Just a little guide on how you can use the player search field to find exactly the cards you want.
First of all some technical notes.
The server is using so called regular expressions (or regex) to match cards. For a "full" regex guide just google it or use the
wikipedia article.
This expression is matched against the full card title (like "Hardware Heroes, 3B Wade Boggs, BOS, 1987") and the team name (like "Boston Red Sox").
The server is ignoring cases, so you find the same results for "BOGGS", "boggs" and "Boggs".
So the obvious things you can search for without understanding regex are
- from the card title:
- card type (okay, we have a filter for this)
- position (again we have a filter)
- player name (the obvious one)
- team abbreviation (a unique team identifier)
- from the card title:
For example we want to search for "Hardware Heroes" from 1984.
Simple thing set type filter to "Hardware Heroes" and search for "1984".
The result is a short list of 3 players.
Another simple example is to search for a specific card.
Just enter the complete card title like "all-star, lf jose cruz, hou, 1980".
Now something a little more complex, all "Jose Cruz" cards from 1984.
Unfortunately when you try to combine those two information into something like "jose cruz 1984" you get no results.
So the first thing to learn is how to combine them and to know the limits.
First you can either search for parts of the card title OR the team name, not both.
Something like "hardware heroes boston" will not work.
"jose cruz 1984" does not work because the server tries to match the complete text with the card title.
Unfortunately for us between type and year stands the player name and some other data.
So to say to the server to ignore that part in the middle we add ".*" (the dot stands for any character, the * means 0 or n times the thing before it) between the type and the year.
"jose cruz.*1984" will now correctly return those cards.
With this information we can create some searches like this "2b.*jose.*2019", resulting in all second base cards from 2019 whose players name contain "jose".
To remind you something like "2b.*houston" will not work as the server can not search in the card title and the team name at the same time.
Now something different, we want to search for cards from specific years.
First thing all cards from the 1980's.
No problem we just enter "198".
Okay, what about all cards from the 1981 and 1982.
Hmm, we can not search for this or that, so we need a way to tell the server to search for either one.
The answer is "|" (next to enter on the keyboard).
It tells the server to search for either the text before or after the separator.
Additionally we can add multiple "|" to search for all possible variants like "1b|2b|3b".
So for this example we enter "1981|1982" and get all cards from those two years.
You can use this to search for either "Boston Brave" players or all players from 1962 "bsn|1962".
But that seems rather useless, so how do I search for all "Boston Brave" players from 1947 and 1948?
"bsn.*1947|1948" returns all "Braves" players from '47 and all players from '48.
That's not what we want.
Instead we could enter this "bsn.*1947|bsn.*1948".
But we are lazy and don't want to type so much so we use another part of regex.
We need to add brackets "()".
"1947|1948" is the same as "(1947|1948)", but in combination with a prefix like "bsn.*" we need the brackets to let the server know that we want that prefix on both variants.
So instead of "bsn.*1947|bsn.*1948", we can use "bsn.*(1947|1948)" or even "bsn.*194(7|8)".
With the help of ".*", "|" and "()" we can search for almost everything.
We want a Historical All-Star or Hardware Hero on 2nd or 3rd base from the 90s? "(all-star|hardware heroes), (2|3)b.*199"
We want an Outfielder from the Chicago Cubs or White Sox? "(lf|cf|rf).*(chc|cws)," (adding a comma behind the team abbreviations, so the server does not think it's part of the player name)
I hope this guide was useful and my English was not that bad.
Have fun in the auction house!
Chris
All images:
https://imgur.com/a/RYIIWil