Back from vacation

So I spent a week out in the forests of northern Canada last week, and I learned something.

I learned that I use a hell of a lot of data on my mobile plan just looking at cards. It has become a bit of a joke to my girlfriend that if I have my phone in my hand, I am probably looking at Scryfall and building a new deck in my head.

Now I know that J-Rock uses some other site to look for cards, but for me, Scryfall has been the goto site ever since Magiccards.info was bought out.

Here are some tips and tricks you can use to make your searches a bit more efficient.

1.) When you want to find multiple cards that do sort of the same thing:

The way I handle this is I pull up the page for the card that has the ability I want to find. Then I copy the relevant lines of oracle text. This is important because if you use the lines that are printed on the card, they may not be the same as the modern templating. Once I have the text copied I go to advanced search and put that into the “Text” box and select my other options (card color, mana cost etc) and boom, I should get a return of cards that looks a lot like my original. This is useful when looking for redundancy in a deck.

2.) Learn to use the syntax in the search bar:

We recently ran a 2DH league where one of the rules was that a creatures power and toughness had to be unequal. (ie 3/4 not 4/4). This was a pain in my ass to build a deck until I started inputing into my search bar, the extra filters I wanted to use. For example in this search, i chose my colors, US $ limit, and mana cost, then his search. Once that was done, I added pow!=tou to the search line. This returned only creatures that fit all of my search parameters and then made sure they had unequal power and toughness. Here is a link to the SYNTAX page, learning the stuff here will make you a true Scryfall gangster.

3.) Explore!

One of the things I do to prepare for the show is that I will just pick a set and search for every card in that set, then I sit back and read them all. This is one of the ways that i find the really weird cards that we put into decks. It is a great way to refresh your memory for old sets, or if you have never played with that set, it will help you learn about new cards that might be useful for decks you currently have or are thinking about making.

In other news, we should be recording the season 3 video battle soon, I have to build the paper versions of the decks this week. And this weekend J-rock is going to find out about the 3 secret Randomator cards I built a deck around. So that should be a hot mess!

Anyway, stay tuned, always more shit going on around here.

Mike