1

Are there any other creatures that have an ability that's the same as Nettle Drone's second ability, "Whenever you cast a colorless spell, untap [card name]"?

I'm not sure how exactly to search for it. Any insight?

The things I tried on Gatherer brought back a lot of false positives.

2
  • 1
    I'm not sure what you tried on gatherer, but if you actually wanted to search for that, just leave out the card name and use double quotes to get an exact match: ["whenever you cast a colorless spell, untap"]. (The brackets aren't part of the query.) But as the more-helpful answers have pointed out, that's too specific a query: it only finds Nettle Drone.
    – Cascabel
    Feb 20, 2016 at 0:19
  • If you look for, "whenever you cast an instant or sorcery" in gatherer, you'll see a large number of very interesting effects. Gelectrode in particular is a personal favorite. Not exactly what you're looking for...
    – John
    Feb 26, 2016 at 0:03

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
7

One option is to use Scryfall, which uses "~" in card text search to mean the name of the card that the text is on. So, for example, you can search

o:"Whenever you cast a colorless spell, untap ~"

This gives exactly one result: Nettle Drone.

In addition, Scryfall has a regular expression search that supports the same meaning of "~". So if you do the following card text search, you end up at Nettle Drone:

re:"Whenever you cast a colorless spell, untap ~"

For a slightly broader set of results, you can search for

re:"Whenever * (cast|casts) (a|an)* spell,* untap ~"

This finds every ability of the form "Whenever [a player] cast(s) a(n) [characteristic] spell, untap [this permanent]". It finds a total of 9 cards, two of which untap when you cast any colorless spell: Dwarven Patrol and Nettle Drone.

You can also use this less-accurate regex:

re:"Whenever * (cast|casts) (a|an)* spell,* untap"

This captures more cards outside our intentions but with a similar effect (e.g. Paradox Engine, Jeskai Ascendancy). More importantly, it includes cards like Blistercoil Weird which say "untap it" (in reference to themselves) following some other effect that's also occurring.

1
  • Thanks, I never have used magiccards.info I've heard of it but not used it. While the results are somewhat dissapointing this did answer my question.
    – thatdude1087
    Feb 20, 2016 at 4:36
4

If you're looking for cards that untap based on some event, a query on magiccards.info like o:whenever o:untap o:cast might be what you're looking for. Essentially, you are trying to distill down the nature of what you are looking for. You want a trigger (whenever), from an event (cast), and an action (untap).

So, the example query gives all cards that check the casting of a spell and untap something. To make it more specific, adding another modifier (colorless) shows that Nettle Drone is the only card with the same trigger and same action.

0
3

That's way too specific. At the most, I'd look for cards with the following phrases:

  • Whenever
  • cast a colorless spell / casts a colorless spell
  • untap

That will allow "Whenever a player casts a colorless spell", for example. And it will allow compound effects that include untapping.

Even with those loosen criteria, there's only one match.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .