Behind the counter at Wizard's Tower: 600,000 cards, sorted by hand

Dropping off a Bugle card at Wizard's Tower on Marketplace Avenue this week, publisher Jay Tarzwell walked in on what looked like a tournament in full swing: a room of staff in matching lime green shirts, heads down at long tables, working through stacks of cards. It was not a game night. Dave, the shop's owner, was running a regular sorting shift.

Wizard's Tower buys and sells trading cards individually rather than only by the sealed pack, and that means someone has to open every new box and sort what's inside. Dave said the shop had just brought in a fresh shipment of Harry Potter cards, and the team he had pulled together that day was working through it card by card, deciding what goes up for sale.

The scale was the surprise. Dave told the Bugle that Wizard's Tower currently carries roughly 600,000 individual card listings. For one storefront in Barrhaven, that is a serious operation, built as much on staff hours at a sorting table as on shelf space.

Dave also said he has been building artificial intelligence tools into the shop's own backend to help manage that workload, telling the Bugle that the commercial software available to game and card retailers doesn't fully fit how Wizard's Tower runs, so he has started developing some of his own tools instead. It is an unusual detail for a hobby shop best known for its Magic: The Gathering drafts and Dungeons & Dragons nights.

Wizard's Tower also runs a full weekly events calendar for players, including a free, open Table Play night every Monday at 6 p.m. See the Bugle's community events page for what's on.