So my previous process involved tagging each card with where it’s “home” is. This was where the card was stored, it was meant to indicate where the card should go when/if it was removed from the deck.

I have moved to a chaos sort system. This means two things changes to this system:

When a card is removed, it should just be sorted into the next batch of intake that I do / added to the most recent bin. This is an improvement to try to resort it into one of my 35 long boxes.

Also, that means the “where it belongs” tag is more of a “current location” tag.

So I have added a new tag called “in deck” that I mark card rows with. Cards with this tag I can check Deckbox’s internal “what deck is this linked to” to know where cards are.

So now that the preamble is out of the way, the problem is I have a LOT of rows where half the card row marks cards in a built deck and the other half are in storage. These need to be migrated to the new system where a card row is either “In Deck” or marked with its current storage container. There are around 700 such rows and manually updating each one will take a ton of time. I’m looking for some interesting ideas on how to do this quicker.

One idea I had but I feel like I’m one step away from is using the filtered view I have of such items (rows that are in built deck filtered by rows that don’t have the in deck tag) and using the “add all to deck” button. From there I can export the deck and reimport with a different tag. So potential steps would be

1. Add one copy of all such cards to a new deck.
2. Export a csv of said deck.
3. In bulk, remove all cards from deck AND collection.
4. Go back to the filtered view above and swap tags in bulk for every card where the count in deck matches the amount of cards in that data row, now that one has been “removed” from the collection.
5. Repeat until everything is migrated.
6. Import all exported spreadsheets with the previous tags they had. I only have two man tags to worry about here so this should not be too arduous, would probably do this process once for a h of those two tags and then do the remaining outliers manually.

To talk out the alternative: Why not trust “in constructed deck count”. Because it’s difficult to see how many are each bin while deck building, which by necessity must be done digitally. Also, by getting this in sync, I can have a bookmarked view that lets me filter to “cards that are in a constructed deck” and “does not have the tag ‘in deck’”

Sorry, I know this is a long post. Just trying to think this out. I want to avoid having to restore from a backup. I would love to test this in a sandbox but it involves a premium feature so I can’t do it without spending money which I also want to avoid.

Hi! I'm not sure if this would help at all, but it might. I'm super OCD organized when it comes to my cards both digitally and physically - I have over 18000 cards in my Deckbox, all of which I've manually added via typing/searching to make sure the right versions were being captured and inventoried - I don't really want to use any sort of scanning systems as I limit apps on my phone.

But I have a bunch of the 4-row white boxes for cards and I have some sets combined together while others that I have significantly more quantity of separated out (so I have 2 full boxes of FF for example, and Edge is split out as is Lorwyn Eclipsed from some of the other expansions I may only have "some cards of"). The thing that is most valuable - each box is labeled with what expansions are in it via P-Touch labels and then within I have it divided by color/type using these dividers I found on Amazon and they have been EXTREMELY helpful in keeping things organized and easily findable:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH3YXJTL

I haven't had any struggles finding any cards I've needed to look for at all using my methods. These might not help with the tagging system itself, but may help for utilizing the tagging system with a better physical organization system to enable you to locate your cards quicker :)

raytia wrote:
Hi! I'm not sure if this would help at all, but it might. I'm super OCD organized when it comes to my cards both digitally and physically - I have over 18000 cards in my Deckbox, all of which I've manually added via typing/searching to make sure the right versions were being captured and inventoried - I don't really want to use any sort of scanning systems as I limit apps on my phone.

But I have a bunch of the 4-row white boxes for cards and I have some sets combined together while others that I have significantly more quantity of separated out (so I have 2 full boxes of FF for example, and Edge is split out as is Lorwyn Eclipsed from some of the other expansions I may only have "some cards of"). The thing that is most valuable - each box is labeled with what expansions are in it via P-Touch labels and then within I have it divided by color/type using these dividers I found on Amazon and they have been EXTREMELY helpful in keeping things organized and easily findable:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/B0FH3YXJTL

I haven't had any struggles finding any cards I've needed to look for at all using my methods. These might not help with the tagging system itself, but may help for utilizing the tagging system with a better physical organization system to enable you to locate your cards quicker :)

Thank you for the response!

