Magic: The Gathering Gatherer Guide

When you’re building a deck, you want to know all of the relevant cards that are available for you. There are tools out there that suggest cards to go in your EDH deck, but none of them are fully thorough for all decks. In many cases, you want to use the Magic: The Gathering Gatherer to search their database of all of the Magic cards through history.

For instance, I was building an Edric, Spymaster of Trest deck. The general strategy for the deck is to use 1-mana creatures that have unblockable, flying, or land-walking abilities. However, I wanted to build an Edric deck that has a little more deathtouch skills for defense purposes.

To do that, I dove into the Gatherer database. First thing you’ll want to do is set limits on your colors. Edric is green-blue, so I want to exclude white, read, and black cards.

Now I don’t want to exclude opportunities for really good cards by restricting my search too much, so instead of filtering out cards greater than converted mana cost 1, I’ll just sort by converted mana cost to easily find all of my 1-mana creatures.

Finally, let’s search for cards containing “deathtouch” in the text. Make sure you’ve selected “text” so that you search text instead of title.

There were only 4 1-mana creatures with deathtouch in the database, but now I have all 4 of those in my deck. Also I noticed Hornet Nest which creates an amount of 1/1 flying deathtouch hornets equal to the amount of damage dealt to that card and I’m now considering putting that in the deck too.

Now there are cases when you’d use the advanced search instead of simple, like if you want to search for multiple words and exclude another word. It gives you and/or functions which can be powerful. For instance, let’s say I want a card with deathtouch and flying, but the name can’t contain hornet.

You fill out your criteria and click add for each one.

I also chose to filter colors out and sort by converted mana cost. Finally my sort description box looked like this:

After searching I ended up with creatures that had reach, because the explanation for the reach keywords contains the word flying. So I went back and excluded the word reach. The only castable creatures left were Winged Coatl and Fleetfeather Cockatrice as a result of my filters.

The implications of using this database are wide. Its a great way to find alternative cards when you don’t want to spend $100 on a card, you can find slightly worse alternatives by searching for relevant keywords.

If you have any usage questions or examples, make sure to reply!