← Scryfall FAQs / General I'm having trouble accessing the Scryfall API, or I'm blocked

In some cases, you may receive access restriction errors when trying to use the Scryfall API or download our static files.

429 Too Many Requests

If you are receiving this status code, you are greatly exceeding the rate limits for api.scryfall.com. We ask that you keep your API traffic to under 10 requests per second.

If you repeatedly or excessively receive this status code, we may permanently block your access to our API. It is not acceptable to ignore this error code or have your application retry the requests until you power through them. You need to act now to reduce your application’s load on our services.

If you need to perform a large amount of simple lookups (such as by name or collector number) or if you need to download a large amount of images, please use one of our bulk data offerings. You can fetch and process these files locally on your own systems.

Other domains, such as files on *.scryfall.io, do not have these limits.

400 Bad Request, or 403 Forbidden

If you are seeing these status codes, you may have offended our API’s malicious traffic filtering tools or otherwise greatly overtaxed the API.

  • If you need a huge amount of data from Scryfall, please consider using our bulk data downloads instead of constantly requesting live data.
  • Do not submit exessively redundant requests to the API, such as searches for every single card name, or searches with the operators empty, or searches that iterate over every card value. Please use our bulk data files instead.
  • Your actual HTTP requests to the Scryfall API need to be well-formed:
    • Please ensure you have set a relevant User-Agent header. Do not allow your HTTP library to choose this header for you, as default header values from HTTP libraries are often flagged as junk traffic.
    • Please ensure you have set an Accept header. Requests without this header are often flagged as junk. You can use Accept: application/json;q=0.9,*/*;q=0.8 as a good header for accessing the Scryfall API.
    • Access the Scryfall API via https URLs. Constantly being redirected by the server to secure paths will flag you as junk traffic and slow down your access to the API.
    • Do not send all of your API requests through a single VPN or relay sever. Such traffic is often flagged as junk.
    • Make sure your application is using at least TLS 1.2, accessing the API via older security versions is often flagged as junk.
  • If you are having trouble accessing Scryfall from a particular set of IP addresses, you can contact us with details to discuss your block.

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