Creating Decks

User Guide

You’re wielding MTG Carpenter because you want to manage your decks for tabletop Magic: The Gathering. This app’s Create Deck page, accessible from the navigation menu in the app header, is where you begin.

From the Create Deck page, you can make new decks and remake archived ones as you want. By either method, the app saves the deck’s data into your web browser and adds the deck to the deck menu.

Start a New Deck

To prepare a fresh Magic deck in MTG Carpenter, see the “New Deck” section on the Create Deck page. In the text input field, enter a name to assign to your deck.

A deck’s name must be unique and fewer than 50 characters in length. If you’d try to submit a name that another one of your decks already has, regardless of any letters in the name being in uppercase or lowercase, then you’ll be prompted to give a different name instead.

When you’ve got the name down, click the adjacent Start button to submit it. The app then produces a new deck project with that name, and takes you to the deck workspace for it, vacant yet ready for construction.

Assemble your deck’s contents by using the List Editor’s card adder tool or the card list entry form. For ideas of cards to include, you should browse through an advanced card search.

Replicate Archived Decks

If you have a deck archive file, you can reproduce the decks contained in its data.

To do so, go to the Create Deck page, and click the Open Deck Archive File button. This displays your device’s file browser, where you can find and open a deck archive file (“.deck” file extension).

When you open an archive file, MTG Carpenter instantly creates replicas of every deck from that archive. The replicas’ data is put into this app’s data storage.

If an archive contains multiple decks to replicate but you don’t want to keep all of them, you can delete the extra ones afterward.

If you replicate archived decks that would have the same names as your existing decks, then you’ll be prompted to rename, replace with, or skip the replicating decks.

You can freely edit or delete replicated decks. Their data in Carpenter’s storage are independent copies from the archive file’s data.

Note that MTG Carpenter can replicate decks only from archive files that were saved from MTG Carpenter (or from earlier versions of this app by its now-obsolete name, “MTG Deck Builder by Iristorm Design”). You can’t replicate decks from files saved from other apps, even if those apps involve Magic: The Gathering.

If you’d want to view a Magic deck that has come from somewhere other than this app, create from a plain-text card list instead.

Create from a Plain-Text Card List

You may have a Magic deck’s card list in the form of plain text. This textual card list may be on another website or in a document of some kind.

You can interact with that deck in MTG Carpenter. To do so, use Card List Entry to quickly recreate that deck in this app. Here’s the step-by-step procedure:

Start a new deck in Carpenter, giving it the same name as the deck that you want to have.
From the List Editor mode for the new deck, click the Add Multiple button.
Go to the source of the deck. If needed, generate a text card list first, and select its text. (If you don’t know how to do that, see specific instructions for various deck-building apps.)
Copy the text card list (to the virtual clipboard of your computer or mobile device).
Back in MTG Carpenter, on the Card List Entry page, paste the copied list into the entry form, then click the Submit button.
Done! You now have the deck in Carpenter with the cards from the text list.

About Storage of Deck Data

The data for your decks in MTG Carpenter is stored in your web browser’s local data cache. It’s not stored in a remote database over the Internet.

That means anyone who visits this app can create decks right away, without needing to register for a user account. (MTG Carpenter doesn’t even have a user account system.)

However, it also means that the custom decks you’ve made in this app are accessible only in the particular web browser on the particular computer or mobile device that you’re using. Further, if you’d clear your browser’s data storage for Carpenter, then your saved decks will be lost.

If you’ve made decks in this web browser but need to access them elsewhere, you can quickly transfer them by saving all your decks to a deck archive file at their original location, then replicating the decks from the archive file at the new location.

Similarly, other users of Carpenter on their own web browsers can’t view your decks, or you theirs—except by sharing decks via the Deck Exporter mode’s methods.