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I like the idea of replacing the flags with tags. Also replacing the tags with the # is good too. At the end of the day it's the same idea. If you look at one of my previous posts you could simply replace the {}'s with a # and bam same thing.

I am assuming you will convert the existing flags into tags before removing them though. I wouldn't be to happy losing that information.

Putting the tags in a notes field via a # marker isn't a bad idea. I've not ever used this # system but it seems intuitive enough to figure out quickly.

As far as the search goes. Can there be a way to search across private and public notes for your cards at the same time? Maybe "Search in Public Comments", "Search in Private Comments", "Search in Public and Private Comments"

I'm taking the idea of additional inventories is right out? That still would be a great use at least to me.

For the deck tagging if the deck tagging is done by adding #deck_### what's stopping me from adding this tag to another card later through the notes interface in lieu of the deck building interface? What would happen in this case? Does that card get marked as being in that the deck? What if that card isn't in that deck list? Does removing that tag from a card remove it from the deck, what about the deck list? What if I manually add two different deck tags to a card is it now magically in two decks at once? What if I manually add a deck tag with a number that isn't in my list of decks?

Un-built deck lists are simply lists of cards and none of your cards in your collection have that tag?
Partially built are deck lists where some but not all the cards have a deck tag?
Does sideboard have to marked in use? I often use the sideboard as a list of potential cards to consider when building a deck. I often leave it when I'm done for the future if I want to modify the deck. I wouldn't want to consider those as being in the deck.

I think if you're going to do the deck tagging like this and put it in a user view-able / editable field you might want to make it friendlier. I am guessing the deck names have to be unique right now. Why not use the deck name instead of deck number? "#deck that blue deck some dude posted" is more understandable then "#deck_329285".

I agree 100% with this. I feel a card can only be added to one deck at a time. Thus the questions of manually messing with the deck tags if they're in a user accessible field. I know others that will disagree with this though because they move cards between decks when they play but I really thing that wouldn't be the right thing to allow in an inventory management system.

This will HAVE to be super slick. Right now it takes a decent amount of time for me to add new basic lands to my inventory. Enough that I've considered not tracking them in deckbox. I'm not blaming the program it could be my computer but it's an issue I deal with. I have so many of them it just takes a bit of time for it to load. I haven't even gotten around to splitting out the different pictures and as of right now I won't be doing that because of the time it takes for them to load. I cringe at the thought of being given a screen and waiting for all my mountain entries to load just to add that one extra land I want to add to the deck. Maybe load the first X newest or latest edition owned entries not in a deck and if you want more offer a search? This would probably give you the cards you want to add 99% of the time. Would probably also return all the cards you owned 99% of the time. But in the case of the land cards I always add the newer lands to the deck first and work back toward the older ones.

A simple check box on the deck edit page would be enough to mark a deck as built or not. Just that a check box. Don't worry about verifying that all the cards are actually owned. See below...

IMHO with us able to specify the condition and other markings of cards, the cards should have been individually addressable from the very start. Each row in the database should be considered a different card. You can do some DB tricks such as lumping "duplicate" cards into a single row and using a column that indicates the number of those duplicates but in the end each of those should be an individual card. If something happens to one of those (say I get one of my 12 copies signed) then when I go and update that card it would end up creating a new row in the DB indicating that the one that is signed is different from the other 11 because of the signature.

This is a users preference. The user should be smart enough, if they don't want to trade from their deck, to check the trade count when creating and/or editing a deck. Alternatively, I could see a tool provided that removes all cards in your decks from your trade list with the option  to choose only built, unbuilt, or all decks. I don't see why you would need to implement something to enforce this preference in the system. Seems like something a user could do themselves.

This actually requires no changes. A user can add a card to the deck that he doesn't own. You could allow a deck to be mark built even if not all the cards in that deck are owned. In this case the user would have one deck that would have 4 of the cards and they would be marked as "in use" with that particular deck. The other 3 decks would have 4 cards and they would simply show up as in the decklist count but there's no cards available to mark as "in use". When the user takes the deck apart that actually has those 4 cards in it he will be updating the deck in deckbox to signify that deck is no longer built. He would then go mark those 4 cards as being in the deck he actually put them in.

