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.

| improve this question | |
  • 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
8

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.

| improve this answer | |
  • 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
2

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.

| improve this answer | |
  • 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

Your Answer

By clicking “Post Your Answer”, you agree to our terms of service, privacy policy and cookie policy

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged or ask your own question.