When you're building a deck, putting cards into a deck builder is only the beginning.
You need to figure out whether the ideas actually work, understand what you've built, test it in practice, and often work through those ideas with other people.
Over the last few releases, I've been adding tools to DCG Nexus to help with exactly that.
There are now three new tools available in the Deck Builder: Deck Playtest, Fingerprints for decks that haven't yet seen tournament play, and Collaborative Decks.
Deck Playtest
The first of these is Deck Playtest.
Playtest is a virtual tabletop built directly into Nexus. It gives you a place to take a deck you've built and actually play through it yourself.
There isn't an AI opponent or a rules engine making decisions for you. You control the cards and the board yourself.
That means you can draw opening hands, move cards between zones, build stacks, suspend Digimon, check your memory sequences and work through interactions manually.
For me, that's particularly useful because I learn a lot better when I can physically see something happening rather than just reading through a list of cards.
It also makes it easier to answer some fairly basic questions about a deck:
Does this opening hand actually do what I want?
Am I seeing the cards I need often enough?
Does this package actually work together?
What happens if I don't see my key card?
The other part of Playtest is the opponent Security tracker.
You can select an archetype and Nexus will load the Security from a real recent tournament deck from that archetype. The cards are randomised, but they're based on an actual competitive list rather than an entirely arbitrary Security stack.
It isn't trying to simulate a full opponent. It's simply another way to make your testing a little closer to what you might actually encounter in a game.
Playtest is currently desktop-first, with mobile improvements planned for later.
Fingerprints for Decks Before Tournament Play
Nexus already has Fingerprints for decks that have appeared in tournaments.
Now, you can also get a Fingerprint for a deck before it has ever been submitted to an event.
These Fingerprints look at the deck itself rather than its tournament history.
You'll be able to see things like:
- Colour distribution
- Level distribution
- Play costs
- Average level and play cost
- How unique the deck is
- The closest tournament builds in the Nexus database
The important distinction is that this isn't trying to tell you whether the deck is good or bad.
It's about giving you a better understanding of what you've actually built.
You might have an idea of what a deck is supposed to be doing, but seeing its composition laid out can sometimes show you something you hadn't noticed.
The closest-build comparison is particularly useful here. Nexus can compare your current list against the tournament deck database and show you the builds it most closely resembles.
Once the deck eventually appears in a tournament, it can then receive the full tournament Fingerprint, which adds the additional context that comes from seeing the deck in competitive play.
Collaborative Decks
Deckbuilding also isn't always something you do alone.
A lot of testing happens in groups. One person wants to try a different package, someone else wants to change the ratios, and eventually you end up with several different versions of essentially the same idea.
Collaborative Decks is designed around that.
You can invite other Nexus users to contribute to a deck and give them their own branches to work on.
For example, you might have a Shared deck and then create branches for:
- Aggro testing
- Control testing
- A different engine
- Alternative ratios
Each person can work on their own version without immediately changing the main deck.
When you're ready, changes can be brought back into the Shared deck.
Nexus handles this with a three-way merge system. Changes that don't conflict can be combined automatically, while changes to the same card in different ways are flagged for you to resolve.
You can then choose which version to keep or set your own quantity.
There's also an Update from Shared option, so a branch can pull the latest Shared version back into its own work.
For groups that want more control, Shared can also be protected with merge approvals and restrictions on direct edits.
The aim isn't to make deckbuilding feel like software development. It's simply a way of giving groups a proper place to work on a deck together without everyone having to pass around copies of a decklist.
And the History?
Nexus already had version history for Saved Decks, and Collaborative Decks builds on top of that.
Instead of only being able to look back at previous saves, you can now see how the different branches of a deck developed and where they eventually came back together.
The history view gives you a visual representation of that process, including branches, saves and merges.
So if you come back to a deck later, you aren't just looking at the current 50 cards. You can see how the different ideas that went into it got there.
Putting It Together
These tools are all solving different parts of the same problem.
Playtest lets you actually use the deck.
Fingerprints let you understand what you've built.
Collaborative Decks let you work on it with other people.
And History keeps a record of what happened along the way.
None of these tools are intended to build the deck for you or tell you what the correct list is.
They're there to give you more information and more ways to work with the deck while you're figuring it out.
And eventually, when that deck does make it to a tournament, Nexus can add the competitive data and full Fingerprint on top of everything that came before it.
The decklist you submit is the end result, but there's a lot that happens before you get there. Nexus should be useful for that part too.