Two facilities, one inventory

1. Why two coasts

A single-site custodian has two problems. The first is transit time — one facility means half your customers are five days from their own cards, which makes withdrawal feel like a punishment and quietly discourages the thing that ought to be frictionless. The second is concentration: one roof, one fire, one flood, one insurance claim covering everything.

Two sites on opposite sides of the country fix both. The West Coast facility serves the western states and the Pacific inbound lane; the Midwest facility serves the interior, the Northeast, the South and the Canadian cross-border corridor. New submissions route to whichever is closer to you.

2. WEST-01 — West Coast

The seismic detail is not decoration. West Coast racking has to be designed for lateral movement, and open-faced shelving throws its contents on the floor in an event that a braced, retained tray system survives. For a facility whose entire inventory is thin rigid objects that dislike impact, this is a real design constraint rather than a compliance box.

3. MID-01 — Midwest

The Midwest site is the larger of the two and carries the deeper reserve inventory, mostly because roughly two-thirds of the addressable customer base lives east of the Rockies. The oversized air handling is the interesting engineering difference: coastal outside air is boringly stable, while a continental climate swings from 90% relative humidity in August to single digits in January. Holding 47% RH ±3% year-round through that is a much harder problem, and under-specifying it is how custodians end up with curled foils and cockled cardboard in February.

4. Environmental specification

Both sites run to the same envelope. Card stock is paper and clay coating; slabs are acrylic and polystyrene. Neither likes heat, and both care more about humidity stability than about any particular set point.

5. Bin addressing and cycle counts

Every item gets a location down to the slot, and a license plate number that travels with the physical object regardless of who owns it.

D14-R3-S07
│   │   └─ slot 7 within the rack
│   └───── rack 3 within the bay
└───────── aisle D, bay 14

LPN7761A8BE63     // license plate — permanent, survives every ownership change
itm_c8a1f9        // item id — the ledger's handle on this physical object
84021173          // PSA cert — the grader's handle on it

The distinction between the LPN and the owner is the whole architecture in miniature. The LPN is a property of the object. The owner is a column that a trade updates. When a Charizard changes hands nine times in a week, the LPN, the bin and the cert never change once — only the owner field moves, nine times, each move a balanced journal entry.

Cycle counting

Ledgers can be internally consistent and still wrong about the physical world. The check is counting.

• Perpetual cycle count — a rolling sample of bins is counted daily, weighted toward high-value and high-turnover locations. Every position is counted at least quarterly.
• Trade-triggered verification — an item that changes hands does not move, but it does get flagged for verification on the next pass through its aisle. High turnover on a card is exactly when a discrepancy would be most expensive to discover late.
• Reconciliation — counted quantity is reconciled against the ledger's holder balances. If the journal balances and the count matches, the system is provably consistent. If they diverge, trading in the affected SKU halts until it is resolved.

6. Access control and fire

7. Insurance

Cards in custody are covered under a policy written to cover property of others in the custodian's care, custody and control — subject, like every insurance contract, to its terms, limits, deductibles, valuation provisions and exclusions. "Insured" is not a promise that a given claim pays out at a given number; see what that actually means.

The intake imaging set is what makes a claim tractable. Four calibrated captures at receipt establish the condition of the item on the day it arrived, so "it was already like that" is a question with an answer rather than an argument.

One boundary worth stating plainly: we carry coverage on our own custodial operation. We do not sell, solicit or negotiate insurance for you — that is a licensed activity in every state and not a business we are in. The declared-value line on a ship-out quote is carrier shipping coverage priced into that shipment, not an insurance product sold by TCG Keepr.

8. Ship-out and packaging

Custody is a convenience, not a lock-in. Request a withdrawal and the item goes through the reverse of intake. There is no exit fee, no minimum term, and no penalty for pulling everything out at once.