I use Gatherer, Wizards' official Magic card database, quite a bit. As such, I've been wanting for a long time to have it work more like a full database, allowing complex queries, iterative queries, and so forth. I want to be able to search positively for one thing, while requiring the absence of something else. Then I want to be able to sort the results according to my needs.
Apparently, that's been a common enough request to prompt a revamp. This week, the beta version of a revised Gatherer went live.
The simple search is probably the way many people used the old Gatherer -- type in a card name, get the card back. The advanced search, however, is nifty. You're given a large number of options for things to include in the search, using a boolean AND/OR/NOT to qualify the term. The interface has the search options on the left, then it shows you the search you're building on the right. Here's a search I set up earlier this week while I was trying to find creatures in Extended that could potentially serve as Elf ruiners:
This is a search I couldn't have done in the old Gatherer, where I would not have been able to rule out both Persist and Wither (which tend to clutter up the results, as you can see if you drop those qualifiers back out of the search). Here's another search (again, in Extended) for cards that have alternate payment options but which are not Suspend cards:
Once you have your results, you can choose display options including text, text plus card (the default), and a pure visual spoiler display. You can also sort as you like -- although I haven't yet figured out how sorts are ordered if you stack them. My default preference -- true for old Gatherer as well -- is to sort by CMC, in ascending order.
I'm happy to see this new, significantly more powerful tool being made available to players. It's handy, it's reasonably intuitive, and it's really fun to play with. Good job.