How Delvefall works

Delvefall is a shortcut. It isn't meant to replace Scryfall: it's a tool for bypassing the tags, and you don't need to know Scryfall syntax to use it. It isn't a chatbot guessing either: it compares the printed rules text of every Magic card with plain math. That math can be reversed to get the most unique cards in Magic.

Reading a result

Every i below opens an explanation of that part.

A result's picture opens it on Scryfall. Ctrl-click (cmd on mac) searches it here instead.

Close

Two kinds of similar, counted together

Every result is scored twice and the two are averaged.

• rules text: cards whose printed text works the same way. Sol Ring gets the other rocks that tap for two.
• concepts: cards built around the same idea, from community tags. Sol Ring gets the whole mana-rock family.
• The badge is the average, and the list is always in order of it. Hover to break it back into halves.

Weaker matches open ten percentage points at a time, which is what keeps a sort honest: one band sorted by price answers "the cheapest card that matches this well", where everything at once would just hand you the cheapest card in the game with a faint resemblance.

If you came here from Scryfall

Scryfall is a search engine: you describe the cards you want in its syntax and it finds them. For "every blue instant under two mana" that is the right tool, and this site doesn't try to be it.

The question that's awkward to write as a query is "what else does what this card does?" You'd have to read the card, decide which of its lines carry the effect, guess the wording every other card uses for the same thing, and write the search anyway. Here you type the name. So it's less an alternative to Scryfall than a different question asked of the same cards: the card data and images are Scryfall's, the concept tags are Scryfall Tagger's, and every result links back.

Filters

The whole vocabulary:

• o:word rules text contains it, o:"draw a card" for phrases
• t:legendary the type line must contain this, any word works
• id:wu color identity (fits-within), id:c colorless
• otag:removal the community tags, served from this site's own daily mirror of scryfall's tagger data
• usd<5 eur>=1 gbp<2 price, price<5 whichever currency the switch shows, mv<=2 cmc=4 mana value
• salt>=1.5 how much players dislike facing a card, from EDHREC's salt survey. 0 to about 3, and only 2% of cards pass 1
• is:dfc two-sided cards, is:split is:mdfc is:saga and other layouts, is:gamechanger the commander watchlist
• f:commander legal in commander, banned:commander the reverse (commander is the only format tracked)
• a - negates anything (-t:creature means no creatures), words side by side mean and, or and parentheses group: (o:draw or o:scry) -t:creature

That's the whole vocabulary, not all of scryfall's: no pow/tou, rarity, set, artist, format beyond commander or regex, because the cards table doesn't carry those fields. Anything unrecognized is skipped rather than erroring, so a stray word never breaks a search.

Where the pound price comes from

Scryfall quotes dollars and euros only, so pounds are worked out here: both converted at the day's ECB rates and averaged, or whichever one the card has. It is an estimate, not a price anyone is asking. Dollars and euros are printed exactly as scryfall reports them.

Unique cards

The unique page is the same math backwards: one minus a card's best match anywhere in Magic. 90% means nothing out there is more than 10% like it.

It deals at random from everything within 5% of the best card left, so it is a draw rather than a running order and no two people walk the same sequence.

The deck lens

The lens reads the most original half of a deck. The other half is lands and the staples every deck brings, which tell no two decks apart. Salt and age drop basic lands, play rate drops every land.

Rules you can't see

Three things that look like bugs and aren't.

• A replacement has to cost about the same. Rules text can't see a curve: a two mana rock and a six mana rock read identically. So Change it stays within 2 mana up to five, 3 past it, and above eight just reaches down to five. It is why a search shows fourteen cards and a swap offers one; the page says how many it held back.
• Salt, price and play rate lag on new cards. EDHREC's rank counts decks that have added a card and salt counts votes, so both climb for months. A card printed last week reads as unplayed and unsalty because nobody has got to it yet. A card with no score at all fails any filter on it rather than counting as zero.
• No deck reaches the server beyond the request that reads it. Decks, swap sessions and the unique history are all in your browser, so there is no account and none of it follows you to another machine.