The Scryfall Blog: News

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

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.

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. 🔮

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