Scryfall Search with Gallery View and Search Everywhere!

Hello and Happy New Year!

I’m delighted to announce that the first week of 2025 brings with it some awesome new features for Cardsphere! Not only is this the first of many updates to come this year, but it’s the first major new feature since Cardsphere became part of the Space Cow Media family!
Let’s take a look at the new features and talk about some of the caveats and idiosyncrasies that come along with it.

Search Everywhere

First and most obvious, we have added a search bar to the top toolbar that allows you to search no matter where you might be on the site. No more having to navigate through the explore menu to search for cards - although that does still work!

The toolbar is starting to get a bit crowded, and perhaps the placement of the search field or the arrangement of links in general could be improved, but as we touched on in the State of the Sphere article, any changes made to the current production site need to also be written for the new front end which is currently in testing. Plus, a UX/UI update is on the horizon, so it would be particularly wasteful to spend a lot of time improving the appearance when it will soon be changed again anyways.

Scryfall Search With Gallery View

This is the biggie! As part of the larger effort to make our data more usable for both noobs and uber-Cardsphere nerds, we’ve added Scryfall search functionality to Cardsphere along with this snazzy new gallery view!

Since we are now leveraging Scryfall data, you can now search for cards by virtually any card attribute, such as mana cost, card type, treatment, artist, etc.  You can get real deep on this, and Scryfall has an entire page dedicated to how to use this powerful feature.

Please note that we fully predict and understand that the immediate ask from our users is going to be the ability to add cards to Haves or Wants directly from this page. We want it too! For now, the gallery is only implemented in a way that makes it easier to find the card you’re looking for without clicking each individual card page or hovering over every card name to view the image. More functionality will come in due time!

There is also a toggle on the right hand side that can be used to switch between text and image based search results. Switching to this view still features a hover view that show you a preview of the cards.

Preserving the hover view is important for mobile users, but the current implementation of hover view makes it pretty restrictive when trying to make the text search results more appealing. So, for the time being, there is little else that can be done to make the search more readable without having to rewrite the hover view functionality that is used everywhere on the site. But, the text view is very similar to the legacy search results, and with the ability to switch to an image view, we feel it’s a pretty worthwhile tradeoff!

About Those Caveats

The most glaring difference between the search results you’ll get on Cardpshere vs Scryfall is that on Cardsphere, because each finish and variant of a card is treated as a different object, you’ll return multiple results for a single card. Here’s what I mean: when you search "teysa" on Scryfall, you get these results:

But the same search on Cardsphere looks like this:

You still have the same results, but Cardsphere will show you foil treatments, promos, etc. as individual cards that match your search. On Scryfall, unless you know the syntax to force the result to show specific or all variants one must click the card to see the variant types.

As with the toolbar, this is something that could be improved with considerable dev effort, but with the UI update in the works, we’ve decided to spend that effort elsewhere.

There will be a lot of other quirks that will be discovered, and the more adept you are with Scryfall search, the more likely you are to find them. For example, sorting by price might seem to be broken:

It's incorrect but also correct. The search is performed against Scryfall data and if there is a price mismatch between Scryfall and Cardsphere, then the results appear out of order, and the multiple object problem makes it even messier. Again, this is something we can improve when the UI update arrives, but for the moment, please excuse our mess.

What’s Next?

Scryfall search was a feature we said may come in 2024 in the State of the Sphere article, but since most of the work was done during the mid-to-late December when most of SCM was on vacation, we opted to wait until the new year to make sure there were proper QA and code reviews done before pushing the feature out. With this feature live, we are moving to the next feature we mentioned in the article: adding Scryfall ID support to CSV import. We’ll have more on that soon!

Hopefully the community is as excited about these updates as we are, but if you’re not, please let us know! The Cardsphere community has always been the guidance force for Cardsphere development, so if there’s something we missed, please let us know on Discord, reddit, or by shooting us an email at contact@cardsphere.com.

xoxo,

efren