Decklist display order?

[swawagon]

Different players use different ways to show their deck. Sometimes cards are in no particular order at all. And decks can come from all different places; deck checks, Morphling.de, each different player, different message boards.

Perhaps for the sake of clarity we should develop a standardized way to show off 75 card decks?

I've been noticing, sometimes more time can be taken just making sense of decks and finding out differences in card slots, than in evaluating actual decks. And it is easy to forget a card or two and show off a 59card decklist. And as Ben Carp can attest, there are more mistakes in tournament deck checks than there really ought to be. I'm thinking that if a standard was adopted, evaluation time and clarity could be sped up significantly. A uniform method for completely new deck ideas and decks with only a few card slots adjusted could potentially be very beneficial.

The actual order should be up for discussion, but I'll toss out some ideas and I'm curious about others thoughts or what works for them.

SORT BY:

color
lower castings costs to high

artifacts
lands
colors (alpha)
multicolor

mana
creatures
disruption
draw

What I personally have been doing is sort cards by types (counterspells together, fetchlands together. basic lands first), and colors, with increasing casting costs

ARTIFACTS
1 Mox Diamond
3 Bottle Gnomes

LAND
5 Plains
1 Gae's Cradle

RED
4 Mountain Goat

MULTI-COLOR
3 Stormbind

Thoughts, ideas??

[LordHomerCat]

I type them out by the order they are written on a decklist (for top8 lists), or else just in the order I see the cards.  I'm kinda OCD about it so my own lists tend to be sorted by color, then by number (4ofs, them 3ofs, etc), then by casting cost most of the time, but still.  If I care enough about a list to want to play it, MWS will sort it for me.

[Smmenen]

I organize decklists by relevance.   I think it's best to put the unrestricted spells at the top of a list, the restricted spells next, and the mana last.

For example:

http://www.themanadrain.com/index.php?topic=23618.0

Meandeck Gifts

4 Force of Will
4 Mana Drain

4 Brainstorm
4 Merchant Scroll
4 Gifts Ungiven
3 Misdirection

1 Yawgmoths Will
1 Tinker
1 Time Walk
1 Recoup
1 Burning Wish
1 Darksteel Colossus
1 Ancestral Recall
1 Fact or Fiction
1 Rebuild
1 Vampiric Tutor/Echoing Truth
1 Demonic Tutor
1 Mystical Tutor

3 Islands
1 Snow-Covered Island
2 Polluted Delta
2 Flooded Strand
3 Volcanic Island
3 Underground Sea
1 Tolarian Academy
1 Mox Sapphire
1 Mox Pearl
1 Mox Emerald
1 Mox Ruby
1 Mox Jet
1 Mana Crypt
1 Mana Vault
1 Black Lotus
1 Sol Ring
1 Lotus Petal


That decklist cues you immediately into

1) What it's about by putting Drains/Forces up front.

2) What's different, by highlighting the 4 Scroll/4 Gifts up front, and putting it all together as an engine.

[EnialisLiadon]

I categorize the cards in my decklist by...win, business, protection, mana.  Each category is organized by color, and then in alphabetical order.  That's also how I write out my decks on registration sheets.

[zeus-online]

In type 1 i do it like this:

Mana:   - The most important part of any deck other then manaless ichorid.

Disruption:

Draw/Search:

Broken stuff: - Restricted cards, or bombs that dosn't fill into any of the other categories..

Win: - Well, the win conditions...

Utility: - Anything that's there to improve your odds while not contributing to the main strategy (like Echoing truth)

For fish or aggro decks i got "Creatures:" aswell.

I usually put numbers next to the name...
Like
Mana: (25)

This makes it easier to figure out how many cards there are in the deck, aswell as knowing the amount of mana etc.

But it would probably be impossible to standardize this...Everyone got their own way and their own logic.

/Zeus

[Mantis]

I think a lot of people aren't going to give up the way MWS sorts the decklists so if you really want to implement a uniform way of organizing decklists that's probably the only way you stand a chance of being succesful. Also, MWS is not being updated so there's little chance the way MWS sorts their decklists will be changed.

[BruiZar]

From all of the above, only Smmenen's list makes sense.

@Zeus: Mana is not the most important part of any deck, its a mandatory part. And your win condition should be listed much earlier. If I spend time looking at someone's deck I want to know how you plan to kill and what the shell is you plan on establishing the winning turn.

@Enialis: Your list seems fine, but 'business' is a broad term. Really you want to know the cards that make up the shell of the deck asap. Business spells tend to be the entire restriction list and make identifying the deck's shell  pretty hard to do because alot of decks use the same broken cards.

@LordHomerCat: Its a system, but it does make it hard for others to make out what the  deck does.

@swawagon: You run in troubles because your acceleration gets mixed with artifacts that actually do something. Then after that, you get even more irrelevant cards (lands) and from that point your list starts. I have to check all the way at the top to identify your bottle gnomes but have to go down to see what it combos with.


I'd immediatly like to see what the shell is, ie:
Workshop/Bazaar/Uba
Bazaar / Dread Return / Dredge creatures
9 Spheres
Tangle Wires and other lock components
Welders/Transmuters
Drains / Fows
Null Rod / Root Maze / Chalice
Fish creatures

After that I want to see how you plan to kill:
Tinker / DSC
Time Vault / Voltaic Key / Tezzeret
Dreadnought / Stifle/ Trickbind
List of Ichorid creatures

After that list the rest in order of importance, the cards at the bottom should in many cases be the once to side-board out

Add Manabase including moxen and spirit guides, spirit guides first, then moxen then land.

List sideboard

[zeus-online]

@Zeus: Mana is not the most important part of any deck, its a mandatory part. And your win condition should be listed much earlier. If I spend time looking at someone's deck I want to know how you plan to kill and what the shell is you plan on establishing the winning turn.

Mana IS the most important part....what you are saying is that it's easier to identify a deck by looking at it's win conditions.
When i build a deck i spend more time looking at the mana then anything else.

The problem with trying standardize how we write decklists is already evident...BruiZar and smemmen can agree on this form, while for me it's illogical....Problem for me is that smemmen's list has cards like rebuild in the same group as yawgmoth's will and vampiric tutor...three cards that got almost nothing in common.

It is easy to identify the deck through that form though...Which is definetly a plus.

/Zeus

[M.Solymossy]

I do it alphabetically by Color Significance, and then artifacts and Mana.  This way, when I organize my deck for top8s I can hand it to them exactly how I wrote it.

[wiley]

I'm perfectly fine with the way they get put up on morphling.de, something like

Deckname (# of cards)
Lands (#)
Creatures (#)
Spells (#)

Sideboard (15)

All sorted alphabetically.  This gives (me at least) a simple way to compare lists and to search for what you think the engine is.  Searching for the engine will often clue you in on little changes that you might have otherwise missed.  It might be nice to have the list broken out more into card type like it is shown on deckcheck.net, but not completely necessary.