Feature Request: Deck Organization

[samdamana]

After many months-years of playing Magic on Lackey I have accumulated a ton of decks I like to play with. When loading a deck to my player I now have to sort through a massive list of decks. I would appreciate a feature for organizing the decks, for example the format (standard, modern, edh, legacy, ect). It would make finding decks to play with so much easier not only because I have to find the name, but also because I don't have to wonder what format the deck is and whether or not it is even legal for play (i.e. naming the subgroups the name of the format). I tried going into Explorer and manually putting the .txts into sub-folders but that did not work. At the very least there should be support for that, but even better would be if it could all be set up inside Lackey.
Thanks!

P.S. Can't wait for Lackey for IOS!

[Trevor]

I considered allowing subdirectories in the decks folder, but I think it's even more annoying to be navigating different directories. And when you can't find something, you need to check every folder. I think perhaps a better solution would be for you to use some sort of naming convention to help sort your decks. I'll try to think of better ways of organizing decks, but I don't think the solution is subdirectories.

[Alastair]

I think allowing people to use subdirectories if they wanted to would be the better solution to this. Maybe even implement a search feature that would check the contents of the decks folder.

[dboeren]

Subdirectories are the way to go.  If people find them annoying, they don't HAVE to use them, so both camps can be happy.

If you want to also implement an alternative system I would suggest a way to include tags in the XML and a search feature to list decks that match a given set of tags.

[Burst]

This request has come up before, and I've seen Trevor mention the "naming convention" idea then too.

That's fine when you have maybe a couple dozen decks, but if you have hundreds or thousands of decks then it's a laughably inadequate means of organization.  I re-requested this for the ipad version.  Swiping and swiping and swiping through files on tablet, or worse, a phone, would be even more painful than searching on a computer and god forbid you want to search by typing.  As a side effect, allowing directory browsing could tie in to dropbox storage.

I can tablet-type about as well as anyone else, and like everybody else, I do it when necessary, not because it's a desirable way of doing input.

As mentioned by others, if people, for some reason, do not want to use subdirectories, they don't need to create them and they can continue to use whatever means they are currently using.

But for the rest of us like a little structure to help find decks, subdirectories are really the only feasible means.
The "you might not be able to find a file" argument is specious. 
Of course, anyone that doesn't know how to maintain their own organization will suffer, but the same goes for names
or databases or anything else.

The XML idea is funny, not that it's a bad idea, but XML is hierarchical, like a directory structure.  Search might be easier to implement
but there are lots of directory searching libraries available.
The simplest method would be to have the top-directory of each plugin be an option.  It could default to the current location
and then allow browsing.   So, no change needed for people that like what there is now.

But, for those of us who have dozens of directories and sub directories, we could simply tell lackey "look over here" and voila, all of our decks, nicely organized, each one easily found and no double-maintenance required.


I love being able to play with friends that live around the country; but lackey sure makes some of the fun come with a proverbial poke in the eye.

[Trevor]

Adding subdirectories is pretty easy and I will do it as soon as I get a chance.