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Magic: The Gatheringis an incomprehensibly huge game. With tens of thousands of cards spread across over a hundred sets, and dozens of formats with their own rules and card legalities, you can’t be expected to know the entire game off the top of your head. That’s where Scryfall comes in.
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A dream for MTG players,Scryfallis an unofficial database of almost every printing of every card, complete with rules text, images, and a powerful search engine to find what you need. Using it can be a bit of a learning curve, so here’s how to make the most of Scryfall.
Scryfall Versus Gatherer
Gathereris Wizards of the Coast’s official database of Magic: The Gathering cards. It does a lot of what you’d want from a database, including letting you search for cards under a number of different parameters.
However,Scryfall is superior in almost every way. It does everything Gatherer does, while beingeasier to useand offeringan extensive search syntaxto let you quickly track down specific cards. As it is third-party, Scryfall can also offer things Gatherer can’t, such asprices for cards on the secondary market.
If you’re doing any kind of deckbuilding, it is heavily recommended you use Scryfall over Gatherer.
Basic Searching On Scryfall
When you first go to the Scryfall site, you’ll see an in incredibly simple interface much like Google’s. In this search box, you can typespecific card names.Any search you can do in this box can also be done from the search bar at the top of the search results and card view pages, saving you from having to go all the way back each time.
For example, if you want to find the card Rin and Seri, Inseparable, you can just type “Rin and Seri, Inseparable” in the search, and Scryfall will take you directly to its page.You can also type in fragments of the name, and it will either take you to the page as normal, or show asearch page of every card with that fragment in its name. This is good for if you want to find every card of a certain character, such as typing “Ajani” to find every card with “Ajani” in its name.
From the search page, you can reorganise your results in a number of different ways by using thedropdown menus at the top of the page. TheSorted Bymenu if the most helpful for finding cards, as it lets you sort cards by value, power, colour, rarity, and other categories to help find the cards that fit your specific needs. A particularly powerful one for Commander players isEDHRec Rank, which organises cards by their prevalence in the Commander deck database site EDHRec.
You can also use theAsdropdown menu to change how your search results are presented.Imagesis the default, and often the most useful, but you can also search by Checklists, just Text Only (good for low-bandwidth connections), or a full view that combines images and Text Only into the most comprehensive view of all.
The Card View Page
The card page gives you in-depth information on individual cards, including:
It also includes a number of handy links, such as using MTGTop8 to seewhat kind of decks that card sees competitive play in, EDHRec tosee its performance in Commander, and Cube Cobra for ideas onwhat kind of Cube environments include it.
By clicking the “Show all prints” link underneath the set information box on the right of the page, you’re able to seeevery print a card has ever had, including their different arts. This is particularly important if you’re wanting to use a specific artist, or have a theme in mind for your deck and want its art to match.
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The Advanced Search Page
Sometimes you don’t know the name of the card you want, and instead want to search by another metric. For this, the Advanced Search Page is the easiest place for a Scryfall beginner to start. The Advanced page looks like a lot at first, butyou don’t need to fill in every field, only the ones that are relevant to you.
For example, if you want to find Elf creatures for your black and green Elf commander deck, you can merely fill in the type line with “Elf”, tick off black and green under Commander colours, and set the format fields to “legal” and “Commander”.
The Advanced Search is much more powerful than this, though, thanks to theCriteriafield. This field has ahuge list of special criteria made by Scryfall itself. For instance, it can easily find you cards that have Adventures attached to them, are buy-a-box promos, or even cards that have only ever been printed once in the game’s history.
Lots of these criteria may not be useful for your day-to-day searching, but it is always worth remembering it is there for those special occasions you, for instance, really want to make a deck of only cards that have been printed in etched-foil frames.
Power Searching Using Scryfall Syntax
By far the best feature of Scryfall is itsextensive search syntax. This allows you to recreate just about every aspect of the Advanced Search page, right in the search box. It’s aquick, powerfulway of finding stuff, but it does require you to remember somespecific search queries.
Modifiers
Keep in mind that much of the syntax below can be adjusted using modifiers. This can change now just how the syntax functions, but even allows you tosearch for the complete opposite thing.By learning modifiers, you can stretch just a handful of other commands much, much further.
Most modifiers goafter the command, before your query. For example, searching “color:white” and “color=white” are two different things, with the colon or equals sign changing the search from inclusive (“color:white” searches for any card with white in its mana cost, even if it also has other colours) to exclusive (“color=white” searches for cards that only have white and generic mana in their cost).
Meanwhile, other modifiers might gobefore the command, such as using"-" to exclude results from the search.
Example
:
The default. In some searches this will be aninclusivesearch that, whereas in others it might be theonly available modifier.
=
-
Exclusionary search.The results will not include any cards that meet the criteria.
<
More than (>)andless than (<). To make this inclusive of the number (more than or equal to, and less than or equal to), add an=after the.
Basic Scryfall Syntax
By using these short codes in the search bar, you may useall the functionality of the Advanced Search page, without needing to navigate all the way to it.
Keep in mind you can alsocombine syntaxinto a single search, using this syntax to search for cards that meetmultiple criteriaat the same time. For instance, if you wanted to find a legendary Elf with power less than four that isn’t a digital exclusive, you could search “t:legendary t:elf pow>4 -is:digital”
This is not an exhaustive list of syntax available on Scryfall. For that, refer to the site’sofficial syntax reference page.
type/t
Will search the typeline of cards.This applies to supertypes like snow and legendary, types like artifact, enchantment, instant, and sorcery, and subtypes like creature types or Planeswalker names.
oracle/o
Searches a card’s oracle text. This is good forfinding effects you want in your deck. ensure you include the terms in quotation marks, as otherwiseit will only count the first word.
Usingfo:will search for the entire Oracle text, including italic reminder text.
keyword
kw
Searches forkeywords on cards. This helps you find keywords without also finding cards that merely mention those keywords as you would if you usedoracle.
color/c
Searches the colour of cards, usingthe coloured pips in their casting cost. Note that you can typefull colours(white, blue, black, red, green, colorless),their colour codes(w, u, b, r, g, or combinations of them), or theirslang names(Selesnya, Simic, Mardu, Grixis, WUBRG etc.)
identity
commander
Searches cards based on theircolour identity, which includes both thecoloured pips in their casting costand alsoany coloured pips in their rules text.
mv
cmc
Allows you to search by themana value(orconverted mana cost). You can also search forodd or even.
pow
tou
format
set/s/e/edition
Search for cards released in a set, using its three- or four-letterset code.
is
Allows you search usingcriteria. The full list of these criteria is available on theAdvanced Search page.
