The Scryfall Blog

Scryfall has just added Through the Omenpaths (OM1), the digital-only reflavoring of Marvel’s Spider-Man (SPM), as well as its bonus sheet (OMB), the equivalent of Marvel Universe (MAR).

(If this is the first time you’re hearing about this, you’ll want to catch up with the original announcement from Wizards of the Coast: Through the Omenpaths and Digital Universes Beyond Updates)

When we originally added Universes Within, we had to figure out how we’d record those cards, and improvised the following answer: we added the new cards as reprints of the Universes Beyond cards, changed the oracle text to match the Universes Within versions, and assigned flavor names to the Universes Beyond prints. We didn’t have clear answers about what was the right call, but this seemed like the best available answer at the time. However, Spider-Man and Through the Omenpaths required different answers, so we’re changing how we’re handling these cards.

How we’re handling Through the Omenpaths

Each card in Omenpaths will be recorded as a reprint of the corresponding Spider-Man card. For example, Kraza, the Swarm as One is a reprint of Spider-Punk. It has the same oracle ID and will show up in a list of all prints of Spider-Punk. They’re the same card.

This is the new part: we’re recording the actual printed text you see on the card for these prints. Although it’s The Soul Stone in Spider-Man, it’s The Terminus of Return in Omenpaths. It has that name. Its type line reads “Terminus Stone”, not “Infinity Stone”, and its rules text is different, referencing the Terminus by name and featuring the Origin keyword instead of the infinity symbol in both its rules and reminder text.

Because of a fun caveat of printed text, these cards still have their Oracle data as well. You can imagine it there but covered up by the printed text. What this means is that you can find these cards by their Oracle text as well: a search for type:infinity set:om1 will show you The Terminus of Return, even if it doesn’t have the Infinity type in its print qualities. You can also search gwen set:om1 to find out what the various Gwen cards were reflavored as.

This system is still a work in progress, and isn’t perfect. It’s not currently going to be clear whether you’re looking at Oracle or printed text. Additionally, our search tries to avoid matching by printed text in search unless there’s no other option—a side effect of the way we de-prioritise localized cards in favour of English search results. We’re going to be working on improving things, but it’ll take time. Among other things there’s a long-awaited database upgrade we’ve been working on for months that is going to be needed before we can make some of this work.

Right now the main impact of that is you may have to enter an Omenpaths card’s full name to find it. Lively Leap won’t yet show up in a search for just “leap”, but it will show up for “lively leap”, because that’s a printed name, not the Oracle name. That will hopefully change with time, and you shouldn’t have to know which one’s the printed or Oracle name, you should just be able to find it, but we’re not there just yet.

Updating Universes Within

We also applied this retroactively to our Universes Within cards. Will the Wise now has his own name and rules text on his page using his actual name. We’ve opted to keep the oracle text set to the Universes Within versions, and apply printed text to other versions.

Does this mean you’re planning on rolling out English printed text?

Not at this time, or at least not yet. We need better handling for printed text first, and we need to have a way for people to tell whether we’re recording printed text for archival reasons or for reflavoring reasons.

What this means for developers

You are now going to see English cards possibly have a printed_name, printed_type_line, and printed_text. Previously this would only happen for localized prints, but now it can happen for English prints as well.

We’re applying this to “reflavored” prints in Omenpaths, and cards that show up in Universes Within.

What you’ll see is the following:

• SPM/OM1 printings will share the same oracle card, with the SPM print as the Oracle baseline
• SPM will not have print-specific fields in English
• OM1 prints with unique names will have a different printed_name
• OM1 prints with unique types will have a different printed_type_line
• OM1 prints with unique rules text will have a different printed_text

The same is true again for MAR/OMB.

Following this change, none of these cards will use the flavor_name field unless they actually have a flavor name — a second name appearing right beside the original on the card itself. You can find cards that actually have flavor names with is:flavorname.

Scryfall is proud to announce that we’ve entered into a new partnership with Cardmarket.

Cardmarket facilitates sales and pricing of Magic cards to over thirty European states and thousands of vendors. While Scryfall has had Cardmarket connectivity for a while, this new relationship allows us to share team resources and dedicate more time to connecting store IDs and EUR price values on Scryfall’s website and API.

Scryfall is already the most accurate MTG database in the world, and we want to keep improving it in any way we can. There is additional background information available on Cardmarket’s announcement, which we encourage everyone to read!

What’s changing?

In the coming weeks, you should see a lot more richness in our available data for European pricing, especially if you are a consumer of the Scryfall API.

Is Cardmarket acquiring Scryfall?

No, Scryfall will continue to operate as an independent service.

Scryfall now offers a search term for cards that use the default frame. That is, cards that aren’t showcases, borderless, extended art, and so on.

• You can find these cards with is:default. (Aliases: typical, normal, traditional, baseline.)
• You can find cards that don’t have the default frame with not:default (or its aliases), or with is:nondefault. (Aliases: atypical, abnormal, nontraditional.)

These are inverses of each other. A card is either default or nondefault. It can’t be both or neither.

Some cards exclusively exist in nondefault appearances, e.g. their only print is borderless. These won’t show up if you’re looking for is:default, because there is no default version to find! However, you can instead combine any search with prefer:default, which will try to give you the default version if there is one that matches your search, and otherwise give you a nondefault version. You can also do the inverse with prefer:nondefault. All the above aliases also work here. (Note that a search cannot have more than one prefer: term, and you cannot search for it as the only term.)

What’s the reason?

We’re introducing this filter because it’s becoming increasingly difficult to filter down a search to cards with a normal frame. When project boosterfun started, it was easy enough: just look for things that aren’t showcase or extended art or borderless.

But that’s becoming an increasingly difficult list to enumerate. If you just want to find cards with a normal frame, your search has to exclude showcases, and extended arts, and borderless treatments, and fracture foils, and etched cards, and stamped and datestamped promos, and fullart. Oh yeah, and not surgefoils or galaxyfoils. And not whatever’s going in masterpiece sets. And probably not the future frame or colorshifted frame either. And playtests, don’t forget those. And cards with inverted text. There’s also yellow borders now. Did you get all that down? Okay, good, because there’s just a few more…

Btw, so far we’re up to this search just to find “normal” cards:

not:showcase not:extendedart -border:borderless not:fracturefoil not:etched not:stamped not:datestamped not:fullart not:surgefoil not:galaxyfoil -st:masterpiece -frame:future -frame:colorshifted not:playtest -frame:inverted -border:yellow

Scryfall has so far tried to avoid establishing a criteria for what’s “normal” because we thought it’d wind up too big a problem to tackle, and too subjective a problem at the fine details. But it turns out it’s pretty straightforward for us to define and get exactly what you’d expect.

Technical details: What makes a card “default”?

When we talk about what makes a card “default”, we’re talking about the card frame and border. If it’s got a “normal” frame and border, and it’s available in nonfoil or traditional foil, it’s probably default.

Specifically:

• It has to be in one of the traditional frames: 1993, 1997, 2003, or 2015
• It has to be available in nonfoil or in traditional foil.
• It has to have a black, white, or silver border.
• Doesn’t have a special frame treatment (e.g. showcase, or Time Spiral’s futureshifted and colorshifted frames).
• Not borderless or extended art.
• Not fullart or textless.
• Not a handful of other things we don’t have a word for.

Default-ness is neutral on new retro frames, like timeshifted cards and Brothers’ War Commander. It’s also neutral on buy-a-box mechanical exclusives.

We’ll be adjusting and maintaining these criteria as the future develops and Magic continues to bring us new and interesting edge cases.

In early February, with the release of Aetherdrift, Gatherer introduced a series of Oracle changes now reflected on our site.

This was a very large sweep of errata, affecting a third of the cards in the game. We saw the following broad changes:

• Approximately 12,000 creatures, artifacts, and enchantments received errata to use “this [characteristic]” for self-references instead of the cardname: “When this creature enters”, “attach this Equipment”, etc. This errata first appeared in Foundations, but only appeared on cards actually released on that expansion. Now it’s rolled out to a lot more cards. (We’ll go into detail on this change below.)
• Hundreds of legendary creatures and planeswalkers received errata to use new shortnames in text. (We’ll go into detail further below.)
• The Affinity keyword was added to 16 cards that didn’t already have it. This introduced affinity for artifacts to several cards that previously spelled it out (e.g. Emry, Lurker of the Loch), as well as other flavors of affinity like affinity for Frogs.
• Revolt received a new reminder text template with a different way to phrase the left-the-battlefield condition.
• Devour also received new reminder text with “As this creature enters” phrasing.
• “Cast this spell only during your turn and only during combat” appears to have become “Cast this spell only during combat on your turn”, affecting two cards.

