Decks and data

The deck is a table. Everything that differs from card to card lives in it, and the blueprint reads it by column name.

Getting the table in

Boardsmith reads CSV, XLSX and its own JSON deck format, and it edits all of them in the Data tab. The usual route is to keep designing in a spreadsheet and paste rows in; the second usual route is to type straight into the table here and never open a spreadsheet at all.

Column headers are editable in place. They are not labels — a header called cost is exactly what makes {cost} resolve on the blueprint, and a header typo is the usual reason a card comes out blank. Where a blueprint names a column that the deck does not have, the table offers to add it in one click.

Two views

• Grid renders every row as a card. This is how you check a deck looks right. Thumbnails render only while they are on screen and are cached by row content, so a three-hundred-card deck opens immediately.
• Table is the spreadsheet. This is how you paste fifty rows, rename a column, or fix the one card whose text is too long.

Finding things in a deck that got big

• Search covers every column in both views.
• Sort is a view, not a rewrite — the deck keeps its order on disk.
• Find & replace (Data ▸ Find & Replace) runs across the whole deck with a live count of what it will change, and lands as a single undo step.

Copies of the same card

A column called count — or quantity, qty, copies — says how many physical cards a row is worth. The editor deliberately does not expand it: a table showing "copy 2 of 3" as an editable row would write the expanded set back and multiply your deck by itself on the next save. The expansion happens at export, where the copies are pasted rather than re-rendered.

One blueprint, several decks

Decks and blueprints are separate files, and several decks can share one blueprint — a core set and two expansions of the same card type. On the way out they can be merged into one deck, or kept apart, whichever suits.

When one card has to break the rules

Editing a card never edits the blueprint. But a card may still move, resize, restyle or hide any field for itself: those deviations are stored as a patch on the row, keyed by the blueprint they were made against, and they travel with the card through duplicate, reorder and delete.

The order of precedence, lowest to highest: the blueprint, then the row's columns wherever a field reads a token, then that card's own overrides, then — with a content language active — its translation for that language.

Artwork paths

An image field's path resolves against the blueprint's asset folders, so a cell holding wolf.png is enough. The picker beside the field returns an absolute path and Boardsmith reduces it to the shortest form that still resolves — which is what keeps a project working after it moves to another machine. A file outside the asset folders stays absolute, and says so.