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:extrasto 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_extrasflag where applicable.We have added a new
"content_warning": truefield to these cards, so that downstream you can also decide how to properly handle them.Cards with
"content_warning": truewill 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