Magic The Gathering Collection and Decklist Management is Difficult and I Think Nobody Has Gotten it Right Yet
/ August 31, 2026
This is a bit of a tongue-in-cheek post for me personally - I’m simultaneously drafting a post with this exact same structure, but replacing “Magic The Gathering Collection and Decklist Management” with “Code Review”. The code-review version of this post is a much bigger effort (and is more-or-less the post I had in mind when I started this blog), but it’s taking a while for me to get all my thoughts organized, so I’m writing this post instead.
This post also has a much bigger caveat on it than the code-review version: while both posts include a disclaimer of “I haven’t found the exact system that works for me”, I think the reason for that in the code-review case truly is “because nobody has gotten it right yet”, while the Magic-collection version is just “because I have a bizarrely-specific set of requirements and I haven’t found a site that checks every box.”
What Collection and Decklist Tracking Should Accomplish
Collection Display
Starting simple: I have a collection of Magic cards. Each of them is a specific printing and has some physical characteristics (foil, signed, etc). I want to have a searchable, sortable digital catalog of these cards. It should be able to “speak” the common import/export formats used by other Magic sites, and should be able to show pricing data for cards or groups of cards (though not necessarily constantly updating.)
It’d also be nice to have a “Set Completion” metric displayed for collection’s sake - what percentage of a set’s cards do I own at least one of? This is a feature that I’ve seen on a couple of “collector-focused” sites (and in Magic Arena!) but not anywhere else.
I’d also like to be able to specify where the cards are stored - which binder, which drawer or box, or which deck. This is one of the biggest separators that a lot of tools don’t offer - they don’t seem to be looking to account for the actual physical management of a collection.
The closest I’ve been able to find in this aspect is the app ManaBox - which also gets high marks for its very good camera-based card scanning. If ManaBox offered a web interface and not only an app, I might manage to make do with it, but doing literally everything from my phone isn’t the workflow I want to use.
Collection Updating
This section might be the most specifically targeted towards my particular use case, so it’s not a big surprise that no existing tool can do it - but if I’m going to make my own (which I’ve already started on), I might as well include it. For people who play a lot of limited Magic (or just crack a bunch of packs), keeping every card is a bit egregious. Instead, there are some criteria about price/collectibility/game-usefulness that should dictate which cards get kept and which get sold (either individually or as bulk.)
What I’d like to be able to do is to scan in a bunch of cards using ManaBox or the like and have my tool tell me which cards should be added to the collection (and add them to the digital version of said collection) and which cards should be set aside for sale.
Decklist Management
There are several very good decklist-builder sites available now - we’ve come a long way since the days of TappedOut and Deckstats. Moxfield (my current personal choice) and Archidekt are both very good modern sites for building and sharing decklists, and it’ll be hard to beat them at their own game. On the other hand, there’s one feature gap that feels massive to me, and it involves a distinction I’d like to draw between a “deck” and a “decklist”. In my completely-arbitrary terminology, a “deck” is a real physical (or digital, in the case of MTGO or MTGA) artifact, which specifies an exact set of card objects that could be bought and assembled, while a “decklist” is an abstract game concept that only includes game-relevant details like the card names and quantities, but ignores details like specific printings or foils. If you’re managing a real collection, you want to track decks, while if you’re theorizing or sharing lists, a decklist is totally sufficient.
The “killer app” feature that has motivated this entire search is the ability to take a decklist and “reify” it by specifying which printings were actually used - or, more importantly, to do so automatically by pulling from an existing collection. Put simply: let me brew up a new decklist, then click one button and tell me which cards I already own (and where they are), and which cards I need to purchase. I think there’s a major “missing overlap” here - sites that are good at decklist tracking don’t usually prioritize collection management, and the collector-focused sites don’t care about decklists at all.
There’s not a complete absence of functionality on this front - Moxfield does offer the ability to filter down to “cards you already own” when building a new deck, but it doesn’t handle the case where the goal is to build a new list exactly as intended, and then search to see which cards don’t need to be purchased.
I’m Actually Going To Build This one
I’ve written in the code-review post about the idea of a mothlamp problem - one that keeps popping back into your head year after year because it just hasn’t been solved yet. This collection tracker is my smallest-scale mothlamp, and I’m trying to actually do something about it. It’ll almost certainly only be aimed at myself and my personal collection, but who knows? Maybe it goes online somewhere as a portfolio piece, if nothing else.