Find a card by the code printed on it
Two cards can carry the same art, the same name and the same rules and be worth sixty-six cents and six hundred dollars. The line of small print along the edge is what tells them apart. Type what yours says, and OtterDex will say which printing you are holding.
What the code on a card actually says
Two facts, printed small. The set code says which release the card came out in, and the collector number says which card that is within it — often over the number of cards in the set, so 045/198 is the forty-fifth of a hundred and ninety-eight. Together they name one printing out of the 176,354 in this catalogue, which is why a scan reads that line and nothing else on the card.
It matters because a name does not name a card. Lightning Bolt is fifty-nine different objects worth sixty-six cents to six hundred and twenty-six dollars, fourteen of which share one piece of art — so the only thing separating the one in your hand from the one in the picture is the line along its edge.
The code a catalogue files a card under is not always the code the card prints. The Pokémon API calls Paradox Rift sv4 while every card in it reads PAR, and 39,363 of the printings here are like that. This page takes what is printed, because that is the only one you can read off the card in your hand.
Magic: The GatheringDSK 105
Along the bottom edge, on the left. Two short lines: the collector number, sometimes over the set total, and under it the set code beside the language. The List is the exception — those cards carry the set they were reprinted from, as MRD 59.
PokémonPAR 045/198
Along the bottom edge. An expansion code, then the collector number over the number of cards in the set. The leading zeros are padding and make no difference.
Yu-Gi-Oh!LC5D-EN147
Just under the artwork on the right, not on the bottom edge. It has been there since 2002. One field, not two: the set code, the language, and the number, welded together. Put all of it in the number — the set field can stay empty.
Disney Lorcana1/204 • EN • 12
Along the bottom edge. Three fields separated by dots. The first is the collector number over the set total, the middle one is the language, and the last one — the one that is easy to read as an afterthought — is the set.
One Piece Card GameOP18-021
Along the bottom edge, on the left. One field, not two: the set code and the number, welded together. Put all of it in the number — the set field can stay empty.
When the card has no code on it
Plenty of cards carry none, and that is a fact about the printing rather than a fault in the reading. Magic put no set code on the card until Magic 2015, in July 2014 — 306 of the 703 Magic sets in this catalogue predate it — and before Exodus in 1998 there was no collector number either. Pokémon began printing an expansion code only with Scarlet & Violet in 2023, which is 24 of its 174 sets; on everything older the set is a symbol and nothing else.
A symbol is not a thing to guess at, and OtterDex will not guess — a wrong printing you do not notice is worse than no answer at all. For those cards, start from the name in search, or open the set you think it came from in the catalogue and find it by its number.
When one address names more than one card
Sometimes the ink genuinely cannot tell two printings apart. Magic’s The List reprints a card keeping its original set’s address, so STX 52 is two real printings at two different prices. One Piece shelves the same card under a retail set, a tournament set and a starter deck while every copy keeps the original number, so OP09-006 is three. Yu-Gi-Oh! prints one number across a run of rarities.
When that happens this page shows you all of them and asks, because you are holding the card and can see the art, the border and the symbol, and it cannot. It is the rule the app follows too: a scan resolves to one card, to a few, or to none, and never quietly to a guess.
You have just used the app, in a browser.
Typing that line is the slow half of what the app does with a camera. It reads the same line off the card, resolves it against this same catalogue, and gives the same three answers — this printing, one of these few, or it could not tell. The difference is that the phone does the reading, which is why scanning is free and stays free.
Holding the card? Point your phone at it.
The OtterDex app reads the line along the bottom edge of the card and gives the answer this page gives — which printing, and what it is worth today — on the phone, in a second, free, with no account. When it cannot read a card it says so rather than guessing.