I'm just getting started with Deckbox, and have two questions:

1. Do I understand it correctly that you can't design a deck unless you have entered an inventory of cards?

2. I've been trying to upload a CSV file and I keep getting "Error: The server encountered a problem trying to import your file. Please check that it is a plaintext csv file and try again." I extracted a five row sample of it, and had no problems importing that. Is there a limit on the number of records in a CSV file?

I have not found a limit in size myself in my testing, and I've tried some big imports. Here's what I have seen though:

1) Make sure that if you have a card name that contains a comma, the card's name is quoted. So, for Emrakul you want your entry to read exactly "Emrakul, the Aeons Torn" - quotes and all.

2) If you have special characters, it doesn't seem to be able to handle it. So, you need to put "Aether Storm" instead of "Æther Storm" and "El-Hajjaj" instead of "El-Hajjâj" (there are too many characters to name them all)

3) I can't seem to figure out how to upload files for the duel decks, commander sets or planechase sets right now. If I use the export tool and then re-import the CSV file immediately with those cards in it, the import fails.


Those are the major things I've found. The last one is a bug, I'm sure. I've imported CSV files with those cards in them before. It appears to be that if there are a limited number of errors, the import tool will point them out to you, but if you get many errors then it just throws up its hands and says that your file is busted.

Ok, the problem with the commander and planechase sets was dealing with some special situations. Quotes in the card name, to be exact.

As for Duel Decks, the name had to be exact it appears. Previously it seemed to work with just "Ajani Vs. Nicol Bolas" but not any longer. Still experimenting, though

Thanks for the advice. I ended up just using some string manipulation in Excel to create text card lists instead. That worked much smoother, except I had to import set by set.

Also, you don't need any inventory to make a deck. It will flag the card in the deck as not being "in your inventory" and mark the qty red, but other than that you don't need to ghost any inventory.

I use deckbox to manage my collection it can take a while to get it all updated but once it is maintaining it is easy.