Fetchland

Once a Magic set's prices settle, the fun buy is a pile of its good cards. Fetchland writes the shopping list for a set and a budget.

The good cards are the rares, the mythics, and the extended-art versions with the better frames. Buying them means clicking through TCGplayer one card at a time, watching prices and keeping a running total in your head. TCGplayer and Card Kingdom will both fill a cart from a pasted list. Neither will write the list.

Name a set and a budget and it buys the most cards the money covers

Bloomburrow, rares and mythics, extended art where it exists, fifty dollars. Fetchland pulls every printing in the set from Scryfall with its current price, groups the printings by card, picks one printing per card by your rule, and fills the budget cheapest-first so it lands on the most cards. The rule is yours: always the variant, never the variant, the cheapest whatever it looks like, or the variant when it costs no more than a set amount over the plain one. A per-card cap drops anything too dear, and a switch counts every unique printing instead of every card. The set field has a picker of 365 sets, newest first, so you don't need to know Bloomburrow is blb.

58 cards for $49.16

A live run: Bloomburrow, rares and mythics, $50, variant if it cost under a quarter more. 174 printings collapsed to 86 cards, 58 fit, and 19 of them came back as extended art or showcase.

The list it writes pastes straight into TCGplayer

The tool below is one HTML file with no backend and no account. It talks to Scryfall directly. Each list it builds is saved in the link, so a link with set codes in it rebuilds the same list on anyone's screen.

Every set has a sweet spot, and it sits at the average card price

Buying cheapest-first, each extra dollar gets fewer cards than the last, so the curve of cards against budget bends. The bend is where every card at or below the pool's average price is in the cart and the next one costs well over the average. Fetchland marks it on the budget slider and jumps there in one click. On the day it was built, Kamigawa: Neon Dynasty's rares and mythics put the bend at $40.95: 59 of 77 cards, 77% of the set for 19% of the cost, with the next card at four times the running average.

The slider refills the list from prices already in memory, about 16 milliseconds a refill. Beside the total sits the fancy tax, what the chosen printings cost over the same cards in their plainest version. Neon Dynasty at $50 read +$3.44.

Scryfall and TCGplayer call the same card four different things

TCGplayer's Mass Entry matches on the card's name before its set and collector number, and its product names are not Scryfall's. The first Neon Dynasty list Zach pasted lost every variant and every double-faced card. The second lost one Phyrexian printing. The third went in whole. Each mismatch comes from a different field in Scryfall's data:

Extended art

Biting-Palm Ninja (Extended Art)

Double-faced

Jugan Defends the Temple, front face only, no "//"

Phyrexian language

Tamiyo, Compleated Sage (Phyrexian), which Scryfall tags as showcase

Etched foil

Tamiyo, Compleated Sage (Phyrexian) (Foil Etched), treatment first, then finish

None of the four turned up in desk research. Eight regression cases now check the generated line against real Scryfall cards: the four mismatches, cards that hit two at once, and two plain controls. A treatment Fetchland doesn't recognize gets no suffix at all, because a bare name might match and a guessed label won't. New sets keep shipping new treatments, so this table is the part that keeps needing work.

Card Kingdom can't sell a card under a quarter