Upcoming Feature: Inventory Improvements - Tags (or Labels) (Page 2 of 3)

We will definitely have attachments as well. We already have 2 servers and they're pretty big

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?

Would using the Card Database to search for what you're looking for and the My collection tab on the card details suggestion mentioned previously not suffice for this?

Why scratch your left ear with your right hand? (i.e. why go the long way around)

Last edited by Chaim (2014-05-27 05:25:04)

Posting in this thread a response to a different feature request thread, just to keep it all in one place.

With regard to marking cards for trade that are not in decks, the discussion is a bit more complicated that it appears . It also ties into other feature requests like inventory management with tags, separate inventories, and detailed cards usage in decks.

First problem with the current system is that you cannot mark decks as being either "built" or "ideas".

If we did that, next issue would be that "built" decks should not contain generic cards like now, but specific cards, from your inventory, with exact printings & conditions etc. Since these cards are now part of your built decks, they should be visible as so in your inventory, and somehow be "separate" from your main collection. This makes working with these cards more difficult.

Some users will not want to trade out of their built decks, other will, this is one source of confusion, as we have to choose and design a way to interact between these built decks and your tradelist.

Furthermore, some people will have a set of Tarmogoyf, and will want to use it in 4 decks, without having to buy 16 Tarmogoyfs. Hence there would need to be a way to signify in these built decks that one of them actually has the goyfs, the other 3 decks just have proxies of them.

And so on it goes...

As always, I'd love to hear your thoughts on these issues. I did not yet come to a conclusion for myself, nor did I have time as I hoped to start seriously thinking of an implementation for this, but it comes back time and again, and I assure you it is always in the back of my mind, stressin' me from there

Last edited by sebi (2014-08-11 13:52:43)

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.

Yes, this is what I'm referring to. The list in question was not made by net decking, but it's a Commander list that I have not yet finished. I'm only missing 7 cards, though, and none of them are crucial, so the deck physically has 7 other cards which are not going to be in the final version, but which make the deck legal. Right now, I have notes stored on the deck telling me which cards I'm missing; it would be nice if I could easily keep track of this and the extra cards that I've added in. Keeping two decklists seems like overkill, especially since if I decide to make a change to the list, then I have to go and edit both copies.

As for creating new inventory I don't see why it couldn't stay the way it is. If you tell it you have 200 of the same cards that could be entered as one record and managed as one record until one of those items changes. Or if it's not a single record there's no reason the computer can't automate the creation of 200 duplicate records.

As for displaying this is just as easy too. It would be handle by way of grouping statements in the back end. Anything that is sufficiently identical in the display can be grouped together and displayed as a single record.

I'm a big fan of introducing a tagging feature, but I'd also like to be able to tag cards in my wishlist, or leave public/private comments on them. For instance, I add a few cards to my wishlist with a view to building an artifact deck; a couple months later I change my mind...If free tagging were enabled I could just pull up all the cards with the artifact tag on and remove them from the list.

And we can still have saved searches in this scenario too, that filter a set by the presence of some tags and absence of others.

With regard to deck tagging, I've been thinking of doing it in a way that was touched upon in this thread by you & Moxy & others.

In built decks we'd have some sort of smart way for each card to pick something from your inventory that can be used for it.

for ex, you have "2 Mountain" in your deck. You click somewhere and you see a list of all the exact mountains that you own in the inventory, and you can check which 2 of them are actually in this deck.

Afterwards, the 2 you have selected will be tagged as such in your inventory. They will have a #deck_234 tag on them.

Then can then have a button in inventory tools that says "Mark all cards that do not have some kind of #deck tag as tradable".