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Thread: Card searching engine

  1. #1
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    Offler's Avatar
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    Card searching engine

    Gatherer's "no other color" function seems broken...

    I am searching for engine which search for color, excludes multicolor cards and if possible exludes also cards with other mana symbols printed on them (edh color identity rule), and exclude Unhinged and Unglued

    Need to check my big collection (Approx 1200 different blue cards) and compare it with some good database, but its problem to found one...

    Tried gatherer and deckbox, but no luck... Any other good card DBs?

    Edit:
    http://magiccards.info/query?q=c%21u...me&v=olist&p=1

    Fixed.

    1849 - 40 UNhinged, Unglued cards, -4 Flip cards, -2 transform cards, -3 split cards = 1800 different blue cards legal for blue EDH General deck. (there are also few banned, but still keep them in my collection, if then someday will be unbanned)
    Last edited by Offler; 10-14-2011 at 08:05 AM.

  2. #2
    No time to actually play Legacy
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    Re: Card searching engine

    This isn't exactly related to the Wizards gatherer, but has anybody else noticed that TC Decks is down? I'm not sure if it's just my computer and/or browser but the site is blank. Anybody else experiencing the same thing?

  3. #3
    Dodge this.
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    Re: Card searching engine

    Quote Originally Posted by Offler View Post
    Gatherer seems broken...
    Yeah. Either the engine is a total failure or it's so counterintuitive that it's inoperable.

    e.g.
    Try searching card names for "wish" with colors white, red, or green. Uhhhh...we all know Burning Wish and Living Wish should be there but Gatherer doesn't. What's up WotC? Too busy playing MtG to make a decent search engine?
    When other people do not assert themselves, they may still have something to be proud of, something that they believe is unrivalled, but it is just that they have not got the same vulgarity of throwing their weight about and imposing themselves and their beliefs on other people. - Dunduzu Kalui Chisiza

    If you think a topic is dumb, don't add to it. Pretty simple. - Bardo

  4. #4
    Timmy-Spike-Melvin . . . . . Level 2 Judge

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    Re: Card searching engine

    Or maybe you should just enter the correctparameters...

    gatherer

  5. #5
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    Re: Card searching engine

    Quote Originally Posted by dorsch View Post
    Or maybe you should just enter the correctparameters...

    gatherer
    Dude! That's my effing point. If one begins here, then proceeds to search for "wish" by name, selecting the colors of his or her choosing(in this case it's ,,) by clicking on the appropriate checkboxes, Gatherer defaults to DOES contain white instead of OR. It's counterintuitive! Sheesh. If you read my post fully I wouldn't even have to defend myself against underhanded epeen rubbing. I'll quote myself here for you:
    Either the engine is a total failure or it's so counterintuitive that it's inoperable.
    See how I underlined and bolded it this time. That should help. Now back to the point.

    A correctly designed search engine would default to the most intuitive option directly from the graphical user interface, thus not requiring the post search parameter manipulation. Why Gatherer does not, I'm not sure. But, I playfully suggest that their developers are too busy playing MtG. :sigh:
    Last edited by umbowta; 10-18-2011 at 10:34 AM.
    When other people do not assert themselves, they may still have something to be proud of, something that they believe is unrivalled, but it is just that they have not got the same vulgarity of throwing their weight about and imposing themselves and their beliefs on other people. - Dunduzu Kalui Chisiza

    If you think a topic is dumb, don't add to it. Pretty simple. - Bardo

  6. #6
    keepin' it unreal
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    Re: Card searching engine

    It is very counter intuitive, and you guys are lucky you don't have to deal with default language suddenly changing to Portuguese and messing it all up even more.
    "Want all, lose all."

  7. #7
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    Re: Card searching engine

    Since I dont want to create new topic a put it back here.

    So my goal for a long time was to filter only Blue cards with blue "Color Identity" for EDH purposes and also for purposes of my collection. I tried gatherer.wizards.com this time. Some features are back again and I try to explain some of those which are non-intuitive.

    To do so one must use Advanced search of course.