And we saw some single-card changes:

• Ghirapur’s plane type was changed from Kaladesh to Avishkar.
• Guidelight Pathmaker had its “Then shuffle.” instruction replaced with “If you search your library this way, shuffle.” This appears to be day zero errata and will save you some unnecessary shuffling.
• “Affinity for Food” became “Affinity for Foods”, as seen on Banquet Guests.
• A few cards had an ability word dropped in Foundations errata, then restored with Aetherdrift errata:
  • Surrak, the Hunt Caller had its Formidable ability word restored.
  • Venom Connoisseur had its Alliance ability word restored.
  • Battle Cry Goblin had its Pack tactics ability word restored.
• Aether Figment had its “can’t be blocked” ability moved to the last line, which makes sense.
• Niko, Light of Hope had “until the beginning of the next end step” replaced with “until the next end step”, continuing the rollout of what seems to be a relatively new template.
• Look at Me, I’m R&D received a significant template update.

“This [characteristic]” errata

We noticed the following patterns with these changes:

• Nonlegendary creatures and artifact creatures now use “this creature” for self-reference.
• Nonlegendary artifacts now use “this artifact”, or a subtype if one is available: “this Equipment”, “this Vehicle”, etc.
• Nonlegendary enchantments now use “this enchantment”, or a subtype: “this Aura”, “this Saga”.
• Nonlegendary lands use “this land”. This includes Dryad Arbor.
• Battles would use “this battle”, but all current battles are Sieges, so they say “this Siege”.
• Tokens use “this token”, unless they’re legendary (e.g. There and Back Again’s Smaug token), in which case the token uses its own name.
• Self-references in a non-battlefield zone use “this card”, e.g.: all leylines, “discard this card”, “exile this card from your graveyard”, “reveal this card from your hand”, “when you cycle this card”, etc. This applies even to legends like Squee.
• Some type-changing permanents use “this permanent”, e.g. Hidden Ancients, Haunted Plate Mail, and Erebos’s Emissary.

There are some exceptions that still use the cardname in full even when they might fit under the above rules:

• Characteristic-defining abilities, such as seen on Abominable Treefolk, still use the cardname.
• Transform triggers still use the cardname.
• “You can’t cast …” restrictions still use the cardname. This is separate from “Cast this spell only …” which just uses “this spell”.
• Cards like Rakdos Riteknife that have to refer back to themselves from another object will use the cardname.
• “If this would be put into a graveyard” effects still use the cardname. This can show up on the back side of Midnight Hunt MDFCs.

Self-references to “this spell” already existed and don’t appear to be affected. For example:

• Planes and phenomenons still refer to themselves by name.
• Instants and sorceries still refer to themselves by name in their spell effect, e.g. Lightning Axe. However, they may have been modified by “this card” errata: see Choking Tethers.

Now for some trivia:

• Atinlay Igpay now reads “acrificesay isthay eaturecray.”
• The Sojourners cycle had its template expanded Syr Konrad style: “When you cycle Grixis Sojourners or it dies” became “When you cycle this card and when this creature dies”.

Legendary shortname errata

First off—what’s a shortname? When a card like Arahbo, the First Fang says simply “Arahbo” in its rules text instead of writing out “Arahbo, the First Fang” in full, we call that a shortname. We only see this with legendary cards. (That hasn’t changed.)

Legendary creature cards already use shortnames all the time. However, prior to Aetherdrift, using a shortname was relatively rare, and it seemed like it was preferable to use the full card name at least once. Now errata has been issued to several hundred of these cards to make them use shortnames in their oracle text. This seems to indicate a new standard for Magic: the shortnames themselves aren’t new, but using them this frequently is.

Some examples:

• Cadira, Caller of the Small is now just “Cadira” in her oracle text.
• Edgar Markov is just “Edgar”.
• Elrond of the White Council is just “Elrond”.
• Chandra Ablaze is just “Chandra”.
• Kaito Shizuki is just “Kaito”.

Also notable is that Wizards seems to have standardised shortnames, so a very small number of cards lost a shortname they used previously:

• Rubinia Soulsinger is no longer shortened to just “Rubinia” in her second ability.
• Donna Noble is no longer just “Donna”.
• Ayesha Tanaka, Armorer is no longer just “Ayesha” the second and third time her name is mentioned.

As of today, the Magic: The Gathering Wiki is moving to a new domain: mtg.wiki. New contributions will no longer be hosted by Fandom.

The wiki administrators and the Scryfall team have reached the conclusion that Fandom’s advertising policies and design choices serve the community poorly. We have joined forces and copied all wiki content and edit history to new hosting provided by Scryfall. This new wiki will be 100% ad-free, forever.

The short version:

• Use mtg.wiki going forward. Also consider a browser extension like the Indie Wiki Buddy to help yourself avoid links to the old website.
• All content and edit histories from the old wiki have been ported over.
• The most active editors have moved to the new site and won’t be working on the old wiki.
• This opportunity was offered by Scryfall, and the decision was made unanimously by the administrators of the MTG Wiki.

Your role

The most important change for you is to know that you’ll find up-to-date content at mtg.wiki, rather than the previous domain. You can help support the wiki by updating all of your links!

You can help yourself avoid outdated links by using a browser extension like the Indie Wiki Buddy, which disables Fandom in search results in favor of the matching page on a community wiki.

Wikis are a community activity, and we always welcome new editors. Whether you want to fix a typo or expound on all of the glories of Phyrexia, we encourage you to create an account and be bold! You can also join us on Discord.

If you’re an existing editor, you can sign up with the same username on the new wiki!

Scryfall is paying all hosting and administrative costs for the MTG Wiki. You can support Scryfall on Patreon or pledge to become a supporter in your Scryfall account.

The new wiki

The new wiki is completely ad-free. Like Scryfall itself, the wiki does not and will not have ads, and is supported by the contributions of its users and patrons.

We control the style of the website. We’ve chosen a more traditional wiki appearance. No more bloated sidebars, no intrusive alerts, no distracting pointers to other content or other wikis entirely!

More speed and privacy. Without ad networks and social doodads forced on us, our wiki loads faster and our tracking is minimal.

The old wiki

We have forked a copy of the old wiki, and we’re going our separate ways. Fandom has the right to continue hosting the old wiki content. We ask that you not delete content from the old wiki or otherwise deface it.

But foremost, we ask that you simply stop using the Fandom wiki. Come to mtg.wiki for your daily needs and references. Enjoy the new wiki!

Thank you so much for your continued support!
—The MTG Wiki and Scryfall teams

On August 8, 2024, multiple Oracle updates arrived on Gatherer for the release of Bloomburrow, detailed below.

Note that as always, Scryfall does not control or issue errata, we just reflect it from the official source. We’re just noting what we’ve seen that’s changed.

Enters the battlefield errata

The phrase “enters the battlefield” has been shortened to just “enters”. This affects all new cards in Bloomburrow, and errata for this has been issued to several thousand cards.

For example, Baleful Strix up to now has had the following ability:

When Baleful Strix enters the battlefield, draw a card.

With Bloomburrow, that text is being shortened to the following:

When Baleful Srix enters, draw a card.

There are some notable exceptions:

• The phrase “leaves the battlefield” has not been changed.
• The phrase “enters or leaves the battlefield” has also not been changed.
• Some cards will still use “enters the battlefield” when they care about control, e.g. “enters the battlefield under your control” doesn’t appear to have been changed.

Paw symbol & Phyrexian mana symbol

Bloomburrow introduced a new paw symbol, {P}, as a resource on modal spells.

One card, Rage Extractor, features the nonspecific Phyrexian mana symbol. This used to be {P} but has been renamed to {H}.

First and second main phases

Cards that referred to your “precombat main phase” or your “postcombat main phase” now refer to your first or second main phase instead.

These cards were affected: o:"first main phase" or o:"second main phase"

Energy fixes

Some cards, notably including the recently released Suppression Ray and Wheel of Potential, received errata to fix an error where you could choose an arbitrary value of X and pay no energy.

Other template changes

During our sweep we saw other template changes we aren’t certain occurred with Bloomburrow specifically:

• “As long as it’s not your turn” became “During turns other than yours”
• “As long as it’s your turn” became During your turn”
• “Protection from all colors” became “Protection from each color”

On June 14, 2024, with Modern Horizons 3, Gatherer introduced a series of Oracle errata now reflected on our site.

