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.

Out to a spreadsheet and back

A deck does not have to live in Boardsmith alone. Data ▸ Export CSV or Export Excel writes it out; Import CSV or Import Excel brings the edited file back and matches each row to a card by the deck's identifier column. Before anything changes, the import says what will be updated, added and removed. Two switches decide the rest: whether a blank cell clears a card's value or leaves it alone, and whether a card the file no longer mentions is removed.

Replace the deck makes the file the whole deck instead. The file's columns are still read for what they are — a card's text lands on its card, and a translation sheet lands as translations — so a replaced deck draws exactly what an updated one would.

Export Project Excel puts every deck of the project into one workbook, a sheet per deck, with each translation on a sheet of its own (Heroes@UK — see Languages). Import Project Excel reads the same file back: each sheet updates the deck bearing its name, and a sheet naming no deck can become a new one.

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, and carry layers of its own that no other card has: 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.

That holds for Delete too. Deleting a blueprint layer while a card is open hides it on that card alone — every other card keeps it, and the layer's eye in the layers panel brings it back. Only a layer the card added itself is removed outright. To take a layer off every card, delete it on the blueprint.

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.