thescarfnerd

The Magic Bean Dealer herself!

  • She/They

24 - Trans Girl - UK based - Pokemon Enthusiast, Destiny 2 Sufferer, Blahaj Enjoyer, MTG Deck Maker


brookehorse
@brookehorse

is there a pokemon card database that allows for searching for cards but only shows one copy of a given card? i'm looking for something like scryfall's default search, where even though a card like Llanowar Elves has 53 unique copies, searching for "Llanowar Elves" returns just one card, with access to view other prints, if you would like

more thoughts and specifics below


pkmncards
@pkmncards

Part of my recent spec work is in prep for this :) It may still take us a long time to deliver something usable, but many of the prominent contributors to pkmncards want this real bad, too.

We've got help from JP (Handles high-res scans and is a long-time well regarded competitive player in the west coast scene), Immewnity (AKA the guy who played a Jumbo deck at NAIC and runs PidgiNet, and me! (TCGL/CardDex/TCGO reverse engineer extraordinaire ~)

Part of the difficulty is building our data set out enough to include variants to begin with, and then learning precisely what taxonomies would be most useful to reduce "duplicates", since they come in many forms and flavors (promotional variants, preconstructed deck variants, rarity/foil/art same-set variants, yellow A alternates, format reprints that change card phrasing, art variants (Hello Vivillon!), language variants, same-format-different set reprints, etc.) We've had quite a few false starts over the years, so we're focusing on building our data set for now before lunging into ad-hoc development again.

For pkmncards, we try to cater to both competitive players (JP's focus) and collectors (my focus). For that purpose, we really want to have a search for collectors (show all variants and printings, with prices specific to each) and a separate search for players (Collapse all competitively identical prints, showing a legal representative example for each.)

It just turns out that this is a lot of maintenance work, but we share your pain - it isn't just you! To my knowledge, nobody has ever really fully tackled this subject for Pokémon, but we'd sure like to try.


thescarfnerd
@thescarfnerd

I used pkmncards.com to search for cards for my new TCG decks and its really good!! honestly once theres an option to filter out different card art of the same card it'll be a phenomenal website for looking up cards :3