Several types and an ability were replaced:

• The Naga creature type was removed. All Naga creatures have become Snakes instead. (For the affected cards, see: (art:naga t:snake date<mh3))
• The Viashino creature type was removed, and they’ve become Lizards instead. (See: (art:viashino t:lizard date<mh3))
• The Cephalid creature type was removed, and they’ve become Octopuses instead. (See: (art:cephalid t:octopus date<mh3))
• Totem Armor was renamed to Umbra Armor. (See: kw:umbraarmor date<mh3)
• The Tribal type was renamed to Kindred. (See: t:kindred date<mh3)

Additionally:

• Kaladesh’s dragons are now officially Cat Dragons. Freejam Regent and Skyship Stalker received errata.

You can see a list of all affected cards with this search.

Some of these changes were foreshadowed on November 3, 2023 as part of the announcement that Rakshasa creature types were changing.

Note: We don’t author these updates; they’re issued by Wizards of the Coast. Tokens don’t have have oracle text and don’t receive errata. That means various embalm/eternalize tokens and Estrid’s Mask token will continue to reflect their original printed text on Scryfall. We anticipate that eventually they may receive reprints with updated text, which we will reflect at that time.

On November 3, 2023, Wizards announced that Rakshasas in the game would receive errata to cease to be Cat Demons (or Cat Devils, in Mahadi’s case). This means they will simply be Demons (or Devils), and simply no longer have the Cat type.

That update affected these cards.

This change is not solely a type line change. The Rakshasa is a type of being found in Hindu Mythology, and Magic is pivoting to reflect their origins rather than the cat version picked up by way of Dungeons & Dragons. This means Arena piloted this change with some sweet new art of a whole new kind of errata seen on Rakshasa Deathdealer, Rakshasa Vizier, Rakshasa’s Secret, and Villainous Wealth.

We welcome Wizards making efforts to address their past and improve the representation found in their games.

We’ve made a change to our API that hardens requirements on the headers you send. You now must provide a User-Agent header and an Accept header.

• Your User-Agent header should reflect the name and version of your application, e.g. MtgExampleApp/1.1. Do not allow HTTP libraries to choose the header for you. If you are connecting with browser-based JavaScript, do not change the browser User-Agent.
• The Accept header must be present, but you can provide a generic preference. For example, both of these are okay: Accept: */* and Accept: application/json;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8.

You can read these requirements in the API documentation.

Starting in October 2022, Scryfall will be transitioning our image and data origins to new subdomains.

Images and bulk data files will stop being hosted on:

• Going away: c1.scryfall.com
• Going away: c2.scryfall.com
• Going away: c3.scryfall.com

Our new file hosts will be located on:

• New subdomain wildcard: *.scryfall.io
• New subdomain example: cards.scryfall.io
• New subdomain example: data.scryfall.io

Why are you doing this?

Scryfall is transitioning to a new file hosting provider to improve our scalability.

Will this break my existing code?

Only if you’ve been naughty. We don’t recommend that you ever try to manually construct a link to a file on c1.scryfall.com or similar. Instead you should fetch card data using our API or bulk file offerings, those objects always include the correct and up-to-date URI to card images and downloadable files.

As a reminder:

• If you want to download a card’s image using its set code and collector number, use the /cards/:code/:number method and specify the format=image option. You will receive an HTTP redirect to the correct file.
• If you want to download a card’s image using its Scryfall ID, use the /cards/:id endpoint and specify the format=image option. You will receive an HTTP redirect to the correct file.
• If you want to bookmark a direct link to a bulk data item, use the /bulk-data/:type method and specify the format=file option. You will receive an HTTP redirect right to the latest bulk data file of that type.

If you have already been using the API to retrieve image and file URIs, nothing should change for you.

Will this affect any api.scryfall.com method paths?

No, this only affects our file download hosts and the URIs found in image_uris and download_uri and similar fields inside API objects.

Will this affect projects I have that use CORS?

No, the new origins should function the same with Cross Origin Resource Sharing.

What if I have cached the old links? Will you set up any redirects?

We will be creating redirects for c1.scryfall.com , but you should not permanently rely on these redirects. They should be considered temporary band-aids until you are able to update anything affected by the domain changes.

Can I still hotlink to the new origins?

Yes.

Do the new origins have a rate limit?

No, only api.scryfall.com has a rate limit.

Questions?

If you need additional clarification on any of these changes, please don’t hesitate to contact us

Hello friends! Scryfall is adding API support for tracking if a card is available in etched foil or glossy treatments.

• API Card objects now have a finishes attribute, which details if a card is available in nonfoil, foil, etched, or glossy.
• Etched foil pricing will be reflecting in the pricing fields under prices[usd_etched] and prices[usd_glossy]
  • EUR pricing for etched and glossy will be arriving later
• When Wizards of the Coast first printed etched foils, we created distinct Scryfall entries for some of these etched foils. We will begin collapsing these entries into their regular entries, marking the regular entry as available in etched, and deleting the separate etched entry from our database.
• Because some stores may have multiple entries for a card if it is available in etched foil or glossy, we are adding a tcgplayer_etched_id field to card objects to indicate if the etched pricing for a card was pulled from a different product ID.

There’s an example object here for Generous Gift from H1R and more information is available on the Card object documentation.

Deprecation Notice for Nonfoil and Foil Attributes

The foil and nonfoil top level properties on API card objects are now deprecated. Use the new finishes field instead. These old fields will be removed on Nov 1, 2021.

Starting in mid-August, Scryfall will be transitioning our image and data origins to new subdomains. Images and bulk data items will stop being hosted on img.scryfall.com and archive.scryfall.com and they will move to new federated hosts at c1.scryfall.com, c2.scryfall.com , c3.scryfall.com, and so on, with new file paths.

Why are you doing this?

Scryfall is transitioning to a new file hosting provider to improve our scalability and also save money.

Will this break my existing code?

Only if you’ve been naughty. We don’t recommend that you ever try to manually construct a link to a file on img.scryfall.com or archive.scryfall.com. Instead you should fetch card data using our API or bulk file offerings, those objects always include the correct and up-to-date URI to card images and downloadable files.

As a reminder:

• If you want to download a card’s image using its set code and collector number, use the /cards/:code/:number method and specify the format=image option. You will receive an HTTP redirect to the correct file.
• If you want to download a card’s image using its Scryfall ID, use the /cards/:id endpoint and specify the format=image option. You will receive an HTTP redirect to the correct file.
• If you want to bookmark a direct link to a bulk data item, use the /bulk-data/:type method and specify the format=file option. You will receive an HTTP redirect right to the latest bulk data file of that type.

If you have already been using the API to retrieve image and file URIs, nothing should change for you.

Will this affect any api.scryfall.com method paths?

No, this only affects our file download hosts and the URIs found in image_uris and download_uri and similar fields inside API objects.

Will this affect projects I have that use CORS?

No, the new origins should function the same with Cross Origin Resource Sharing.

What if I have cached the old links? Will you set up any redirects?

Yes, we will be creating redirects for img.scryfall.com and archive.scryfall.com, but you should not permanently rely on these redirects. They should be considered temporary band-aids until you are able to update anything affected by the domain changes.

Can I still hotlink to the new origins?

Yes.

Do the new origins have a rate limit?

No, only api.scryfall.com has a rate limit.

Questions?

If you need additional clarification on any of these changes, please don’t hesitate to contact us

Throughout Magic’s history, there have been insensitive, bigoted, and stereotypical decisions made about set designs, card artwork, and Magic’s story. On June 10th, Wizards of the Coast announced their intent to ban a set of older Magic cards and adjust their presentation on Gatherer.

We fully support Wizards’ decision to discuss openly how these cards are not appropriate for Magic. However, we want to be clear that we also believe that these changes are minor gestures within a grander scope of issues in Magic and within Wizards of the Coast.

• The Scryfall team supports calls for Wizards of the Coast to take strong, transparent steps to diversify and improve their hiring process, diversify their permanent and contracted staff, and to make inroads on shaping their company to better match the demographics they serve.

• We support anyone speaking up about their positive or negative experiences with Wizards of the Coast, professional or otherwise.

• The Scryfall team supports all efforts to elevate participation in our community from black and brown players and creators.

• We want an inclusive future for Magic where often-marginalized voices are given space to flourish. And we want the community to continue to keep all organizations involved in Magic accountable for that future.

It is important that Wizards of the Coast continues to acknowledge their role in perpetuating systemic racism and confronts their prejudices and biases, as we all should as we strive for a more just and inclusive world.

What is Scryfall doing?

You can make arguments both for and against Scryfall as a “museum” and as a “public utility” of Magic knowledge. Our goal is still to be the most comprehensive search engine of Magic cards, and very few other sites have the same ability to archive Magic data like we can. We could set that goal aside in this instance and delete the images of these cards as Gatherer has done, but we believe keeping the images will enable people to understand and learn from this game’s past.