    Colors
    Blue
    Exclude Unselected Terms (works after some months)

    Expansions:
    Not UNhinged
    Not UNglued

    Link:
    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...22Unhinged%22]

    Seems almost fine, but after checking the list still contains for example Balshan Collaborator. Card itself is completely blue, but its abilities are certainly not.

    The black mana symbol is located in Text field. When I read the "Help" i found a hint that to search for black mana symbol I have to put [B] into search field. However thats wrong. B in [ marks and are BOLD tags. Not for Black mana.

    When checking the Gatherer for a while I realized that I need to use {B} instead of [B. To test that changed the search to display all cards as listed above but only those which contain black mana symbols in its text.

    Link:
    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...ext=+[{B}]

    And miracle happened. Now I have listed all Blue monocolored with black mana cost on their abilities. Since I wanted to remove all WBRG I have to negate them in text search like this:

    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...R}]+![{G}]

    However the Gatherer is still doing some mistakes. Now to Split cards. They are still present on the list. To remove them I first tried to search for all blue split cards.

    Fill the field "Name" with "//".

    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...name=+[//]

    Now you see that each blue splitted card is in the list TWICE for each half separately. To remove them from the list just use "not" instead of "and":

    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...ame=+![//]

    Just to note name=+[//] in link means to search for cards with // in name. name=+![//] will exclude all cards with // in name from the search.

    We are getting close to the final goal but now what... There are still Transform cards and Flip cards. Only one blue Transform card does not comply to the search of EDH legal blue card. It is Civilized scholar. Just exclude it from the search but in "name" field you must put it in "Civilized Scholar" form.

    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...%20Scholar%22]

    If you forget on the quotation marks the search will exclude all cards with words "Civilized" and "Scholar" in its name instead of removing only this single card.

    Two other transform cards are also listed twice. I decided to filter their transformed versions by not searching by their names:
    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...Aberration%22]


    And now to Flip cards
    Callow Jushi is listed only once in the list, while his flipped version Jaraku the interloper is entered in gatherer only as a part of text of its unflipped version.

    However Jushi Apprentice, Erayo and Student of Elements are separated from their flipped versions and still both versions - flipped and unflipped - are in the list. How to remove duplicates is however for me a mystery.

    Trying to filter them by names or text was not sucessful. I just have to remember that there is 3 less blue cards as the gatherer says. Which means that there is:

    1791 blue cards which can be used with monoblue EDH General.

    Hope this helps to someone...
    Last edited by Offler; 12-01-2011 at 12:55 PM. Reason: Correcting tags...

  8. #8
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    Re: Card searching engine

    Thanks for your work and insight. I rarely play EDH anymore, but it is easy to acknowledge the utility of this.

  9. #9
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    Re: Card searching engine

    I believe you can do this with Orcish DB: http://orcish.info/ (despite what the site says, it's updated through Innistrad)

    My knowledge of SQL syntax isn't quite up to date (haven't used it since a database course a couple years ago), but I believe you can search for cards that have X color in their mana cost, and exclude colors that are not X in the rules text. So include CMCs that are Red, but exclude the color symbols {b} {u} {w} {g} in rules text. There are also other databases I've seen Pickle DBs with Gatherer info (from some guy on the wizards forums) that were pretty easy to get into and use despite not having any experience with Python.

    This might be going a little too deep for what you need though.

  10. #10
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    Re: Card searching engine

    I have re-checked the list when I found Talonrend

    The red/blue mana symbol definition in search by text is really crazy:

    DOES contain {(}u/r)}

    It also seems that they at least follow the WUBRG order. So I added 5 combinations with part blue mana:

    http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Se...Aberration%22]

    So "Exclude selected term" really works crazy... Two cards down from my list 1789.

  11. #11

    Re: Card searching engine

    Why dont you just use magiccards.info. It has a "Color Identity" checkbox in advanced search.

    Try this search:
    l:en f:commander ci:u c!u NOT (o:{w/u} or o:{u/r} or o:{g/u} or o:{u/b})

    It yields 1798 results though. I don't know, and don't intend to figure out which is included in this search, and not in yours...

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