5

Ancestral Vision is an example of a card with a total absence of any casting cost: you can't cast it the ordinary way. In this case, you have to cast it using its Suspend ability.

I've just found that I have no idea how to search for these cards in Gatherer or in MagicCards.info. I can search for cards with a mana cost or converted mana cost of 0, but that also gets me cards like Accorder's Shield.

How can I search up cards with no mana cost in either Gatherer or MagicCards.info?

Lands are also in this category — it's fine if this search turns lands up as well; I can exclude those by their type easily enough.

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  • Looking at MagicCards.info it looks like for their their system doesn't differentiate between a mana cost of 0 and a mana cost of NULL, so the only way I could find involved various hacks like excluding Kobolds that aren't necessarily future proof... – diego Oct 4 '16 at 19:34
  • @diego It's ok if the only viable method is via Gatherer. Thanks for taking a look into it. – doppelgreener Oct 5 '16 at 12:24
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You can search for cards that have a CMC of 0 but don't have a mana cost of 0 or that contains X. Here is an example on Gatherer. Many of them are transform cards or tokens.

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  • You can also skip both Innistrad blocks and Magic Origins to ditch the transform cards, leaving just the tokens and the real no-cost cards. – Cascabel♦ Oct 5 '16 at 4:02
  • Instead of excluding each different occurance of X, you could include mana=+!=[0]+!~[X] and get the same result. This is safe to use even in case a card with even more Xs as costs is printed. – TheThirdMan Oct 5 '16 at 12:25
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You can actually directly search for all cards without a mana cost (or, more specifically, an empty mana cost) like this [direct link]:

http://gatherer.wizards.com/Pages/Search/Default.aspx?action=advanced&mana=+=[]

This can be input directly in the Advanced Search by submitting Mana Cost and =, without adding any value to the field.

This query also excludes lands and some tokens.

As far as I can see, there's no simple way to exclude the back faces of cards without excluding entire editions they appear in, or excluding their names one by one. The only data-wise unique qualifier is that the collector number contains b, however Gatherer doesn't seem to offer a search query for the collector number.

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  • 1
    The results of the second search you linked to include tokens. – KSFT Oct 5 '16 at 12:29
  • @KSFT: Wow, you're correct... I fixed the link declaration, as I can't seem to come up with a query that reliably excludes tokens in general. – TheThirdMan Oct 5 '16 at 12:35

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