We will however work to divest ourselves from these cards and warn users about them:

• These cards will no longer appear in most casual Scryfall searches, you must specifically search for their sets or their names, or add include:extras to your search terms.

• Scryfall will be asking other search engines to de-index our pages for these cards.

• Scryfall will no longer refer sales and web traffic for these cards.

• Scryfall will no longer sync prices and store IDs for these cards. (Some of our partners have also already taken steps to remove these products for sale.)

• When you look up these cards on Scryfall, you will now see an overlay that requires you to click through to view the card’s image.

• We have also merged in the changes to Multiverse IDs and card legality

For Scryfall API developers, these specific technical points also apply:

• These cards are now marked as Scryfall “extras”, so you must opt-in to receiving them with the include_extras flag where applicable.

• We have added a new "content_warning": true field to these cards, so that downstream you can also decide how to properly handle them.

• Cards with "content_warning": true will omit several sales URLs and prices.

Finally, we are listening to community feedback about these changes, and continuing to evolve our response as wider discussion happens. Nothing we’ve done here is necessarily final and permanent. Our site has always evolved with the community’s desires and we’ll continue to do so.

Supporting the Black Lives Matter movement

Members of the Scryfall team have made private contributions to nonprofits and fund drives supporting the BLM movement. We are also announcing that we plan to run a public fundraiser auction to benefit Black Lives Matter and Fair Fight .

The Scryfall team will be auctioning a complete collection of every basic land card, with all proceeds going to these two organizations. Please look for more news about the fundraiser very soon.

We love you,
The Scryfall Team

First and foremost: On June 10, 2020 Scryfall will remove access to the “all cards” /cards API endpoint. This endpoint is now deprecated.

Because this endpoint paginates over our entire database, it has been a long-term source of performance and uptime issues for us. Our database has nearly doubled in size since we implemented it, and this endpoint now has over 1,500 pages and has become unsustainable for the kind of complex data we expose.

We will also have a 24-hour brown-out for the endpoint on May 30, 2020 as an extra alert for downstream consumers.

(This change applies only to the “all cards” pagination endpoint https://api.scryfall.com/cards. Our more specific card endpoints such as /cards/search, /cards/named, /cards/:id and so on are not affected.)

If you previously used the /cards endpoint, you should migrate to using the Bulk Data endpoints.

We’ve made several improvements to the bulk data files:

• Bulk data files now include price information (but you should still be careful about trusting prices more than 24 hours old)
• Bulk data files are now updated twice per day
• You can now fetch bulk data objects individually or by type
• Each bulk data file is now available at a timestamped URL, rather than replacing the same un-timestamped URL as before. Use the download_uri property of the Bulk Data objects to get the new URI. The old-style URIs without a timestamp will no longer be updated.

More information is available in the Bulk Data article, and if you have any questions don’t hesitate to contact us.

Scryfall Card objects now include new preview[previewed_at], preview[source], and preview[source_uri] fields, which contains information about who previewed/spoiled this card, updated as soon as we enter the card during a preview season.

Deprecation Notice: Frame Effect Field

On Oct 1, 2019, Scryfall will be removing the frame_effect field from Card objects, use the new frame_effects field (plural), which can contain multiple values.

On July 15, 2019, Scryfall will be removing support for the Frontier format.

Keeping format data current is a nontrivial task for the Scryfall team. Frontier has not recieved enough momentum and excitement from the community to continue maintaining it.

Scryfall API objects will lose the legalities[frontier] property on July 15, 2019.

If you have questions about this update, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Foil Prices and Old Price Fields

On April 1, 2019, Scryfall will be removing the usd, eur, and tix fields from API Card objects. You should use the new prices[usd], prices[usd_foil], prices[eur], and prices[tix] properties instead.

Note that the new prices property includes separate foil price data in prices[usd_foil].

Previously, Scryfall’s API overloaded the usd field: If a card was only available in foil, the foil price would appear in usd. If a card was available in both foil and nonfoil, only the nonfoil price would appear in usd. The new prices[usd] and prices[usd_foil] properties will now always keep these prices separate.

Old Image URLs

Scryfall has changed the URL pattern for new card images:

Previously, card images on img.scryfall.com used a path pattern like /cards/{size}/{lang}/{set}/{number}.jpg. New card images now use a pattern like /cards/{size}/{face}/{uuid-parts}.jpg. This new URL is much more stable, it will not change if a card is renumbered or moved to a new set.

We are slowly migrating all card images on img.scryfall.com to use this new URL structure. Scryfall does not recommend that you ever try to guess or interpolate a card’s image URL yourself. If you need to access a card image by set code or collector number, use the /cards/:code/:number API method with format=image. Our API always returns the correct URL to a card’s image in API Card objects.

Questions?

If you have questions about this update, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

On February 1, 2019, Scryfall will be removing support for the 1v1 Commander and Brawl formats.

Maintaining format data is a nontrivial task for the Scryfall team, and we have come to this decision based on changes to WotC’s support for these formats. (Brawl, 1v1 Commander)

Scryfall API objects will lose the legalities[brawl] and legalities[1v1] properties on February 1, 2019.

If you have questions about this update, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Previews for Ultimate Masters include some of the best cards ever printed: two cards that are restricted in vintage, the primary win condition in one of legacy’s best decks, and the most powerful creature/moon to ever grace the sky.

In their honor, and in the honor of that person (there’s one at every LGS) who calls any powerful card “broken,” we wanted to run down the history of the cards banned in both modern and legacy.

Skullclamp

By now, it’s a familiar story: late in development, Skullclamp gave the equipped creature +1/+2. In an effort to nerf the card, they reduced that to give creatures +1/-1 instead. As it turns out, they just made it stronger.

The entirety of both the Standard and Extended formats warped around Skullclamp. Decks either played Skullclamp or were designed to beat the card. Skullclamp Affinity was the most memorable of them all, pairing the card with Disciple of the Vault and Shrapnel Blast for aggressive starts that were still resilient to removal. Elves and Nail and Goblins were also good decks.

Skullclamp was banned at the inception of both modern and legacy. For a quick primer, watch 4x Skullclamp Elves take down the No Banned List Modern Gauntlet of Greatness, besting another 4x Skullclamp deck in the finals.

Skullclamp is a broken card.

Sensei’s Divining Top

By itself, Sensei’s Divining Top is a fine card. When printed, it was paired with the Onslaught fetchlands to become a powerful card selection engine. Two years later Counterbalance was printed, forming the backbone of one of the most frustrating combos to play against.

The icing on this particularly miraculous cake was spread when Avacyn Restored brought the Miracle mechanic. The recipe starts with a Top. Opponent interaction is prevented with a Counterbalance. If your board state starts to get sweet, Terminus will add some salt to balance it out. Then, long after your spirit has mortared into a fine dust, an end-step Entreat the Angels ends the game in a single turn.

Sensei’s Diving Top is a broken card.

Deathrite Shaman

Mana creatures are an important slice of green’s color pie; the ramp brings green players to their larger, more expensive threats ahead of schedule. Llanowar Elves is generally one of the most powerful cards in any standard format that it’s in. They also have a downside: the most effective mana creatures cost 1 mana, and have a correspondingly low power and toughness. This makes them terrible draws in the late stages of a game, when a board position has already been established.

Deathrite Shaman is a big exception to that rule. Tacked on to the mana ramp—which has a cost, but one that is easily paid in formats with fetchlands—it also allows its decks to be more greedy with color requirements. It serves as maindeckable graveyard hate, its second ability can close out the game quickly, and its lifegain ability helps stabilize against aggressive decks. It is good in most every game, in most every circumstance.

Deathrite Shaman is a broken card.

Gitaxian Probe

One of Magic’s secret strengths is variance. Though flooding out isn’t fun, neither would it be if every game played out the same way. Deck construction and gameplay rules help with this: a 4-of in a 60-card deck will only be in your opening hand 40% of the time, so you need to account for the times when your plan does not come together as designed. This leads to a wide variety of gameplay, and a much healthier metagame.

Gitaxian Probe does a very good job reducing variance: since it costs zero mana and replaces itself, it allows you to effectively play with a 56-card deck. On top of that, it provides a great deal of value:

• Combo decks, the decks most interested in reducing their variance, can make especially good use of the information Gitaxian Probe provides: it can tell them which prospective answers to play around while going off.
• It triggers abilities on cards like Young Pyromancer and Monastery Mentor without costing a card.
• When spells can be cast from the graveyard, such as with Snapcaster Mage or Kess, Dissident Mage, it can serve as card advantage.
• It can net you mana when paired with spells with Delve, like Gurmag Angler or Tasigur, the Golden Fang.