I could see an option available to "automatically assign unused cards to decks" where in if a lazy user in this case were to mark his first deck unbuilt and then go about his merry way the system would recognize that 3 other decks are "built" and use this card but that the card isn't marked "in use" in those decks. It would then pick one (which one doesn't really matter) and assign those 4 cards to that deck.  Not really the greatest solution to this problem but hey, it's a lazy user anyway.

Distinct inventories as I have envisioned them have no bearing on this at all. Being distinct sets there would not be any mixing of the cards between the inventories, EVER. You would never have a deck with cards made from both inventories. Just wouldn't happen. The entire purpose of having inventories separated at such a high level is to indicate their unique quality that they NEVER EVER mix. Think of each inventory as a different deckbox user account. Your cards and my cards never mix, thus one inventory and a second inventory will never mix. A card would only exist in one and only one inventory at a time ever, and an inventory would have its own set of unique tags, decks, lists, etc. that is not shared with any other inventory.

Now tagging, yes tagging would allow a cards to mix and belong to multiple tags at a single time.
This is essentially what the decks are today. Sadly their hierarchical nature today prevents them from being in multiple groupings. When they truly move to being tags we could put a single instance of a deck in multiple groupings (folders).

Precisely, even if the decks aren't implemented as tags allowing a search of "cards in decks" (with an option of built, unbuilt) might even suffice in lieu of the tool I spoke of above.

Well put.

This I disagree with. The point of all this is to indicate where your cards physically reside. If they're in your deck they should be marked as in your deck. If they're in your collection they should be marked as in your collection. Why would you possibly want to mark something as in your collection if it is actually in your deck? The only reason I see here is being able to pass around a bogus decklist to friends so they don't really know what you're playing.

On second thought I could see you having an "official" decklist maybe via net decking that lists cards that should be in the deck you don't own and your "place holders" are your substitutes for those cards until you can acquire them. You want to keep the "official" decklist so you remember what cards are supposed to be in the deck but you also want to know what cards are actually physically in your deck. The more correct way to go about this would be having two decklists. The "official" decklist the unchanged one marked as unbuilt and a second decklist that includes the cards you actually put in your deck and it would be marked as built. You still have your reference and you now have an accurate representation of where your cards are at.

That said as above you could have something in your deck list that isn't in your collection. It would seem strange to me and it would probably break the deck tools to allow you to set the decklist number to 0 in the deck editor and to set the "number in deck" to a >0 number. If it were me doing this I would have a constraint placed on the decklist column that it would always be >= to the number in deck column. This would help ensure the user is marking this where they physically are.

I'm all up for greater privacy filters. I like this idea. Might also add a filter for built/unbuilt settings. If I'm working on some secret tech maybe I don't want to share it before it's time. If you end up adding a built/unbuilt check box could probably add a check box for visible. This way if a user wanted to filter privacy at the deck levels he could.

Maybe a good comparison is thinking of inventories as separating your cards in the same way another account separates the cards in that account from the cards yours. You wouldn't look at a listing of your cards mixed with my cards. They're distinct entities. The only way our inventories would ever really interact with one another is through some sort of trade or buy/sell transaction. Moving a card from one of our inventories into the other inventory.

If you have a collection of cards you want to see grouped together for some reason using tags would likely be a better solution.

If you have a collection of cards you keep *strictly* separate then inventories would be better.

Both examples of using inventories to *strictly* separate cards. Neither of these situations would you want to see both sets of cards together at once as a whole.

What situation would you want to group and see various inventories listed together where using tags for such groupings would be sub-optimal?

