Joaquin Orozco, author of the guides
I am Joaquin Orozco, the creator and developer of TradeMatches, the app for trading TCG cards with nearby collectors. I sign the guides on this blog and I am responsible for what it publishes.
About me
I am a software developer based in Barcelona with more than ten years of experience, mainly in back-end development with C# and .NET. I designed and built TradeMatches end to end with Flutter and Supabase: the local radar, the lists of cards you have and want, matching between collectors, and the chat used to close each trade.
I am 37 and have been a Pokémon fan since I was a child: the anime, the games and the whole world around them. Today I collect TCG cards from several games, though I focus mostly on first edition cards of the classic Pokémon. Many of the questions I answer on the blog are ones I ran into while completing my own collection.
Before that I founded TrueReviews, a verifiable reviews product. You can read my full professional background (in Spanish).
What I write about
I write about what surrounds a trade: identifying a card and its condition, preparing your lists, negotiating, shipping cards, buying on Cardmarket or grading from Spain. These are the problems that come up while building and running a trading app.
When an answer depends on a rulebook, a law or a store policy, I link the official source. I am not a tournament judge or an appraiser, and I do not present myself as one.
How the guides are prepared
I use AI tools for research, first drafts and translation into English. A new guide or a new version is not published until I have reviewed it. Guides published before October 2026 are being reviewed one by one, and that month I removed the ones that added nothing of their own. The full criteria are in the editorial policy.
Contact
If you spot a mistake or want to suggest a topic, email tradematches.es@gmail.com. For a correction, include the guide URL, the section and a source that lets me check it.