Topic: New to the site/how to inventory my collection

Hi everyone!
I have a pretty extensive collection. Wild guess would be 30,000 cards or so. I'm preparing to bite the bullet and inventory what I actually have, and I'd like to do it in a way that helps me track the value of the collection. A quick search online brought me to deckbox. So far so good.

Right now, my collection is in the shape of:
- 20 or so decks I've constructed
- A few binders or small boxes of scattered cards
- A bunch of boxes of cards sorted by edition, color, alphabetical order

Having poked around here a bit, my guess is that the most efficient way to catalog this would be:
1. Enter the decks I have constructed. Those are gonna be a bit painful, because they mix all sorts of editions and are not sorted in any way. Oh well. But I'll get the fringe benefit that I can also see/share my constructed decks.
2. The binders and mixed boxes will be similarly painful. Serves me right.
3. Since the vast majority of the cards are then sorted by set, color, alphabetical order, I'm hoping there is a relatively painless way to do that. It seems like maybe deckbox provides a handy interface for doing this, but it is a premium feature. Is that correct? It will show me all the cards in a set, and let me walk down the set just entering how many of each card I have?

Other questions:
- Some of my built decks contain proxies. I think I gather from another post here that there isn't any clean way to designate that. I could leave them out, but then my deck listings would be inaccurate. I could include them, but then my inventory/value would be inaccurate. I think the best I could do now is to include them, but make those distinctive somehow; specify they have a quality of Poor, are signed, or something else that would make it easy to find them. Yeah?
- Once I have all this entered, in like 7 years heh, I'm not sure what I'll end up doing with the completed inventory. It looks like I can easily export the full listing into a spreadsheet as needed. Right?

Thanks in advance!

Re: New to the site/how to inventory my collection

It sounds like you have a good approach planned.

If you are going to go with the premium account for now, you can also note specific cards that are in a given deck.  I like to keep track of what cards are in each deck, as it helps figure out where specific cards are and where I still need to upgrade cards to foil.

The ability to easily add cards to specific sets with the + and - buttons is wonderful.  Just make sure that you set your default values properly before you do.  You'll probably want to set NM as the default condition and specify that your cards are in English.

For proxies, I would suggest marking them as textless cards.  There is no legitimate reason to use that property any longer, so it makes it very clear that something unusual is going on, and you'll also have an easy way to filter your collection as well.  You can just filter your inventory for textless cards and see them all really easily.  If you want to get a rough idea of your collection value you can filter your inventory to not show textless cards, and then select 'View' -> 'Total Set Value' to get the value.  Just note that Deckbox values aren't great.  But, as you said, you'll have your inventory available as a CSV, so you can get a more accurate estimate of card value elsewhere.

Re: New to the site/how to inventory my collection

psrex wrote:

It sounds like you have a good approach planned.

If you are going to go with the premium account for now, you can also note specific cards that are in a given deck.  I like to keep track of what cards are in each deck, as it helps figure out where specific cards are and where I still need to upgrade cards to foil.

The ability to easily add cards to specific sets with the + and - buttons is wonderful.  Just make sure that you set your default values properly before you do.  You'll probably want to set NM as the default condition and specify that your cards are in English.

For proxies, I would suggest marking them as textless cards.  There is no legitimate reason to use that property any longer, so it makes it very clear that something unusual is going on, and you'll also have an easy way to filter your collection as well.  You can just filter your inventory for textless cards and see them all really easily.  If you want to get a rough idea of your collection value you can filter your inventory to not show textless cards, and then select 'View' -> 'Total Set Value' to get the value.  Just note that Deckbox values aren't great.  But, as you said, you'll have your inventory available as a CSV, so you can get a more accurate estimate of card value elsewhere.

Okay. As soon as I entered one card, I think I see a problem with my plan heh

I picked up a deck. Sorted it. Went to input it. But it looks like there isn't any way to enter the deck, and in doing so add it to my inventory. If I just put in the deck, it just warns me I don't have the cards to make the deck. I can tell it that the cards have to be in my inventory, but that's kind of the opposite of what I want.

Am I missing some way to simultaneously add a deck and add the cards in it to my inventory? It'll be a drag if I basically have to enter all my decks twice.

EDIT: I think I found it. There were multiple interfaces to add cards to a deck, and I think I just found one that will let me add to the deck and my inventory. It is a premium feature, but I think I was going to end up needing a premium membership anyway.

Last edited by djp1968 (2021-03-14 23:14:43)

Re: New to the site/how to inventory my collection

I don't know if it is premium only or not, but the way to add to your inventory and a deck at the same time is go be in the deck list, click 'Add Cards' at the top, and select the 'Add to Deck & Inventory' option.

Re: New to the site/how to inventory my collection

One important thing to understand about Deckbox's organization scheme is how decks interact with your inventory.

Think of your inventory as "every card I own, no matter where it's located". Deckbox unfortunately has no way to split up the inventory between binders, decks, boxes, etc.

Think of decks as a list of cards, not necessarily tied to your inventory. They start out as "deck ideas", meaning it's just a list of card names you might use in a deck. Then, if you're a premium user, you can switch it to a "built deck" and specify the exact card in your inventory for each card in the deck, or not. This allows you to have it be a mix of cards you actually own and ones you don't (in your case, proxies).

So now that we have that foundational understanding, how you handle your proxies depends on whether you want to a) have them listed in your inventory (list of owned cards), or b) not list them at all in your inventory since they're not actual cards. If the former, then psrex's idea of setting the "textless" flag is probably the best one. If the latter, then only add your actual cards to your inventory, add your full decklist to a new deck, and then for the cards that are proxies, it'll show up as "you don't own enough of these" in the deck view, and that's good. Easy to spot which are proxies when viewing a decklist. All the ones you do own, you can manually specify the exact printing you own, or just leave it on the default edition.

Last edited by meldon44 (2021-03-16 00:11:57)