About Optfall
Optfall is a card search engine and rules reference for Flesh and Blood. I built it because I wanted one: somewhere every card, every printing and every rules section has a permanent URL you can paste into a judge call, and where a legality verdict shows you the upstream flags it came from instead of asking you to take my word for it.
It is free, it has no accounts, it runs no server, and it will never have a chat box in it.
In honour of Scryfall
Scryfall is the card search engine for Magic: The Gathering, and it is the best reference tool any trading card game has. I have typed queries into it for years, and Optfall is built on what it taught me: the query grammar, a permanent URL for every card, the shape of the front page, and the rule that a search should say what it could not answer rather than quietly answering something else.
Where the two look alike, that is on purpose, and it is a debt rather than a coincidence. None of their code, their data or their blessing is in here. What is in here is their idea of what a card search engine owes the person using it, and they should get the credit for it — which is the whole reason this section exists, because a resemblance nobody owns up to reads as something worse than an influence.
The grammar is inherited on purpose too. You arrive already fluent in pitch:3 class:guardian because you have typed c:r t:goblin for years, and a second dialect would just be the same thing learned twice.
If you play Magic, go and use theirs. This is a small thing made in respect of a much larger one.
Where all this came from
Almost none of it is mine. The cards, the rules, the symbols, the art and even the letterforms were made by other people first; what I did was the joining-up. So here is everyone to thank, with the address the build actually reads.
- The cards
- the-fab-cube/flesh-and-blood-cardsA community compilation of Flesh and Blood card data — cards, printings, sets, rarities, editions, foilings — kept up in the open by people doing it for nothing. Optfall reads a copy of it, pinned to one commit. It publishes no licence of its own.
- The rules
- the Comprehensive Rules (PDF)Published by Legend Story Studios. The document is theirs; the parse into sections you can link to is mine.
- The symbols
- rules.fabtcg.comThe resource, attack and defence markers the printed text carries, taken from the rules site rather than redrawn.
- The letterforms
- GrenzeSelf-hosted under the SIL Open Font Licence, whose text ships beside the font file.
- Optfall itself
- alxjrvs/optfallEvery page on this site is generated from this repository by a script in it. The structural work over the dataset is openly licensed — read it, take it, tell me where I got it wrong.
Both corpora are committed to this repository at a pinned commit, and the whole site is generated from them as static files, so what a page shows you is identified by the bytes it was built from rather than by a date somebody last checked. No database, no API, nothing to go down.
Card images are Legend Story Studios'. They are reached through the URLs the card compilation carries and re-served from a store of my own, so these pages do not hotlink theirs.
Legality is present-day only. Where upstream publishes no flag for a format, Optfall returns no verdict for it.
Card keywords are matched to the Comprehensive Rules section that defines each one, and a card page cites what its own keywords resolve to. The keywords the rules never define outright are named rather than hidden: and lightning, attack reaction, binds, cure, decay, ice, incarnate, instant, pairs, shadow resist, stealth, the crowd boos, the crowd cheers, traverse, unique, usurp. A keyword the rules do not define carries no citation instead of a guessed one, and a card upstream records no keywords for carries none at all.
Rights and permission
Flesh and Blood is a game by Legend Story Studios. Card names, card text and card images are their property, displayed here under their third-party application policy. Optfall is not affiliated with them, and I would take it down if they asked.
What is mine is the structural work over the dataset — the field selection, the upstream pin, the derivation of legality from published flags, the keyword-to-rules join — and that is openly licensed. The upstream card compilation publishes no licence of its own.
LLM Statement
Optfall was built with LLM coding tools. I have used Claude and various open weight models to produce code, tests, documentation and design here. All of it was directed, reviewed and deployed by me. The GitHub shows the full extent of that involvement — every pull request, every review, every argument I lost. Bugs and errors are my responsibility, and the blame for them falls on me.
None of that reaches you. No language model runs in this site, and none was used to produce anything it tells you about a card or a rule. That is not a promise about my intentions, it is a property of the build: every string served traces to a parsed official document or to a named human author, the parsers are deterministic code whose output diffs cleanly and fails loudly, and continuous integration fails if a language model so much as appears in a dependency manifest. A tool whose entire claim is being right cannot have a component in it that is confidently wrong, and a rules answer composed by a model is exactly that.
This constrains the product and I think it improves it. There is no chat box here and there will not be one. Where Optfall does not know something it says so — the keywords the rules do not define, the cards with no published release date, the formats where upstream publishes no flag — rather than generating a plausible sentence to fill the gap.
I support open-weight models. I am against consolidated ownership of LLM infrastructure, and against the obtrusive, environmentally unsound data centers built to serve it.
Software, like games, will eternally be a human endeavor.
About the Dev
Jrvs is a third-generation Norman Rockwell painting. He enjoys TTRPGs, "Weird Al" Yankovic originals, and the 2010 DreamWorks Motion Picture Film "Megamind", among other things.