Gitaxian Probe is a broken card.

Mental Misstep

Anyone who played legacy during Mental Misstep’s reign of terror knows why it’s here: it warped the metagame as much as any card that has ever been printed.

Non-rotating formats like legacy and vintage have a higher concentration of inexpensive, powerful cards, making Misstep significantly better as a baseline. It’s also great against aggressive decks:

Of blue cards that are legal in Modern, Mental Misstep is the most played in Legacy, and it also has one of the more damaging effects on Modern by sitting on beatdown decks that want to start on turn one. We chose to ban it rather than put that much pressure on beatdown decks.

–Welcome to the Modern World

Since it is good against aggressive decks, has no color requirements, and can counter your opponents’ Mental Missteps, aggressive decks also want to play it to protect their primary gameplans. Before you know it, every deck in the format starts with 4 copies.

Mental Misstep is a broken card.

Treasure Cruise

Cost reduction mechanics offer Wizards R&D a wealth of design space. It also provides a massive developmental challenge: cost reducers subvert the mana system, and can lead to problematic gameplay experiences:

• Force of Will trades mana for one life and one card.
• Fireblast is one of the best red deck finishers in the game, offering 4 damage for effectively zero mana.
• Invigorate gives the opponent life, which doesn’t matter much when you’re attacking with a Berserking Glistener Elf.
• Hypergenesis grants a cost reduction for time: in exchange for one less mana, you will have a Eureka moment in three turns. (Or you can cascade into it immediately, but we digress.)

Treasure Cruise pairs a powerful cost reduction effect with the best phrase in Magic for an incredibly strong card. If you aren’t convinced, watch Reid Duke pilot a Modern U/R Delver list and be grateful you weren’t trying to resolve a Tarmogoyf against him.

Treasure Cruise is a broken card.

Dig Through Time

Dig Through Time is, in many ways, the culmination of many of the points this article has made. What does it do well?

• ☑️ Provides card advantage, like Skullclamp.
• ☑️ Offers flexibility in your gameplan, like Sensei’s Divining top Deathrite Shaman.
• ☑️ Reduces variance, like Gitaxian Probe.
• ☑️ Warps the format around what it can offer, like Mental Misstep.
• ☑️ Provides a deep cost reduction to a powerful effect, like Treasure Cruise.

Yeah. Dig Through Time is a broken card.

Scryfall doesn’t typically host content like this. So why did we take you on this journey?

Wizards of the Coast was so kind to as to provide us with an Ultimate Masters card preview of our own: Dig Through Time. Thank you!

On Dec 31, 2018, Scryfall will be removing the colorshifted, futureshifted, and timeshifted properties from API Card objects.

• For determining if a card is colorshifted, look for the value "colorshifted" in the new frame_effect field
• For determining if a card is futureshifted, look for the value "future" in the frame field
• For determining if a card is timeshifted, look for the value "tsb" in the set field

If you have questions about this update, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We love Scryfall, and want nothing more than to build a service that you love too. We’ve spent quite a bit of time over the past few years trying to figure out how to make Scryfall a sustainable resource for everyone to enjoy.

Today, we’re excited to announce a partnership with TCGplayer to make that a reality. This will allow us to end our paid membership program, fund full-time employees, and devote even more time toward building your favorite features.

In TCGplayer we’ve found kindred spirits; they’re fans of Scryfall, proponents of the game, and are every bit as passionate about Magic and its community as we are. Scryfall is remaining independent, but we expect to do great things with them.

If you have any questions or comments, please get in touch!

What will change?

Through your generous support with our paid membership program and Patreon, we’ve been able to cover Scryfall’s operational costs like servers, hosting, and bandwidth. But it’s otherwise been a passion project for our team: something we did in our evenings and weekends for the love of the game and community.

With this partnership, Scryfall will be able fund full-time team members. In addition to keeping our database up-to-date, accurate, and open, we’ll be able to speed up our work on new features like the deckbuilder.

We will be reorganizing our price links on card pages to only include TCGplayer, Cardmarket, and Cardhoarder. And we are actively looking into ways to make price information more accessible, including foil and buylist prices.

What about paid memberships?

We are planning to end our paid membership program: registering for Scryfall, participating in beta programs, and using site features will be free and open to everyone.

As of today, we have stopped charging current paid users. Any memberships paid in the previous 15 days will also be fully refunded, and all current paid members will be notified by email of this change.

What if I still want to support Scryfall?

We will continue to operate our Patreon, and would be very grateful for any continued support. There is also a page where you can make a one-time donation to us. We aren’t currently offering rewards, however.

Is TCGplayer acquiring Scryfall?

No. Though we have plans for a long and fruitful partnership, Scryfall will continue to operate as an independent company.

More Information and Conversations

• TCGplayer
• Twitter
• Reddit

On November 16, Scryfall will be removing the following fields from API Card Objects:

• purchase_uris[amazon]
• purchase_uris[ebay]
• purchase_uris[card_kingdom]
• purchase_uris[coolstuffinc]
• purchase_uris[mtgo_traders]

Other related fields, like usd and tix, will not change. If you have questions about this update, please don’t hesitate to contact us.

Update: This change is now complete.

Stop me if you’ve been here before: it’s turn 2, your legacy Goblins deck took advantage of the play by turning a turn 1 Warren Instigator into a turn 2 Siege-Gang Commander. Your opponent’s Scalding Tarn, Island, Ponder start indicates a combo deck, but your untapped Wasteland is ready to deny them the resources needed to go off. All according to plan.

Ancient Tomb, Show and Tell, Emrakul, the Aeons Torn.

A turn 2 15-drop? What can a measly mono-red deck do against such monstrous power?!

Previously, our favorite dark-dwellers have brought along Ashen Rider; uncastable and untutorable, but capable of handling such broken starts. Today, Guilds of Ravnica gives that deck a new tool: the extremely flexible Goblin Cratermaker, illustrated by Svetlin Velinov:

Cratermaker provides a flexible package that Goblin Matron’s tutoring and Goblin Ringleader’s velocity can take advantage of:

• As a tutorable removal spell, it offers additional effective copies of Gempalm Incinerator.
• It provides a less expensive artifact destruction effect than Goblin Trashmaster, particularly relevant against Mono-Red Prison’s Ensnaring Bridges.
• It can be used to destroy colorless Eldrazi creatures like Thought-Knot Seer, Endbringer, and Emrakul herself.
• If none of that is relevant, it’s still a 2/2 for {1}{R} that gets pumped by Goblin Piledriver and counted by Krenko, Mob Boss.

Here’s a new take on Goblins, replacing copies of Tarfire and Goblin Trashmaster with two Cratermakers.

May your Vials be tapped and warrens be empty!

This card preview was provided courtesy of Wizards of the Coast. Thank you!

Hi everyone! We are humbled to announce that Scryfall has acquired magiccards.info. The owner of magiccards.info reached out to us in July to ask if we were interested in taking over the site, and we’ve come to a friendly agreement to assume responsibility for their traffic and links.

Over the coming weeks, magiccards.info card, set, and search pages will start redirecting to Scryfall. Some developer-centric features will become deprecated and will be supported on Scryfall’s REST API instead.

Scryfall will also be using data from magiccards.info to improve our own database, especially non-English cards printed before Invasion block.

We know that magiccards.info has very loyal users and we want this transition to be smooth. We’re listening for your feedback. Please don’t hesitate to contact us.

We salute the owner of magiccards.info for their service to the Magic community. magiccards.info has been a true utility and it is an essential piece of Magic’s history. We hope to do right by its legacy.

—Corey Csuhta and the Scryfall team

What is magiccards.info?

magiccards.info is a Magic card search engine that launched in 2001. It provided a fast, powerful, and comprehensive alternative to Gatherer and has been a staple of the community for many years. magiccards.info was the direct inspiration for Scryfall and we’re really proud that they chose us as long-term caretakers.

What is Scryfall?

Scryfall is a mobile-friendly Magic search engine. We also focus on providing card imagery and data tools that other content creators can use to build more things about Magic.

What’s going to happen to all of my magiccards.info bookmarks and links?

Scryfall plans to handle 99% of links from magiccards.info, especially any links you’ve made to card or set pages. If you follow one of those links you will be redirected to the proper page on Scryfall or an equivalent site. Your bookmarks and old forum links should continue working forever.

How does Scryfall search compare with magiccards.info?

Scryfall search syntax was built on top of magiccards.info’s syntax style. Redirected magiccards.info searches should be predictable and familiar.

Will you be adding proxy features?

We don’t have any plans to add proxy or playtest card tools. There are several other sites that already do a really fantastic job with proxies.

