Board and Card Games

11:42 AM

Actually, looking at it again, the Scryfall suggestion was actually older than the other one I linked. Both of those suggestions were made to address the same problem: for a few reasons, some cards could not be linked properly. That problem has been addressed by the implementation of the post I linked, so we don't need another change to solve it again. — murgatroid99 ♦ 2 days ago

@murgatroid99 the feature request doesn't just fix bugs, but adds language support and uses a better maintained and more reliable service - meaning fewer future bugs that we'd need SO Devs to fix. Gather goes down (or at least used to) when new cards are added, whereas Scryfall doesn't. There's lots more to using scryfall than just fixing a few cards. — Pureferret 1 min ago

@murgatroid99 thought it might be better to discuss here?

@doppelgreener might know more than me, but there's a lot more to using scryfall than just fixing a few cards

doppelgreener

12:52 PM

At this point Gatherer is sometimes incomplete or incorrect or has altogether broken pages: github.com/scryfall/gatherer-bugs/issues

Disclaimer: I've joined Scryfall staff since making that feature request, but I still do not stand to benefit in any way whatsoever based on this issue. The only change for me will be which thing we use for card links.

That said, I still stand by that proposal. Scryfall gets cards in earlier, our index is more complete, we fix things that are objectively errors (a recent egregious example is Cleave, a less egregious example is all the DFC alt pages being broken), we don't have any broken pages (like Hanweir Militia Captain), and more significantly we fix the language issue: every user will see the same page after following the link.

But I'm not recommending that as, like, a marketer. I'm a volunteer who does data entry and helps manage their discord community. I've got no stake in this other than as a player of the game and user of the site, and in that respect, I'd much prefer seeing Scryfall links.

Bonus points: Scryfall isn't nagging you to use a client app which works even worse somehow (for real, Companion has some seriously awful breakages for card lookup, for example take a look at the modal lands) and the number of people maintaining Scryfall is more than zero.

Joe W

1:13 PM

From what I have seen scryfall appears to lack the rulings that gather has which can be very helpful in answering questions. I know in the past I have answered them by just looking at the listing.

doppelgreener

Rulings would be the weak point. Scryfall is probably 99% complete on those, but periodically Gatherer will come out with rulings after release (which we pull) and then arbitrarily later do a second pass to change them again, fixing errors or adding more. They'll also periodically make changes to older cards and we've got no way to find out; they don't release a changelog.

We rely on user reports to find out about the changes we didn't anticipate and sync it in ASAP.

Personally if I'm looking for rulings I'll check scryfall and if I don't find anything relevant I'll double check gatherer. In my personal experience there's rarely a difference between them. We can still do that as power users answering the question.

doppelgreener

3:02 PM

@doppelgreener oops this message could stand to be removed, the mobile editing glitch happened, the edited version is the next message

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Board and Card Games