Every Magic card should have a comment section.
August 23, 2026
Goblin Guide gives every card its own page, its own rating, and somewhere to put the thought you had about it.
Somebody wrote that in 2013. At the time of writing, seven people had liked it. Nobody has ever built a deck around Carrion Beetles, and that is exactly the point.
Where this comes from
My cousin taught me Magic in the summer of 2007, when I was eight. She gave me a Kamahl's Temper deck. Red is still my favourite colour.
The problem was that she lived far away and nobody at my school played. I was too young to walk into an LGS on my own. I did not even know game stores existed. So I learned Magic the only other way available to me: I read about it on the internet.
Mostly I read Gatherer. It was the official card database, and from 2008 to 2014 every card on it had a comment section. Players who knew the game far better than I did would explain what a card did, what it worked with, and why it was good or terrible. You could hover a card name in a comment and see the card. You could click it and land on a new page, with new comments, pointing at more cards.
I spent entire afternoons doing that. Card to card to card. I kept finding interactions I wanted to build a deck around, and I found almost all of them by reading what one player said to another about a single piece of cardboard.
Around the same time I was watching ChannelFireball's Top 8, where LSV sat down and talked about individual cards. Same feeling exactly. I did not want a decklist. I wanted to hear someone explain a card.
Wizards closed Gatherer's comments in 2014 and deleted them for good in 2025. Goblin Guide is my attempt to bring that back, and this time to keep it running.
Open whatever interests you.
What's missing today
People do still talk about single cards. Reddit does it constantly, especially in spoiler season, and it is great fun. I would love that energy here. But I think there is a real gap.
Card talk gets diluted
A forum is about everything at once: decks, tournaments, prices, rules, drama, memes. Threads about one specific card are a small slice of that, and they are buried among the rest.
Only the interesting cards get a turn
Attention goes to the chase rares and the format staples. On Goblin Guide every card has a page by default, whether it is a Commander all-star or a common from Urza's Saga that nobody has thought about in twenty years. Where else would the comment at the top of this page live?
Spoiler threads have a lifespan of about a week
Everyone rushes in with a first impression, the thread dies, and then the card gets played for the next ten years with nothing added. I want commentary that keeps arriving. After you actually cast it. After you find the interaction. Three years later when it turns out to be great in a format nobody had invented yet.
Forums are not built for cards
Hover a card name here and you see the card. Type @ to cite one, the way you would mention someone on Twitter. Use { } for mana symbols. This is a Magic app and it should feel like one.
The kind of thing people write
Here are three examples of things I liked in the old Gatherer, and that I would like to keep seeing on Goblin Guide.
A funny remark:
A synergy or "combo" suggestion — not game-winning, but the kind of thing that would make an interesting inclusion in a Commander deck, say.
An interesting remark about a card's flavor or artwork that you could easily miss.
This is not a museum
Goblin Guide starts with the old Gatherer comments already in place. They survived because cardologist saved a copy of the corpus before Wizards deleted it, and Max Dymond turned that copy into a usable dataset with Pointed Discussion.
Other people have done lovely things with the same material. Re-Gathered is a proper archive and a great browse. Players Just Like You is a joy.
Goblin Guide is trying to do something else. The archive is the seed, not the exhibit. Those comments are here so that no card page ever starts empty, and so that a note written in 2009 can sit directly above a note written this morning about the same card.
That is the whole idea, really. Not a snapshot of what players used to think. A record that keeps growing for as long as people keep playing the card.
On card suggestions
If you brew Commander you almost certainly use EDHREC. I do. It is genuinely useful and I am not here to knock it. But it answers exactly one question: which cards show up alongside this card in other people's decks.
That is co-occurrence. It does not read the card. It does not know what the card does, what the art shows, or why a single person ever liked it.
It also feeds itself. Popular cards get more popular, because appearing in decks is how you get recommended and being recommended is how you get into decks. Meanwhile the underground card, and the pet card you keep in one deck because you love it, never gather enough numbers behind them to be suggested to anybody.
What I want here is something else. A suggestion comes from something a human wrote about the card. Somebody played with it, noticed something, and said so. When someone wrote four words under Cowardice in the old Gatherer, that was a recommendation with a reason attached, which is what you actually get from a friend across the table.
On the name Goblin Guide
I wanted to call it Flavor Text. Flavour text is the line that gives a card depth without changing what it does, which is more or less what a good comment does too. I thought that was clever. It also sounds nice.
Then I looked at what a .com costs and started browsing cheaper top-level domains. Did you know .cards is a real one? While I was down that list I hit .guide, which reminded me of a certain hasty red one-drop, and that was that.
I think it fits nicely. Goblin Guide is not an expert. It is somebody who has been down this road before and is willing to show you around, at speed, with enthusiasm, and no guarantees.
I've read all the threads. I even remember some of those comments.
Where this is going
What Letterboxd is for films, Goblin Guide wants to be for Magic cards. One page per card, for every card, where what people think about it collects over years instead of evaporating after release week, and where the good comments are still sitting there when somebody new turns up looking for them.
Or, in the older version: Gatherer's comment section, still open.
Magic is a beautiful game. Thirty years of art, text, rules, mistakes and jokes, one card at a time. I would like there to be somewhere to talk about all of it.
If you like Magic, I hope you will like Goblin Guide.