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 withis: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.