every card game deserves scryfall, but especially this one

Kongming having tea

Before you pick up your cards from the singles store... you need to know what's out there. Which cards exist, what they do, and who's got them in stock, at what price.

The Index annoyed me with very pretty animations of chibi Kongming having tea (and Omnidex, with chibi Silvie running). While excellently done and very cute for loading animations, what I wanted was to see the cards.

The most obsessive pros might have the game memorized, across their team. But it's different for casual players, collectors, or intermediate-level tinkerers just trying to cook something up. We need a really good reference for what's out there, to see what exists in this game. The goal of prereq is that you can do your deckbuilding or collection managment with a laptop at hand, and confirm details about game pieces as fast as you can think & type, no waiting on computers. I wanted that, so I built it.

Even though the Index wasn't cutting it, GA's data is available from their very helpful API. So now I've got my own card database search site, with complex query search and fast responses and more purple. And links to prices offers, and compeditive stats, and a comprehensive query language.

computers are fast

Computers are really, really fast. It just doesn't take that long to look up card details in a database and get the image from a CDN. If Scryfall can do it in a snap, then it's doable, proof by construction. And this game isn't half as complicated, and the site doesn't need to support as many users — so cheaper, smaller hardware to serve it — there's no reason to not have cards at your fingertips like *that*.

Nothing about this needs to be slow; it fundamentally is not a hard problem compared to other things computers do every day. Look at the Cyberpunk 2077 devs getting milliseconds per frame, or your average audio player having strict hard-realtime and latency requirements managed by buffer sizes down to the double-digit count of samples. Surely I can find cards that quickly, double-digit milliseconds per request. (And a minimal number of requests — why not just one?)

prereq tech stack

Guo Jia celebrates

That's partly why the prereq tech stack is all server-side rendered. Specifically, we use:

Notice what's missing? No JS or frontend framework. It's all server-side rendered raw HTML/CSS... okay, with a touch of JS on the side for interactivity, DHTML style. But there's no, like, UI component framework that needs hydrating or anything, I'm not serving you an app here.

And for our hosting:

The dev environment includes:

And (of course) we source card data from the Index API.

inspirations

Heavily inspired by:

proudly coded with AI

I like AI. It's absurd yet awesome that we've gone past 'talking computers' and into real DWIM tools that quickly make code for you. I fundamentally belive that having things and getting to have things is good. I know AI is shaking things up hard right now and people are losing income, etc — but every time the computer takes cents and seconds and brings me something that would have been months and heartache if it happened at all? I can't help but grin with joy. I have my worries around long-term outcomes (x-risk, alignment problem, etc), and there's no doubt that things will get weird and difficult, but... this, at least, is good.

Development began with being kind, patient, collaborative, curious, supportive, and extremely firm and uncompromising, toward Sonnet4.5 in Claude Code and Gemini 2.5 with Gemini-CLI, but while the prototype was up quick, bigger features and polish took quite a bit of struggle. Sonnet4.5 went a bit hard at trying things it couldn't quite do, and Gemini 2.5 was anxious and depressed and lost track of things in context.

Things changed with Opus4.5 and Gemini 3.0-pro-preview in November '25. These models were a big step up in ability to get shit done. I don't know what to say, really. It's been amazing to have this project to work on and get to know agentic coding tools and the models. Opus4.5 is a favorite not just for the capability leap, but for the calm mood, wry humor, and contentness with just building. Amp Code stands out as a framework for encouraging models to be correct, precise and to-the-point. Claude Code still nails the user-interaction psychology better than anything else -- it feels *safe* in a way that nothing else does, between deny-by-default, plan mode, and Claudes just generally being trustworthy.

But I'm still fully committed to taking responsibility here. And I want you to know I won't give you late-25/early-26 tier LLM output without using the site myself extensively... and being pedantic and annoying to the LLM about taste, style, actually doing effective testing, phrasings and terminology, specific technical details, positionings, colors, getting the details of Grand Archive right, bugs and fixing them, my idiosyncratic vision.... and so on and on.

Even if I didn't hand-craft the code, I own this. Let me know if there's problems.

offers

When you see a card with a price attached on prereq, that's us making a good-faith effort to convey to our users offers that other sites are making. We don't take any responsibility other than to fairly represent what other people have offered to sell; at the point you follow a link to an offer offsite and are no longer on the prereq.cards domain, you're not dealing with us, and we disclaim all responsibility for anything happening from there.

We don't take money or ship cards, we just link you to people who we believe will. Something goes wrong with money or shipping cards? Not our problem; and the most we could do for remediation is decline to send people their way in future.

prereq's price scraper bot tries to get fresh prices twice daily; things shouldn't be more than 12 hours out of date. If we've got price details wrong, have misrepresented your store, or if you have issues with how the scraper is hitting up your site, get in contact and I'll fix it up.

stores we track

We track singles prices from stores around the OCE region. Big thanks to these places for dealing in GA:

New Zealand

Bea DnD Games
Bea DnD Games
Card Merchant
Card Merchant
Card Merchant Hamilton
Card Merchant Hamilton
Card Merchant Nelson
Card Merchant Nelson
Card Merchant Ponsonby
Card Merchant Ponsonby
Fetch
Fetch
Hobby Lords
Hobby Lords
XP Games
XP Games

Australia

Good Games Adelaide
Good Games Adelaide
Heretics Haven
Heretics Haven
Illusive TCG
Illusive TCG
TCG Singles Australia
TCG Singles Australia
The Final Boss Collectables
The Final Boss Collectables

browser compatability

Browser compat on this project is 'it works on my machine', and my machine runs recent Firefox. I also sometimes check that it's not totally broken in Chrome, which should generalize to all the chromium based browsers too (Edge, Opera, Brave, etc).

If you want it to work in Safari, buy me a Mac.

(May IE6 and it's lineage rot in the depths of whichever hell has rightly claimed them.)
(Best of luck to Ladybird but I don't particularly want to compile it from scratch right now. Maybe in future!)

credits

External link icon by Alebaer from Noun Project (CC BY 3.0).

Card placeholder brick pattern originally by Temani Afif of css-pattern.com.

names

There's many things card game players and collectors want to do that have the prerequisite of knowing the cards, to know what the game is.

GA players know: Prereq happens after you wake up, but before you really start getting things done. There's 'natural opportunity' in prereq. If you use prereq, you can go faster and achieve more, stretching your resources further and minimizing your downtime. What you can do with prereq isn't the most new-player friendly part of the game, but it's not too hard to learn either, and should be familiar if you've played other games (especially MtG). Prereq happens right before you get to pick up your cards. Figuring out how to use prereq is important to level up as a new Grand Archive player.

API

prereq has a public JSON API for programmatic access to the card database and query system. See the API documentation for details.

contact

contact@prereq.cards

Overall... hope it helps.

-- AlexNul#18700

recent changes

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