "stay on AI Card Vault because CardLuma doesn't do Pokemon" pitch no longer works. We have to be more specific about what we actually do differently.

This is the post-April-2026 honest comparison. What CardLuma now does well. Where AI Card Vault still has the edge. Which dealer profile should be on which tool.

What CardLuma now does well

Crediting them honestly:

• TCG support is real. Pokemon, MTG, Yu-Gi-Oh, Lorcana, and more are scan-able in their workflow. The card identification looks competent.
• Pricing is aggressive. Their entry tier ($10/mo for 1,000 scans) is cheaper per-scan than ours by roughly 2x. They are deliberately undercutting on price.
• They ship fast. 17 releases between December 2025 and April 2026 — roughly one every 10 days. That's faster than our cadence and faster than CDP's. You can watch their changelog to verify.
• Their feature ergonomics are genuinely good. Keyboard shortcuts, store-category automation, image watermarking, listing branding, custom parallel buttons — operational polish CDP doesn't have.
• They publish honest content. Their /news page is well-organized and well-written. Their comparison-to-CDP page is direct.

If you've never heard of CardLuma and you sell only English-language sports + TCG on eBay only, they're a reasonable choice. I'm not going to pretend otherwise.

Where AI Card Vault still has the edge

The differences are now sharper. Five categories where the comparison meaningfully favors the vault:

1. Foreign-language Pokemon catalogs

CardLuma's TCG support is English-only. They support Pokemon TCG — but only English Pokemon TCG. Japanese, Korean, Chinese Pokemon are not in their catalog.

This is the wedge we built for. The vault supports:

• Full Japanese Pokemon catalog (1996 to current — WOTC-era JP through Battle Partners and beyond)
• Korean Pokemon (Scarlet & Violet era domestic + select WOTC-era)
• Chinese-language Pokemon (Hong Kong / Taiwan releases)

If you have any meaningful Japanese Pokemon volume, CardLuma cannot list those cards correctly. The cards either won't identify (no catalog match) or will identify as the English equivalent (wrong card spec, wrong title, wrong audience).

2. Multi-region eBay (US + DE today; JP on the roadmap)

CardLuma is single-region eBay (US only). The vault's eBay integration is multi-region — US and DE shipping today, with JP next on the roadmap. The point is the same: a Pokemon collector in Germany searching ebay.de finds your listing natively, not a translated US listing.

For Japanese Pokemon, the JP region in particular matters; that's why it's the next region we're prioritizing rather than another sport-card-heavy market.

3. Channel roadmap beyond eBay

Both products are eBay-only today, but the trajectories differ.

CardLuma's release notes through April 2026 show every feature shipped is eBay-flavored: eBay Advertising Campaigns, eBay Market Data, eBay Inventory Management, eBay Policy Sync. Their focus is "the best eBay tool for cards," and they're executing on that.

The vault is also eBay-only today. Where the strategies diverge is the roadmap: TCGPlayer, Whatnot, CollX, and Shopify are all on our Phase 5 build queue. Whatnot in particular matters for Pokemon dealers — Whatnot is where live Pokemon selling happens.

This is honestly more "future commitment" than "current advantage." If you need Whatnot today, CDP is the answer — neither we nor CardLuma ship it. If you're betting on which tool will get to multi-channel first, our roadmap is published and the founder is on the build.

4. Cert lookup for all five major graders

CardLuma's grading-cert verification status is, per their own comparison page: "In progress." Today, you cannot type a PSA cert number into CardLuma and have it pull the full grading record.

The vault has supported this for ~12 months. PSA, BGS, CGC, SGC, TAG — all via direct API. Paste cert numbers, get the full grading record, queue the listings.

For dealers with meaningful slab volume (anything more than 5 slabs a week), this gap is operational. CardLuma's flow requires manual cert entry; the vault's is paste-and-go.

5. Pokemon-first catalog depth

The vault was built Pokemon-first. CardLuma added Pokemon in April 2026 — less than two weeks ago as of this post. Our catalog has been refining itself on Pokemon-specific edges for longer:

• Parallel detection (which Reverse Holo this is, which set the SIR comes from, which print run)
• Native-script title generation
• Pokemon-specific item-specifics mapping (eBay's filter fields for the Pokemon TCG category, which are different from sports cards)
• Set-code awareness (JP set codes like SV1S, SV6a, S12a)
• Pokemon Center exclusive flagging

CardLuma will catch up on these over time. They're shipping fast. But "five months of Pokemon" is genuinely different from "two years of Pokemon" in terms of catalog edge-case handling.

Where we are roughly the same

Honesty in both directions:

• AI identification accuracy on common English cards: within 1-2 percentage points either way.
• eBay direct listing: both ship listings via the eBay API; both work.
• Inventory management basics: both have batches, both have card-level CRUD, both have CSV export.
• Custom title templates: both ship this on every tier.
• Promoted Listings setup: both support it.

If you only need the rough-same features, the choice between us is a coin flip — go with whoever you prefer.

Where CardLuma is better

For completeness:

• Per-scan price at the entry tier. $10/mo for 1,000 scans ($0.01/scan) at CardLuma vs $10/mo for 250 imports ($0.04/import) at AICV. If you're scanning 800 cards/month and don't need any of the differentiators above, CardLuma is cheaper.
• Native desktop scanner app integration with PaperStream Capture. CardLuma doesn't have a desktop app of their own (neither do we), but their image-upload workflow is more polished for high-volume autofeed users.
• Sports-card automation features. Auto Hall of Fame detection, auto Rookie Card detection, auto Autograph detection — they have specific sports-card automation we don't prioritize because we're not sports-first.
• eBay-specific automation depth. Best Offer auto-accept rules with min thresholds; per-card eBay campaign overrides; FIXED campaign bid overrides. CardLuma has been shipping these for ~5 months; we haven't matched the depth yet because we've split focus across the foreign-language catalog and the broader channel roadmap.

The "which one is right for you" decision

That table is the decision. Use it.

What we're doing about the gap

Two of CardLuma's edges are things we should and will close. From the AICV roadmap:

• Per-scan economics — we're investigating a higher-import entry tier or a per-import metering option that gets us closer to CardLuma's $0.01/scan at high volume. Q3 2026 target.
• Sports-specific automation — auto HOF / auto RC / auto Autograph detection. Q3 2026 target.

The features they have that we don't are catchable. The features we have that they don't (foreign-language Pokemon, multi-region eBay, multi-channel) are years of catalog and integration work. The gap on those is widening, not closing.

My honest read

CardLuma is the most credible threat to our positioning we've seen. They ship fast, they price aggressively, their content is good, and their feature set is genuinely improving every two weeks.

But they're explicitly targeting the same buyer that CDP targets — English-language single-channel eBay sellers. They've widened their TAM to include English TCG; they have not crossed into the multi-language, multi-channel, multi-region territory that's our primary buyer.

If you're a Pokemon-first dealer with any JP / KR ambition, or you stream on Whatnot, or you cross-list to TCGPlayer or Shopify — you're our buyer, not CardLuma's. The right answer for you didn't change in April 2026; it just got more important to be specific about why it didn't change.

— Jamie

Both CardLuma and CardDealerPro are competent products run by smart teams. This post is honest comparison, not disparagement. The trading-card software market deserves real apples-to-apples information; that's why I publish posts like this one.