Deck/Collection Process

[DazBoot]

So, because I'm crazy, I sat down with a friend of mine and we were talking about how we go about making decks (casual, edh, standard, whatever) and what the process was. We pretty quickly came to the conclusion that how we went about it was very radically different. Then the conversation wandered on to how we stored our decks, if we documented them, how we sorted and managed our collection, trade binder, etc.

This conversation was in response to the trade program that I posted last year and a few other small Magic tools that I've been just mocking up in some of my free time. I realized that of the tools already available to us (Gatherer, Pencil Paper, Physical Cards, etc) we used them entirely differently.

Because I plan on continuing to work on some of these in my free time, I was wondering what other people used currently, and what they wish was in existence (not that I will necessarily make it, but just because I think it's interesting).

I know that the response could be long, but we've done that in the past so I don't feel too guilty!

[vultanphase]

Well, I currently only use it for large highlander decks (250+ cards), and only two such decks, but I maintain decklists on Google Docs, sortable by numerous bits of information on the cards (Such as type, subtype, mana cost, CMC, name, and some less useful things like premium status and datestamps).

Don't really know what I would WANT to use, but I'm pretty happy with that so far.

Example: White Deck which is (as of this posting) sorted by Card Type, subsorted by Converted Mana cost, and subsubsorted by name.

[fivealarm]

I haaaaaaaaaate sorting cards I didn't use and putting them away so I tend to draft decks on a legal pad first. At the very least I'll punch a functional shell of my deck idea into www.deckstats.net just to visualize where the holes in the curve are.

I prefer to use magiccards.info to search up cards because you can type advanced search filters into their text box such as, "t:zombie o:lifelink" for zombies with lifelink. Gatherer is slow and stupid and I don't use it unless I'm forced to.

I save decklists as notepad files and upload the good ones to my dropbox.