Image courtesy of Scryfall.com
Clustering Similar MTG Cards with Embeddings: A Practical Case Study
If you’ve ever taken a deep dive into the world of Magic: The Gathering card data, you know the thrill of discovering that a seemingly simple card can sit on a vast, multidimensional map of interactions. Embeddings—dense vector representations learned from a card’s text, color identity, mana cost, type, and flavor—let us cluster cards that feel kin to each other even when they live in different corners of the multiverse. In this exploration, we’ll use a classic white sorcery from Urza’s Saga as a lens for how such clustering works in practice 🧙♂️🔥💎.
Let’s ground the discussion with a concrete example. The ancient white sorcery from Urza’s Saga carries a modest {1}{W} mana cost and a deceptively large effect: “Return all basic land cards from all graveyards to the battlefield tapped under their owners' control.” On the surface, that line item sounds tame—swap a few lands from the grave into play, but the ramifications ripple across formats and deck archetypes. Clustering this card alongside others requires us to weigh its mechanics, mana economy, and lore in tandem with its artistry and print history.
What makes Planar Birth—er, this Urza’s Saga rarity—stand out in a crowd
- Set and era: Urza’s Saga (USG), a landmark expansion from 1998 that fans often associate with the era’s heavy land and artifact themes. The card’s frame, flavor text, and art carry that late-90s craftsmanship vibe 🧙♂️🎨.
- Color identity and mana cost: White mana with a cost of {1}{W} (CMC 2). Its color identity firmly places it in the white cluster—think about white’s strengths: protection, order, and, in this case, restorative graveyard play.
- Rarity and presentation: Rare, nonfoil in the original print, with a distinctive Adam Rex artwork that helps anchor its identity in a crowded card pool.
- Oracle text and effect: A mass-return-with-a-tap twist—return all basic land cards from all graveyards to the battlefield tapped under their owners’ control. That effect interacts with graveyards, land count, and timing in ways that ripple through deckbuilding and long game plans.
- Lore and flavor: The flavor line, “From womb of nothingness sprang this place of beauty, purity, and hope realized,” hints at a plane-spanning imagination—a theme that many white cards vibe with, even when the mechanical impact is straightforward.
“Return all basic land cards from all graveyards to the battlefield tapped under their owners' control.”
These attributes become the features in an embedding model: the textual surface of the oracle text, the color identity, the mana cost, the card type, and even the flavor text. When you combine them, you create a rich vector that a clustering algorithm can group with similar cards—those that primarily care about land, graveyard interaction, or white’s signature tempo and resilience. In our space, this Urza’s Saga rare commonly nodes with cards that engage lands, reviving or replaying resources, or enabling big plays by reanimating or reusing lands as battlefield assets.
How embeddings reveal the card’s neighborhood
Think of an embedding as a fingerprint that captures a card’s personality across multiple axes. Here are the axes that matter for clustering Planar Birth in a practical sense:
- Resource type and timing: It’s a sorcery with a late-game potential to swing board state by re-spawning lands from the grave. This is “land recovery on a mass scale,” a behavior that often anchors it to a cluster of white spells that manipulate the graveyard or battlefield state.
- Color and mana economy: White’s classic swing between stasis and decisive tempo; a low-cost, high-impact payoff fits neatly into blue-white and white-heavy control themes as a pivot point for big plays.
- Grand effect vs. setup cost: A two-mana investment that can unleash a tidal wave of lands—this contrast makes it sit near other “board state reset” or “land-based engines” cards in embedding space.
- Flavor and art direction: The flavor text provides cultural texture that helps differentiate it from other mass land effects—adding a semantic layer that’s useful when embeddings are trained on both text and context.
From a practical standpoint, an embeddings-driven clustering approach can help designers, collectors, and players identify candidate cards for synergy or for building archetypes around specific strategic ideas—like “bring back lands from the grave,” or “maximize victory through massive land drops.” This is where artistry and mechanics meet data science in a friendly, nostalgic way 🧙♂️⚔️.
Crafting clusters: a step-by-step mental model
- Aggregate features: Pull in card name, mana cost, cmc, type_line, color_identity, set, rarity, oracle_text, flavor_text, and artist notes. Don’t forget dynamic attributes like print status and legality across formats.
- Represent text semantically: Use a transformer-based embedding for oracle_text and flavor_text, then fuse it with structured features (mana, color, type).
- Normalize and fuse: Normalize the numeric features and concatenate with text embeddings to form a single vector per card.
- Cluster and validate: Run hierarchical or k-means clustering, then interpret clusters by sampling cards from each group and confirming thematic coherence (land interactions, graveyard play, white spell mechanics).
- Iterate with flavor: Add flavor notes and art descriptors to refine clusters, capturing how a card “feels” in addition to what it does on the table.
Applied to our Urza’s Saga sorcery, the vector would likely pull it toward a cluster of white spells that interact with lands and graveyards—a neighborhood that includes cards designed to restore, reuse, or accelerate the battlefield’s land economy. The power of this approach is that it surfaces connections you might not notice just by scanning card text in isolation. It’s a blast from the past, with a modern twist 🧙♂️🎲.
Why this matters for deckbuilding and collecting
For players, embeddings-guided clustering translates into practical deckbuilding insight. If you’re exploring a white-heavy strategy that leverages graveyard land re-use, clusters help you discover under-the-radar inclusions that share a creative DNA with big, splashy plays. For collectors, seeing which cards cluster with older classics reveals potential value drivers: cards with robust synergy, iconic art, or rare status from classic sets like Urza’s Saga. The rarity and historic charm add to the allure, especially when you consider market measures like price trajectories, print runs, and reprint history 🔥💎.
Beyond numbers, there’s a cultural layer. The art by Adam Rex, the flavor text drawn from a fictional canto, and the sense of stepping into a plane where things can be rebuilt from the ground up—all of it threads together into a tapestry that data alone can’t capture, but that embeddings can help you organize and explore with clarity and curiosity 🧙♂️🎨.
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