Topic: [Feature Request] Tags for the Card Search

While I was searching for cards to go into a new deck I had the idea, that it could be greatly enhanced by tags for the cards.

To illustrate, some examples of what I am thinking of:
1) To find card drawing spells, you can filter for the rules text "draw". This will, however, also show all cantrips, all cards with cycling, etc . With card tags you could simply filter for the tag "card_draw" (or sth similar) and find your results.
2) Similarly, you could find cards, that use counters, for your Doubling Season deck without finding most counterspells or if you were to seek for counterspells you would also find Mindbreak Trap and the like.
3) If you want hosers for a suspend-deck, you search for the appropriate tag (e.g. suspend_hoser) and find Riftsweeper.

It would obviously take a lot of community effort to tag all cards, but the result would be the best search engine for cards I have seen so far. What are your thoughts on this?

  • Locke
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Re: [Feature Request] Tags for the Card Search

Gatherer (http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Advanced.aspx) already does a great job at this. It's what I use when I'm building decks. Using positive finds along with negative filters (example find "graveyard" and not "unearth") you can find things fairly easily. It's easy to get false positives, but looking at more cards usually leads to inspirational tangents.

While tags may be a good idea, I'm not sure it's worth the time to create the feature and the time to update all the cards with specific tags. I'd rather have more smaller features worked on first.

1) +"draw" -"draw a card" <http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&text=+[draw]+!["draw%20a%20card"]> (link was breaking in preview so I put <> around it to keep it from being cut off)
2) +"counter" -"counter target spell" <http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&text=+[counter]+!["counter%20target%20spell"]> (same as above)
3) Riftsweeper... lol

Re: [Feature Request] Tags for the Card Search

Gatherer is a very good (albeit slow) query engine, but its capabilities are limited to the actual card text. Card tags would provide a meta data layer, that contains the knowledge of the taggers (e.g. that card x is a hoser for mechanic y or that you can use Time Stop to counter a spell).

PS: "false positives [...] lead to inspirational tangents" is an interesting excuse. I will keep that in mind for my next data mining projects. wink

  • DIos
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Re: [Feature Request] Tags for the Card Search

I would also love this, i stumbled across similar problems multiple times. Also, would this really be so much of a hassle? I mean, the actual tagging would have to be done by the community anyway. Crowdsourcing ftw!