C19 fixes, double-sided tokens issues

I would love to be able to catalog the older double-sided tokens as double-sided cards rather than as one side or the other (or both).  I'd be fine either way with leaving the single-sided versions of those cards in the database, or deleting those after a buffer period of several months to give users who care about cataloging tokens a chance to manage our inventories to the new double-sided reality.

I would love this idea.

This is why I think the idea presented by Giumbus in that newish thread in Site Feedback that Sebi alluded to is ultimately the most ideal solution — it allows for multiple ways to catalogue your inventory, offering a very flexible, robust, and simple interface. If you want to add all of the C19 as single-sided tokens to your inventory, it would let you, and not force you to pair those tokens with their other faces. If you want your inventory to reflect the physical cards you actually own, you could add them as double-sided, but then in your decks, you could still just add a single side. So e.g., C19 has both a Saproling // Morph and a Saproling // Manifest, so you could add them as such to your inventory. But say you never play with Morph or Manifest and instead sleeve those tokens so that only the Saproling is showing. In your deck that uses the Saprolings, you could then add just Saproling tokens rather than the full double-sided token. Or finally, you could choose to list only double-sided tokens ANYwhere, inventory or deck. It would be fully up to the user.

As nice as that system sounds, we probably shouldn't hold our breath. I have no idea what Sebi's backend coding and database structure looks like, but my gut feeling is that the proposed system would be very difficult to implement.

In the meantime, the key consideration in my opinion is this: Deckbox is fundamentally a place to track, trade, and sell physical cards. While a C19 Saproling token is a valid virtual card for deckbuilding, and a person can choose to only ever use that single side of it, that's not actually the card we own in our physical inventories. It will never be a physical card, because it doesn't exist. We can't trade it (not that people commonly trade tokens) and we can't sell it. Having nonexistent cards in the database undermines a core feature of Deckbox — its Market.

That all said, I'm personally fine with single-sided tokens continuing to exist on the website for those like Reezel who really want to input them like that. I have no actual desire for them to be removed (they're just objectively not correct to have). All I want is for them to not prevent the double-sided tokens from being added, since those are the more important version to have on the site.

For collecting purposes, I totally want to catalogue my double-sided tokens accurately (i.e. as the exact double-sided versions they are).

But I also think it's good to have a list function in parallel that allows you to note which side you're actually using in a given situation. Maybe that's something best handled in the deckbuilding side of the site. I currently use the sideboard and scratchpad functions to capture elements like tokens and contraptions. What if, when adding a token to one of these sections, you allowed the user to select which side of the token is being used in the given? You could also add a separate section alongside sideboard and scratchpad specifically for tokens.

This would also be able to handle a situation like reezel's: you just create a deck called "tokens master" or some such, and add all your tokens to it, noting which side of each double-sided you're using.

The database should not list cards which don't actually exist and it should not have multiple entries for the same card. If you are going to do this, there should be some kind of tag which clearly shows the card is not a real card or that one of the versions is not the "primary" version.