There are card identifier apps that connect to your webcam - you just flash a card under the camera and it will identify the card and set (used most often to give a quick market price or help you catalog your collection digitally) but you could definitely fit that into a larger automation project.
Yeah I remember seeing these for the first time not long ago. We were scraping magiccards.info without the owner's permission to use color coherence vector for comparison. As software engineers this was the really fun stuff for us - trying to figure out computer vision problems having absolutely no experience.