For developers: images and data

Scryfall will continue serving images from magiccards.info at magiccards.info/scans/* and magiccards.info/crop/*. Please note that this source of images should be considered deprecated, and it will be removed at some point in the future. No new images will be added at this path, and existing images will not receive updates.

There will not be any support for scraping HTML pages from magiccards.info after the transition.

Scryfall has an extensive REST API where you can fetch all of our high-resolution card images in multiple formats and all of our card data. We have endpoints for building bots, parsing mana costs, and even fetching random cards.

Specifically, if you rely on images from magiccards.info, our border_crop image format is a direct analog.

Support Scryfall

Scryfall is a 100% community-funded project. If you love Scryfall, please consider supporting us with a monthly membership. You’ll receive an invite to our Discord server and early access to beta features.

Support Scryfall Monthly

Olá! こんにちは! Scryfall now supports searching for cards in seventeen languages!

Wait, seventeen? Yep: we have a lot of “unofficial” printed languages indexed too. Did you know that there is a Magic card printed in Hebrew?

We’ve started by importing all sets in Modern, and we’re slowly working our way back in time with older information.

You can use the new lang: keyword to find cards in a particular language:

• Everything in Japanese
• Blue instants in French

Searching other card parts also works as you would expect:

• Searching for parts of a name
• Finding card types with type:/t:
• Searching printed card text with o:
• And flavor text with flavor:/f:

Cards available in multiple languages also now have tools on the page to switch between them.

We’re really proud to bring language support to Scryfall and we hope you love it! If you have any questions or comments, you can always contact us.

By the way: Our supporters were given early access to these features and they helped provide feedback for what you see today. If you love Scryfall, please consider supporting us monthly. You’ll receive an invite to our Discord server and early access to future beta features:

Support Scryfall Monthly

Additional information for developers:

• Card objects have been expanded to include a lang attribute, which will contain an ISO-like code to identify the current language for a card. If you do not wish to process cards in languages other than English, you will need to filter on this attribute.
• Cards and card faces will now begin to include the text they were printed with in new printed_name, printed_type_line, and printed_text fields. The Oracle text fields remain unchanged.
• The /cards endpoint now includes all cards in every language. If you need to retrieve only English cards, consider using /cards/search with lang:en specified instead.
• The /cards/search API method now supports a flag to include all languages.
• The /cards/:code/:number API method now supports requesting the card in a particular language.

We’ve got a lot of new features for you today, let’s get right to it!

Search Preferences

If you have a Scryfall account, you can now specify your default search options and automatically filter out certain card types in your preferences.

Unique/“Rollup” Mode Updates

We’ve added the ability to control how “duplicate” results in your search are elminated (previously this was only available with the ++ search syntax). You can now control this option with the first dropdown on search results. The ++ syntax is still available.

We’ve also added the ability to search by unique artwork. The same card will be returned more than once if it has alternate artworks available.

Other Search Changes

• Your search is now explained in English to you on the results page.
• You can now sort by artist name
• There is now a text-only results layout with no images
• You can now change the direction of your sort.
• Power users can now specify their unique mode, search sort, and search display with new display keywords.

Color Keywords

We’ve reverted the c:/color: and id:/identity: keywords to their previous behavior:

• Using c:w is now equivalent to c>=w (previously it was strictly c=w).
• Using id:rug is now equivalent to id<=rug (previously it was strictly id=rug).

The other versions of these keywords that use =, >=, etc will still be exactly that comparison.

It’s been a bit over a year since Scryfall launched, and we’re really proud of all of the improvements we’ve made. Here are a few highlights:

• We’ve launched Scryfall accounts so you can now support us directly
• We’re crowdsourcing art and functional card tags on Tagger
• We’re now providing high-resolution card images
• We launched a Slack and Discord bot
• We’re archiving tokens and lots of other supplemental items
• We’re now part of MTGCardFetcher on Reddit
• We’ve done a lot of work to represent split and double-faced cards correctly

In addition, we have some amazing news: Scryfall is now solvent! Our Patrons and our members are covering all of our hosting costs per month. This is a huge milestone for us, it means we no longer have to spend money from our own pocket to keep Scryfall available and fast. Thank you! ❤️❤️❤️

Extra support goes towards helping us tip community members that source images for us, and transitioning Scryfall from a passion project to something that can support a part- or full-time development team.

And now without father ado, here are the answers to year-end questions you submitted:

What do you get asked for help with the most?

The Planeswalker Deck cards are very polarizing. A lot of people ask us how you can filter them out. (It’s not:pwdeck by the way.)

What’s your favorite thing you’ve seen someone do with Scryfall?

The whole Scryfall team was surveyed and here are some things they chose:

• Scryfall regular expression golf
• April King made some great collages from our images
• We often get messaged by students asking if they can incorporate Scryfall’s API into their computer science projects. We’re really, really happy that it’s inspiring novice programmers. 🙌

What are your favorite tokens?

• The Reef Worm cycle by Dan Scott
• An octopus! by Craig Spearing
• One of the more Thallid-like Sapprolings by Warren Mahy
• Magali Villeneuve’s Prowess Monk

What are your favorite “Out of Flavor For This Color” cards?

• Unyaro Bees — Combining arbitrarily large green creatures with Time Spiral nostalgia
• Wheel of Fortune — Why is this red!? We’ll take it!
• Prodigal Sorcerer — The poster child of (modern) color pie violation
• Mana Tithe — No one suspects Mana Tithe

(A bunch of questions about site stats and most-popular cards)

Unfortunately (or fortunately), the answer to questions about our most popular pages and what people search for is somewhat boring.

• The majority of people are looking up cards by name (for pricing, or because they’re in the middle of a game, etc)
• The most popular card groups are whatever is new. Essentially if you pick any 90-day timeframe, the most popular cards are the most recent set release.
• The most popular individual cards in a set tend to be ones that make big news on Reddit/Twitter, here are some recent most-popular cards:
  • Silvergil Adept reprint in Rivals
  • Spike, Tournament Grinder
  • Search for Azcanta
  • Mana Drain reprint in Iconic Masters

Thanks!

This amazing year was all because of you and your contributions! Here’s to many more! 🎉

You can always get in touch with the Scryfall team here on the site, Twitter, or Reddit.

We’ve completed syncing new Gatherer updates for Unglued and Unhinged, and there have been a few non-trivial changes:

• Big Furry Monster is now indexed as two cards with the same name instead of one weirdly-combined card with two reprints.
• Who // What // When // Where // Why is now a single card, properly classified as a split card with five faces.
• Curse of the Fire Penguin’s flipside is now named “Curse of the Fire Penguin Creature”. Previously the flipside was named “???” because we did not know what the name should be.
• We have connected all Multiverse IDs for Unstable variants to their correct page on Gatherer.

Some additional MTGO data and functionality is now available:

• Card objects now include their mtgo_foil_id when available
• Card objects can now be found by their mtgo_foil_id using /cards/mtgo/:id
• Set objects that are on MTGO now include their mtgo_code, which may differ from the regular code
• Set objects can now be found with their mtgo_code using /sets/:id

Unstable has caused us to make a few API changes to card objects:

• Cards can now have borderless as their border_color, example cards
• Cards can now have augment or host as their layout, example cards
• A large amount of watermark field data was added
• has:watermark will find cards with any watermark

We’ve started rolling out unique illustration identifiers as part of card JSON data. You can now reference the illustration_id field to identify card artwork across printing editions. Cards with the same illustration_id have the same artwork.

Note that assigning unique identifiers isn’t a fully automated process, so there may be some delay in this information for new sets.

Hi everyone! Corey here. First off: Thank you so much for becoming sponsors. It means the world to us that we have your support. You’re providing an invaluable safety net that helps ensure that Scryfall always stays accurate and on the move. Scryfall will be turning 1 year old at the end of this month, and there’s lots ahead. So thank you, again. 😊

To show you we were serious about wanting to create great deckbuilding and brewing tools, I have a small sneak peak of some of the things we’ve been hacking on for a deck interface. (This information is of course a work in progress, subject to change, not a binding contract, etc etc)

People build decks (and cubes) in different ways. Some of us start off with a handful of core cards or a core combo, and then cast a big net looking for what we can do to make that work. Others brew by upgrading a tried-and-true list that became outdated. We want to support both kinds of workflows.

When you’re starting anew, the same kind of blank screen doesn’t work for all kinds of decks, so we’re looking at ways to provide starter templates.

Our current saved-cards feature will be transitioning into this system. While searching, you should be able to add cards to your deck from other pages of the site. If you’re not currently building a deck, adding cards will create a new list-type deck that you can review and share later.

