A Little Recap of a Lot of History
Scryfall.com launched in October 2016 with the ambitious goal of providing "a better, faster card search" to the Magic community. This passion project was inspired by another website, magiccards.info, which was the number one resource for—the name checks out—info on Magic cards at the time. Magiccards.info had been a true giant, leaving, as giants do, large footprints and giant shoes to fill and casting a long shadow that reached all the way back to 2001. For context, Wizards of the Coast only launched the official searchable card database Gatherer in 2004. Alas, after fifteen years, the giant, as they do, had become sluggish. It was around this time too that Magic first ramped up the release of new product with schemes and planes and increasingly frequent Commander decks.
Another thing giants are known for is that one can reach unknown heights by standing on their shoulders—and Scryfall did. Scryfall quickly established an even more comprehensive database and indeed provided a better and faster search to the community. But the commitment to The Gathering went far further. The openly accessible Scryfall API allowed countless community members to develop their own applications over the years, and it does so to this day. Many other passion projects may have never seen the light of day if it hadn't been for the reliable service of Scryfall.
—and scryfall.com at the bottom
The owner of magiccards.info was happy to pass the torch to Scryfall in 2018. "They trusted us with their site data, domains, and redirects, which we're very proud to still keep operable," Corey Csuhta, owner and lead engineer of Scryfall, told us. "For example, you can still visit links like these: https://magiccards.info/m10/en/1."
Scryfall has carried the proverbial torch ever since, and its light continues to reach farther and farther still. Not only did Scryfall manage to keep up with an influx of new Magic that would have been unthinkable a few years ago—far more sets released at a far faster pace, with more cards and always more versions. There have been innumerable improvements to Scryfall too, to the search filters and syntax or to the deck and tagger features. "Scryfall's biggest challenge right now is scaling up the website and API. I'm currently working behind the scenes more on site performance and database updates, rather than big visible features," Csuhta admitted. "Having the site be speedy, free, and always available is a big point of pride for us."
Most recently Scryfall has also picked up the mantle of hosting the mtg.wiki. It's a move that, Csuhta pointed out, "allows us to protect an important community resource. MTG Wiki currently creates no revenue, we just think it's super important."
Cardmarket was born from a similar vision of providing a useful service to the trading card community and has been a proud partner of Scryfall since 2017.
A Closer Relationship
Cardmarket is happy to have played a supportive role in Scryfall's journey so far and happy to report that we have now increased our support. Corey Csuhta, as owner and lead engineer of Scryfall, is happy with the development as well: "The new contract will let me justify more time making sure our systems are interoperable and we have more of your data available to everyone. Scryfall started as a side project for me when I used to work a nine-to-five job at web development agencies. I didn't ever really expect that it would grow enough to be a full gig, but I'm proud to say that Scryfall allows me to work full time on it." Csuhta is of course not the only one working on Scryfall and grateful for the help of many: "I'm supported by several stipend'd volunteers, contractors, and other people who offer advice, community support, and help with data entry for spoiler seasons."
Cardmarket is excited to see what the future holds for Scryfall, and we are excited for the opportunity to help shape its future in a small way too, with huge help from the Cardmarket community. Together, the users of Cardmarket—this name checks out as well—determine what the definitive, fair market value of any Magic card is across Europe. You can expect this number to continue to appear on Scryfall in all the usual places, only more reliably, more up to date, and more accurate now than ever before.
Last year we introduced our new downloadable data files. Both our complete catalog of products as well as all price parameters for all products are available to the public and updated daily. Anyone can import and incorporate the data into their own applications, no extra permission or access point necessary. In an ideal world we might have an API that delivers any such information on demand, and we'd have the cold-fusion-powered quantum computers to support a network of users who employ the data to update their own selling prices on Cardmarket in real time, each time influencing the data and potentially creating a recursive loop well into unreal time. However, we rather didn't want to break our servers, Cardmarket, or the internet. So in the real world, we took a more egalitarian approach: full open access via download instead of an API that imposes various rate limits and restrictions.
Earlier this year we also introduced redirects that enable anyone to link to a specific product page on Cardmarket solely based on the game and the unique product ID found in our downloadable product catalog. For example, the card
But you may notice that the links from Scryfall to Cardmarket do work this way now. We have successfully switched to the system described over the previous two paragraphs with one of our oldest, biggest, and most cherished partners. If it works for Scryfall, it will work elsewhere, and many partners across several games are indeed to follow. In fact Cardmarket's Magic card prices can also show up on any application that is built upon Scryfall, as Csuhta points out: "Our API is used by a lot of downstream websites, and they will all have instant access to any store IDs and prices we connect."
A few kinks with the links still persist. The databases of Scryfall and Cardmarket don't line up 100%, especially when it comes to some of the rarer stuff. Fortunately, our new and improved partnership accounts for this as well. Our own tireless card catalog managers have graciously been granted some limited access to the Scryfall back end, just enough so they can assist with problems at any points where Scryfall specifically connects to Cardmarket. It really is a group effort, and we invite any interested community members to take part in this project too. Should you find any missing links or incorrect prices on Scryfall, feel free to contact us at [email protected]. We cannot promise everyone will receive a reply, but you can expect a fix in response.
We like to thank Scryfall for being such a great partner to Cardmarket. More than this, though, we like to thank Scryfall for providing such a great service to the Magic community. A lot of us at Cardmarket are, personally, long-time users and huge fans. Thanks for enabling anyone to find the Magic cards they're looking for, a goal that Scryfall and Cardmarket of course share.