I thought I read something last night about assigning tags or moving cards between inventories in bulk, but don't see it today. This would be a really nifty feature though, especially when setting up. I could see this coming in handy during block rotations and you need to move all your older cards to another inventory or update block related tags. Maybe moving in bulk between inventories could be accomplished with a "trade" but might be better served with an actual function with options to preserve tags and other identifying information about the cards being moved.

I disagree with this. In my view the point of an inventory would be that those cards are physically distinct. If you needed to view groups of cards together at once you would most likely be better served with tags. If you look at how the inventories are configured now you're not going to be mixing warhammer and magic together and looking through them as a single collection or single search result, they're that distinct. Extra inventories of one game should remain that distinct. In my viewpoint it should be right down to including decks, searches, tradelists, & wishlists. Inventories would represent separate and individual real world collections that one maintains, not "sub-collections" or parts of an overall whole.

If there's an option for a freeform notes field then personally I would "tag" cards like this "Misprint", then use the notes section to identify and describe the actual type of misprint that occurred for the card. This would allow you to search for your tag and flip through all your misprint cards as one grouping. The notes would help identify markings for a specific card without making the tags overly specific. Hmm, photo notes/attachments anyone?

The search in general needs an overhaul but in it's current state, yes you would need to allow multiple filters for the freeform tags. That would allow you to do searches such as this tag, but not that tag. You'd need to know which gets priority though if you have a card with two tags.

I really want to see the additional inventories but I also really want to see the free form tags. The inventories alone won't suffice for everything. That would keep things *to* distinct for some cases. The tags don't keep things distinct enough in some cases. Both seem to be a good mix and could solve most wants.

Ignoring a tag or set of tags would be great in conjunction with cards tagged as being in a deck.
If I'm looking to build a new deck I often want to ignore cards already associated with a deck that is built.

This may be taking the idea a bit to far but it wouldn't be horrible if we had the option of adding a second inventory in the Magic the Gathering section and have it treated as if it were just another game's inventory. So it would work in a similar fashion as if I had Magic cards and Warhammer stuff. Might have to provide a way of naming those inventories though so you can keep them straight. This might work well for representing completely separate collections. As in this box is my personal horde collection, that box is my share with the community collection. This may also solve issues of wanting one collection private and another public.

Adding the idea of tagging and the idea of a completely separate inventory might be the best of both worlds. The tagging could be a way to freeform mark your cards. So you could use the tags as "In Deck", or "On Loan", etc.

Personally I have "absorbed" my brothers collection. I don't suspect he'll want it back but I've kept the cards marked so if he does I can pull them and give them back. I would use a tag for this "Brother's Cards". I have cards that are basically sold and are in a sell box. They're not used in decks or anything, strictly sold in person. I would use a separate inventory collection for this "Dice Game". I have a set of cards set aside in a separate box for trade or sell but not building decks, I could use the trade list on deckbox and currently do but don't intend to trade through decbox. I might use either a separate inventory or tag for this. If I used an inventory I could mark that inventory public (keeping my others private) and pass the url around to friends asking if I have this or that. Also being in a separate inventory it wouldn't be an inventory that I make decks in are so when searching for cards in a deck they wouldn't show up (I would be searching the other inventory for deck making cards). If I used a tag for this I could mark it like "Trade Box" and then set an exclusive (ignore) filter when searching for cards for a new deck and I would have to rely on the trade list and privacy filters for sharing this particular list with friends. Actually given the choice between the two it'd go in a separate inventory.

Colored cards with cmc of 0 such as the kobolds show up as colorless in the search.
http://deckbox.org/games/mtg/cards?f=33 … 796!a4MA**
is an example showing this.
I'm guessing this is because you're using the casting cost to determine color which is accurate most of the time but not all the time.

Also since you seem to support EDH in the deck building adding a search for the color identity of cards would be nice. Seems like this might easily be added since the identity looks solely at the mana symbols present on cards.

Adding a slot in EDH deck builds to designate the commander might be nice too. Users could search for EDH decks based on the ideal commander for the particular decks.

B.F.M Left is showing up as a sorcery as well.