Scryfall

With tens of thousands of Magic cards in the world, it's easy to be overwhelmed when building a deck (especially in formats where a lot of sets are legal, like Modern or Commander). Knowing how to search for cards is important.

There are many online card search engines. The official card database, Gatherer, is clunky, but it does rely on Oracle, which is Wizards' official "reference that contains up-to-date wordings for all tournament-legal cards."  In other words, it digitally updates the wording on older cards to match current game terminology.  Thus, it's great for resolving rule disputes around older cards.  But Gatherer isn't the only search engine to do so, and as I said, it's clunky.  So I use another: Scryfall.  And when I say that name, I invariably hear the James Bond "Skyfall" theme song in my head.  But I digress; let's take a look at this useful tool.

screenshot of the scryfall homepage

Scryfall is simple and powerful, but bears some explanation.  If you search for a term in the homepage's search field without any syntax, it will return results with that term in the card name only. So, for example, searching for "goblin" will not return all goblin creature cards, but cards with goblin in the card name.  That's okay, but the advanced search is where Scryfall gets its value.  Click on the Advanced Search button and check out that page.

the first fields of the advanced page

The Advanced Search page is impressive (you should know how to read a Magic card to understand this page). As you might expect, you can search by any number of factors.   The more common ones include:

• Card name
• Card text (any card text that appears in the rules box (flying, abilities, etc.)  that's not flavor text- there's a separate field for that)
• Type line (types (like creature, enchantment, etc.) and/or subtypes (like goblin, legendary, etc.)
• Color(s)
• Commander (it will return cards that match your chosen colors, in keeping with Commander deck building restrictions)
• Formats (like Standard, Modern, Pauper, etc.)
• Set(s) [and block(s), for the older sets]
• Rarity (common, uncommon, rare, mythic rare)
• Preferences (the final field, this is where you choose how to display and sort the results- you can sort by card name, set/number, etc)

Fun!  Let's try a few.
I want to build a Standard white/blue deck that features flying creatures. On the Advanced Search page, I fill out the following:

• Text: flying
• Colors: white, blue, and select "at most these colors"
• Formats: Legal (so it omits banned/restricted cards) and Standard
• Preferences: Display as Images, Sort by Set/Number
• Press "search with these options"

This returns the following results:

Some observations:

• At the top it shows you the syntax it used in the search bar- more on this in a minute.  But note that it, like Gatherer, relies on Oracle for the latest wordings.  Good!  
• Immediately after the syntax, it shows the total number of cards returned and repeats the criteria you entered.  It's a good idea to review this to make sure you correctly captured your intent.
• Note that, in our particular search, it included cards with 'flying' in the card text, whether or not a card had the flying keyword.

This is a great start for a flying deck!  You can use these results to identify desirable cards for deck building.  But let's say you wanted only the search to return creatures with the flying keyword.  This is where knowing Scryfall's syntax comes in handy.

The syntax Scryfall uses is explained here, and is pretty intuitive.  From that page, it notes "You can also use keyword: to search for cards with a specific keyword ability." So we replace 'oracle' with 'keyword' from our original search and get:

Easy!

Once you know the syntax, you can enter that right on the front page, in the main search box, without bothering to use the advanced search page.  For example, if I want to see all cards in the Eldraine set, I could enter "set:eld" in the search box to get that result.

I think that's sufficient for an overview.  I highly recommend Scryfall for all your card searches.  As an aside, I also use it for previews of upcoming sets (the Core 2021 previews are up).

Enjoy!