More experienced players will want to fuss with deck entry directly. For that, we’re working on a keyboard-friendly list editor. The editor uses the same name-matching system we’ve built for the Slack/Discord bots and site search. You can be super lazy, type word fragments, omit all punctuation, and make spelling errors and the editor will attempt to correct your lines.

That’s all for now. Let us know what you think! And again, thanks for becoming our patrons and supporting our work. 🔮

Magic’s relationship with colors is…complicated. The color pie is ever-changing and inconsistent, rules for colors and color identities are complex, and mana bases require a PhD in mathematics to accurately craft.

Today, we’re happy to announce changes to how we handle colors and color identity that might make it easier to search about color:

• You can use nicknames for color groupings from lore, such as color:esper.
• For color range comparison, you can use <, >, <=, >=, =, and !=.
• You can still use the color and identity operators as you have previously.

Some examples of searches you can now make:

• color:azorius – All cards that are both blue and white.
• identity<=artifice – Cards you can play in your Breya, Etherium Shaper commander deck (sorted by EDHREC rank).
• identity:jeskai is:commander – Commanders with a Jeskai color identity.
• colors=4 – Four-colored cards.
• colors:jund block:ala – Jund-colored cards from Alara block
• color:multicolored colors>r (type:instant or type:sorcery) – multicolored instants and sorceries for your base-red Cloven Casting deck.
• identity<=esper identity>colorless type:artifact – Colored artifacts you can play in your Sydri, Galvanic Genius commander deck (sorted by EDHREC rank).
• color:lee – Lee Sharpe’s favorite cards.

Enjoy!

Our API documentation pages have been redesigned and split into multiple pages for easy linking and reading. We hope you like it. ❤️

Of particular interest, we now have image guidelines and a full list of colors and symbol formatting we support.

Object Updates

• Set objects now include their uri linking to themselves and a scryfall_uri linking to that set on Scryfall’s website.
• Card objects now have a color_indicator field describing the contents of their color indicators.
• Cards that transform now have a correctly-scoped colors fields in their particular card_face objects.
• Cards that transform now have a correctly-scoped color_indicator field in their particular card_face objects if that face of the card has a color indicator.
• It’s now possible for double-faced cards to have multiple Multiverse IDs. These are made available in the new multiverse_ids property.
• Card objects now include information about their future (Future Standard) legality.
• Card objects now include a prints_search_uri which links where you can begin paginating all re/prints for this card on Scryfall’s API

Method Updates

• New catalog: /catalog/artifact-types
• New catalog: /catalog/spell-types
• The /cards/autocomplete now returns up to 20 items (down from 25) but it is more accurate. It’s more likely to return a full list of 20 items and it favors results that start with your term (also known as “anchoring front”)
• The /cards and /cards/search endpoint now returns 175 items per page (up from 150), to match the checklist pages on the main website.
• /catalog/word-bank now includes words of length 2, so it covers some of our favorite words like Ob

Deprecated Features

• The multiverse_id field on cards is now deprecated. It will be removed on December 1, 2017. Use the new multiverse_ids field instead.

Removed Features

• The deprecated (and long-hidden) methods /catalogs/banned-formats, /catalogs/restricted-formats, and /catalogs/legal-formats have been removed. A list of all supported formats are available on every card object.
• The foil property on Card objects has been disabled. The value of this property was misleading and inaccurate for many cards. It will return when we can better support foil card data.

Mirroring the previous update made to flip and split cards, we have merged each side of transforming cards into a single record.

Transforming card objects now include two card_face objects describing their distinct face. Each card_face object will have its own image_uris property linking to the images for that face.

In addition, a new layout double_faced_token has been added to handle the new promotional double-sided token cards available with Ixalan. These card objects will have the same two-image system as transforming cards.

New Images

We’re rolling out two new image types:

• border_crop is a 480×680 JPEG image where the borders of the card are cut close and the rounded corners removed.
• art_crop will attempt to isolate the card’s artwork into its own rectangular image file. This will likely not be perfect for outlier card designs. Art crops for different frames and layouts may be different rectangular sizes. As this image is the first where we don’t include the copyright line and artist credit, you are heavily encouraged to show a copyright, disclaimer, and artist credit wherever you display this image.

URIs to both of these images will be part of the image_uris field for card objects when available. Recent sets already have these images, and older sets will receive them progressively over the coming weeks.

image_uri is Deprecated

The image_uri property on card objects is now deprecated. We will be removing this field from objects on November 1, 2017. Instead, you should choose an image that works best for your project from the keys in the image_uris (plural) property on card or card_face objects.

Questions?

If you have any questions or feedback about these changes, you can always DM us on Twitter or submit an issue on GitHub. Thanks so much for using our API!

The /cards/search endpoint can now return results as a CSV. Example: http://api.scryfall.com/cards/search?q=cmc:7&format=csv

Review the full documentation for more information.

Two new API methods are now available:

• /cards returns a paginated list of all card objects in Scryfall’s database. You wanted the full firehose, here you go!

• /symbology/parse-mana will parse a given mana cost string and return our interpretation. It will even format the cost for you and tell you things like the CMC.

All cards from Hour of Devastation (HOU) are now indexed. Find them with ++e:hou. Happy hunting!

But wait, there’s more! In addition to the new rotatable card views, you can now inspect both sides of transform and meld cards as well. 😱

No more craning your neck to squint sideways at split, flip, plane and phenomenon cards. Just click the rotate button in the card detail view (and in full search results) to adjust the card orientation. 😎

You can now use the watermark: or wm: keywords to filter cards by their affiliation watermark. For example, see all Izzet guild cards or all Phyrexian faction cards.

When available, card profiles now include a link to download a full-resolution PNG image with rounded corners and transparent edges. These images are designed for tasks that need the best quality assets, such as videos and promotional art.

In the toolbox section of card profile pages, click the “Download PNG image” link. Examples:

• High-res profile (long may she reign)
• Example PNG image (long may she reign)

These image files are also now returned via the API, in the image_uris object.

Banners and shields up! Commander Anthology is now available.

You can now search for cards with a numeric year comparator. For example, year=2017 will find all cards released this year.

The Card Sets page may now be filtered by set type. For example, see all expansion sets or core sets.

You can now use the in: or wasin: keyword to filter cards based on a set they “appeared in”, but not otherwise require that set in results.

Examples of interesting searches you can make with this keyword:

• Cards that were in both Alpha and Eternal Masters
• Homelands cards have been printed online
• Cards that were in Alpha, but not Revised
• Cards in both Amonkhet and Amonket Invocations

Previously this functionality was available using the e:set+set or e:set,* syntaxes. Use the in: keyword instead for official support.

You can now find cards that have high-resolution images with is:hires

Scryfall is rolling out support for high resolution card images. We currently have all of Standard available, and new sets are being added daily.

For developers: Card objects in the API now have an image_uris property, which will be populated with different image sizes if the card in question has high-res imaging available. Note that many cards (especially promos) will not have these fields available immediately. You should handle both situations in your code.

We hope you really enjoy this update. We want to support content creators, app builders, and anyone else that needs high-resolution images to do their work. Please let us know what you think! 🚀

Split and flip cards have been updated. Each half of the card has been combined into a single page. Information for split cards has been updated to adhere to the Amonkhet rules update. Notably:

• The converted mana cost of a split card will now be the sum of the converted mana cost of both halves.
• The color of a split cards is now the combined colors of both halves.
• The color identity of split cards is now the combined color identity of both halves.
• The card types of split cards are now the combined card types of both halves.

Split/Flip Card Search Updates

The search system now understands that a split/flip card has one combined name like Beck//Call but also two distinct names, Beck and Call. You can now search for one or both halves of a split card using any of these formats.

Split/Flip Card Changes for Bots

The Slack and Discord bots now understand requests for split card names, such as [[Wear//Tear]].

API Changes for Split/Flip Cards

Each split and flip card is now represented as a single object via the API instead of two. A new card_faces property has been added that contains information for each half of the split/flip card. See the updated API documentation for details.

All cards from Khans of Tarkir Promos (PKTK) are now indexed. Find them with ++e:pktk.

This post is to provide advance warning to developers that Scryfall’s data model will soon change how we present split cards, flip cards, and card images. The changes will unfortunately be backwards-incompatible with the previous API.

High-Resolution Images

We will be slowly rolling out higher resolution images for cards!

👇 Click to ENHANCE.

• Our current cards are available at 336×469px.
• New images will be double that size, at 672×938px. 😱😍

A new field images will be added to the card object with normal and large properties with URIs to each version.

The image property will continue pointing to the normal version of the image, but is now deprecated.

