Methodology

TCGKing publishes news automatically. This page explains exactly how, so you can judge for yourself what to trust.

1. Where the news comes from

We maintain a registry of sources for every game we cover. Sources are either official (the publisher's own website, news page or product catalog), partner (a distributor or organizer with first-hand information) or community (established fan sites we have reviewed). Every source is listed on each game's page, with how often we check it.

We only read what each source makes publicly available, and we respect its robots.txt and terms of use. We never bypass logins, paywalls or captchas.

2. How a story is verified

Each new item goes through the same steps:

1. Relevance — is this really about a trading card game?
2. Deduplication — is this the same announcement as something we already have? Five sites covering one announcement become one TCGKing story with five sources.
3. Fact extraction — every claim (product name, date, region, price, quote) is extracted individually, with the exact passage of the source that supports it.
4. Status — each fact is marked Confirmed (official source), Reported (credible non-official source), Unconfirmed or Rumor.
5. Composition — the article is written from the fact sheet and from TCGKing's own archive (previous sets, usual release gaps, earlier dates). Nothing enters the text that is not in the fact sheet or the archive.
6. Checks — traceability (every sentence maps to a fact), originality (no passage mirrors a source), consistency (no date or name outside the fact sheet), spelling and grammar in each language.

A story is published automatically only if its key facts are confirmed by an official or partner source and every check passes. Everything else waits for human review.

3. What the labels mean

• Confirmed — stated by the publisher or an official source.
• Reported — stated by a credible non-official source; not yet confirmed by the publisher.
• Unconfirmed / Rumor — circulating in the community; not verified. Shown in grey and never presented as fact.
• Corrected / Retracted — we changed or withdrew a story. The change is logged on the article and on the Corrections page.

4. Updates

When a new source adds to a story, we update the existing article instead of publishing a new one. Each article shows when it was published and when it was last updated, with a history of changes.

5. The role of AI

The reading, extraction, writing, proofreading and translation steps are performed by language models under strict constraints: they can only use the facts and context they are given, their output is validated against a schema, and any sentence they cannot trace to a fact is removed. A human reviews what the system is not confident about, and can correct or withdraw any article.

6. Report an error

Write to jonathan.gmpro@gmail.com with the article link. We answer every report.