I used to sort by set then alphabetically. I was able to find anything just by knowing the set.

The issue is that I was “thrashing” on intaking new cards because I would have to first sort out the different sets, decide if they needed a new box, sort the cards into the existing boxes, blah blah blah. And the fact of the matter is I’m taking in way more cards than I am taking out and needed to speed up that process. Plus, it’s not like when I pull cards they always come from the same set. If I build a commander deck I am more than likely pulling from different sets.

To that end, I have adopted chaos sorting because it makes the intake much faster…no decision to be made, just scan/input, tag with the next location number, box it up and keep moving. It does entail a lot of extra “easy to mess up” upkeep on the deckbox side, but overall the process is nice. Just trying to improve my “recall” speed by making it so that only cards not in a deck are marked with a location.

What would be the most straightforward or useful tool for fixing this? Would a filter in inventory that allows filtering for an exact deck solve this?

sebi wrote:
What would be the most straightforward or useful tool for fixing this? Would a filter in inventory that allows filtering for an exact deck solve this?

Oh! I think a CSV export tweak would help: when I tried to do this one swoop where I would export, make changes myself in the csv, and then reload…the thing was that the used deck count seemed to be off from what I thought it would be. I didn’t verify what it was counting, and am away from a way to test it right now, but I think it was counting the used deck count for that printing of a card and not that row?

I think if it was counting the “amount used in deck” for each row, I could write a script that would take each row and split them by tag to what I need and then delete what I exported and reload. Though…typing that out, that may break the deck / card row linking…

That said, being able to filter by deck on the search bar WOULD be nice. I don’t remember exactly what I wanted each time, but I remember a few times wishing I could do so before working around it.

Your Chaos approach is interesting. I guess if you're digitally recording the location of the card, it really doesn't matter in what container it lives in.

A concern I'd have is how accurate is your positioning in the container. How do you keep track of where the card is in the container?



My 26000 count collection is physically sorted primarily by color (WUBRGMCL), secondarily alphabetically. The exceptions to this are some full sets in their own binders, sorted by Collector Number, and cards in decks.

With the help of tagging, I am using a similar approach to you regarding "home" location for every card. That home location is either the aforementioned color/alpha drawers, or binders. Example: "White - 1.1" (contains A-F), or "LCI Binder". These tags NEVER come off the card, as they indicate the card's home location to return to.

When a card leaves its home location, I tag it with "Out of Library", as well as a tag I create for the location it goes to. Typically, it goes into decks, and every deck has a tag. However, it could be a tag such as "Trade Binder", or "To Bobby", etc. It's common to have three tags on cards that are away from their home location.

A good portion of the collection is in built decks (over 22 constructed lists). Each of their deck boxes (as well as the Binders), have an RF tag which links me to the deckbox tag filter so I can see what's contained in that container.

When importing; it's pretty easy to do it manually in color batches, using the set/tag/attribute presets to quickly tag them with proper Home location. Or, import via CSV (from scanner of choice) having pre-processed the tags. Or even, sorting by color and bulk tagging post-import. Lots of options here, you get quicker and quicker as you become practiced at it.

Beyond digital recording, because physically sorting cards is time consuming, I have a few import trays that pile up with cards before they get put back. This is a catch-all for any new cards that HAVE BEEN RECORDED, but not yet sorted. Or cards that get pulled from decks and need to be sorted. In either case, they are treated to their normal Home location tags like the rest of the collection. I don't bother uniquely tagging the cards in this tray as they typically don't hang around there too long. I try to stay on top of it, but it's not uncommon for 100-200 cards to stack up before I sort them.

Anyway. Hope this helps. Sorry if it didn't quite hit the mark you were looking for.