Not all cards will have high-res images immediately. This change will likely creep out to newer sets and expansion sets first, then to all supplemental sets. When a card doesn’t have a high-res image, its images.large property will be null.

The system we’re building to make this change opens up a bunch of future possibilities with card images: art crops, square crops, consistently rounded corners, and more. Let us know what you want to see out of this. Stay tuned!

Split Cards and Flip Cards

Because users so often search for the combined name of split cards or search “across” the two halves of split cards (to discover casting loopholes, etc) we will be combining split cards and flip cards into a single object representing both halves of the card.

• The name field for a split/flip card object will contain both names of the card. For example Wear // Tear
• The mana_cost field for a split/flip card object will contain both values on the card. For example {1}{R} // {W}
• A new faces field will contain two card_face objects that will have the distinct name, mana_cost, type_line, oracle_text, power, and toughness information for each face of the split/flip card.
• The parent-level fields type_line, oracle_text, power, and toughness will be null for split/flip cards.
• Other parent fields such as multiverse_id, prices, set information, etc will be unchanged.

These new combined card objects will replace the previous left-side/top-side object in our results. The object for the other side will be deleted.

• For example, our current object for DGM Wear has ID d169a3b2… and the object for DGM Tear has ID bd0f7a22…. When this update occurs there will be only one object with ID d169a3b2… called Wear // Tear.

We will be updating split cards to adhere to the new Magic rules update:

• The converted_mana_cost will now be the sum of the converted mana cost of both halves.
• The color will now be the union of the colors of both halves.
• The color_identity will now be the union of the color identity of both halves.

When searching for split/flip cards, API endpoints that use either part of the name or the combined // name will work:

• Searching for a card named exactly Wear will find Wear // Tear.
• Searching for a card named exactly Tear will find Wear // Tear.
• Searching for cards named Wear/Tear, Wear // Tear, or Wear //\\/\/ Tear will find Wear // Tear.
• Partial name searches will now match either side of the card or both. For example searching for we tea will now include Wear // Tear.

In addition, our chat bots will now return both halves of a split/flip card when you search for one or both sizes. For example [[Wear]] and [[Wear//Tear]] will now find Wear // Tear.

Transform and meld cards are unaffected by this update. They will remain distinct cards with an all_parts field as usual.

Thank you!

Thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for using our API. We’ve been delighted by the things we’re seeing people build. If you have any questions or feedback about these changes, please send us a message.

All cards from Welcome Deck 2017 (W17) are now indexed. Find them with ++e:w17.

We heard you asking for saved cards as text… you got it. In fact, we’re giving you the whole toolbox complete with text, json, and purchase links.

All cards from Amonkhet (AKH) and Amonkhet Invocations (MP2) are now available. Good luck on those trials… you’ll need it. 🌄

All cards from Magic Online Theme Decks (TD0) are now indexed. Find them with ++e:td0.

The re: or regex: operator is now available to filter Oracle text using a regular expression.

Regular expressions are very powerful. Here are some examples of searches you can make with this keyword:

• Instants that grant +X/+X boosts
• Creatures that have a tap ability with no other payment
• Cards that mention orcs, but not other words like sORCery or ORChard

Please see our syntax guide and full regex documentation page for all the details.

You can now search for cards with hybrid mana in their mana costs or Oracle text using is:hybrid.

We’ve added a new “format”: future. Using the f:future keyword or picking “Future Standard” on the advanced search will let you search over what Standard will be once the next set is released or a rotation occurs. Whenever we start spoiling a new Standard set, we will update f:future to let you brew for the coming season.

Try it out with f:future to brew with Amonkhet.

Whenever you sort results by price, and you aren’t filtering cards on print-specific values (like artist or rarity), the results will now automatically show you the cheapest reprints. This update makes it super easy to do things like:

• Find the most expensive cards in Modern, but automatically ignore things like Masterpieces and promos
• Price out your eternal format manabase
• See the most “popular” Pauper cards on MTGO

Additional shorthand is available for the f:/format: keyword.

• f:c — Commander
• f:dc — Duel Commander
• f:dreadful — Penny
• f:edh — Commander
• f:f — Future Standard
• f:french — Duel Commander
• f:l — Legacy
• f:m — Modern
• f:p — Pauper
• f:pd — Penny
• f:s — Standard
• f:v — Vintage
• f:2 — Standard
• f:type2 — Standard
• f:t2 — Standard
• f:1 — Vintage
• f:type1 — Vintage
• f:t1 — Vintage
• f:1.5 — Legacy
• f:type1.5 — Legacy
• f:t1.5 — Legacy

You can now filter for/against Masterpieces with is:masterpiece or not:masterpiece

All cards from Duel Decks: Mind vs. Might (DDS) are now indexed. Find them with ++e:dds.

A new API method is now available: /catalog/card-names.

Returns a collection of all English Magic card names. The names are drawn from Scryfall’s database. This method will return a name as soon as we have the card entered for “spoiler season.” 😎

Version 3.2.111 of AutocardAnywhere now supports Scryfall as a built-in choice. Visit our add-on page for more information about it.

All cards from Modern Masters 2017 (MM3) are now indexed. Find them with ++e:mm3. Happy hunting!

The Saved Cards page now shows price totals when all cards have pricing data available.

All cards from the MTGO prize sets Legendary Cube (PZ1) and You Make the Cube (PZ2) are now indexed. 📦😎

Many older sets have been renumbered to more closely match the standardized color/name order that newer sets usually have.

Note that none of the following sets have official collector numbers, so our re-assigned numbers continue to be chosen “arbitrarily” and/or not from WOTC:

• Limited Edition Alpha (lea)
• Limited Edition Beta (leb)
• Unlimited Edition (2ed)
• Revised Edition (3ed)
• Legends (leg)
• Fallen Empires (fem)
• Fourth Edition (4ed)
• Chronicles (chr)
• Homelands (hml)
• Fifth Edition (5ed)
• Portal (por)
• Portal: Second Age (po2)

In addition, the following sets were renumbered to match either the partial or full list of collector numbers we have for that set from Magic Online. The rest of the set numbers were assigned “arbitrarily” as with the above list.

• Tempest (tmp)
• Visions (vis)
• Ice Age (ice)
• Alliances (all)
• Weatherlight (wth)
• Mirage (mir)

Scryfall now has card prices in Euros (€), and links Euro prices to our European affiliate, MagicCardMarket.

Similar to other currencies, you can sort by Euro price, and filter results by Euro value with eur and a comparison. Try out ++eur>15 t:land.

A new API endpoint is now available to find cards by MTGO ID (also known as the Cat ID). Example, for Ghost Quarter from Commander 2014: https://api.scryfall.com/cards/mtgo/54957

You can now sort results by color. The sorting system is:

• Everything colored, in color order
• Colorless artifacts, in color identity order
• Land, in color identity order

Color priority follows the official WOTC ordering.

We’ve archived two older Magic Online sets: Theme Decks (TD0) and Mirrodin Pure vs. New Phyrexia (TD2). Find them with ++e:td0 and ++e:td2 These also have high-res images!

You can now save and share card lists! Click the “☆ Save” button on card profiles to add cards to your Saved List. Once you have cards on your saved list you can send the list to other people.

All cards from Planechase Anthology (PCA) are now available. Try ++e:pca.

Many new shortcuts were added for land groups. You can find some competitive groups with is:fastland, is:checkland, is:shockland, is:fetchland, is:filterland, and is:dual

A new, redesigned search reference is now available. It should be much easier to find what you want on this reference.

Friday Night Magic promos have been organized into yearly sets, and now include high-resolution images. See them all with ++b:fnm

You can now find cards that are or are not reprints. Try e:c16 not:reprint.

Plane, Scheme, and Phenomenon cards have been hidden from default results. You must now specifically search for their sets or types. See the docs for more info.

Color identity searches are now “coverage”-type searches instead of a match filter. Searching for id:wug will find all cards that you can put in a white/blue/green commander deck. The old version of this search would find cards that had at least white/blue/green in their color identity, which was not very useful. Try id:wug t:instant

You can now filter cards in Duel Commander format. Try f:duel t:sorcery cmc>5

You can now find cards in Frontier Format. Try f:frontier t:creature for all creatures in Frontier.

Complete Commander 2016 information is available. Try ++e:c16.

You can now filter cards by TIX and USD prices. Try ++tix>15.00 for all cards that cost more than 15.00 TIX.

We fixed a lot of bugs and small omissions thanks to everyone who reported issues on release day, including:

• Searches for t:assembly-worker now work correctly
• Fixed incorrect Vintage legality results
• Fixed incorrect Clash Pack images
• Repaired a few URL format inconsistencies in API results
• Fixed lots of spelling errors