Card Collections & Quantities

A card collection is a named subset of your cards with a quantity attached to each one. Starter set, expansion, promo pack, a specific playtest build: all are card collections. The collection rail is also home to boards, mats, tokens, dice and other component types, but this tutorial is specifically about the card workflow.

Cards can belong to several card collections at once. There's one shared card library; collections are views into it.

The collection rail

Along the bottom of the grid:

• All cards: the full library. Always first.
• One tab per card collection: Starter, Expansion pack, Expansion 2 in the example.
• + at the end (its tooltip reads New collection): opens the component catalog. Keep Cards for another card collection, or choose a different type to add a board, token set, die, and so on. A thin divider separates card collections from the other component types.

Click a collection to switch. The grid re-scopes to that collection's cards.

You can drag deck tabs left or right to change their order. The order is shared by the project, so put the deck you use most often near the front. When there are more tabs than fit, the rail scrolls sideways (a mouse wheel over it scrolls it too), and a faded edge shows there are more beyond it. On a phone the same rail sits at the bottom of the screen and tucks away while you scroll down the sheet.

What changes inside a card collection

Compare this with the All cards view and one thing jumps out: the DECKS column has been replaced by QTY.

That's the core of the card-collection model. In All cards you see which collections a card is in; inside a collection you see how many copies it wants. Row 1 above has a quantity of 3, so the Starter collection carries three copies of that card. Everything else is a single.

Quantity drives print runs. When you send a deck to Print & Ship or export a PDF print sheet, a card with QTY 3 is laid out three times. When you export from inside a deck, the export dialog has an Include deck quantities checkbox, on by default; untick it for one copy of each card.

Changing a quantity

Inside a card collection, click the number in QTY, type a value from 1 to 99, then press Enter or click away. Press Escape to cancel an edit. Quantity belongs to this collection only: changing a card from 1 to 3 here does not change how many copies it has in another collection.

To see the deck's total size, turn on View → Totals row: the QTY column's total is the number of copies in the deck. See Search, Sort, Filter & View.

To make the card absent from this collection rather than setting its quantity to zero, select it and click the trash button in the selection bar (Delete 1 card...). Inside a deck the dialog opens on Remove from deck, which takes it out of this deck only. The card and its data remain in All cards. You can also untick the deck in the card's DECKS cell on All cards. To empty a whole deck at once, open the deck and use File → Clear deck....

Adding a card to a deck

From the All cards view, click the DECKS cell on the card's row:

The picker is headed Add to decks. Tick every deck the card belongs to. The chips in the cell update immediately.

In bulk, select several rows, then use Add to Deck in the bulk action bar. Pick an existing deck, or New Deck... to open Create Deck with Selected Cards, name it and press Create (or Enter). See Working With Cards.

Straight into a deck: inside a deck tab, Add card at the bottom of the sheet creates a new card that is already in that deck.

An empty deck opens on Starter is empty. Add Card to Deck creates a new card in it, and, once the project has cards, Browse All Cards takes you to All cards to pick existing ones.

Creating a deck

Click the + at the end of the deck tabs. The dialog opens on What are you making? with Cards already chosen:

1. Check the card size. It is what Print & Ship orders against, and you can change it later in the deck's details.
2. Name the deck. ShuffleKit suggests Starter Deck, or Starter Deck 2 and so on when that name is taken.
3. If the project already has cards, a checkbox reads Add all N cards to this deck. Tick it to start with everything and remove what you don't need; leave it off and the deck starts empty.
4. Click Create. If the project has no card layout at that size yet, you get a Next step first to pick the design the new cards open on.

Renaming, describing and deleting

Right-click (or Ctrl-click) a deck tab, or hover it and click the small arrow beside its name:

• Rename renames inline on the tab. Double-clicking the tab does the same. Press Enter or click away to keep the name, Esc to cancel.
• Deck details… opens the full editor (below).
• Status: Draft / Active / Archived, the same three states as cards. The current one shows beside the item.
• Change type… opens the deck's details at the type section, for turning a card collection into another component type such as a board.
• Delete deck removes the deck, after a confirmation that it can't be undone. The cards survive: they stay in the library and in any other decks. Only the grouping and its quantities are lost.

Deck details

Two tabs:

Details holds the deck's Name and Status, its Size (changing it never resizes an existing layout), Change type, and an optional Description, plus a read-only contents list of the deck's cards with their quantities. The count in the heading (Cards (19)) is the number of distinct cards, not total copies.

Use the description field. Six months into a project, "Starter" alone won't remind you it was the 2-player intro set with no expansion mechanics.

Name and description save when you leave the field (or press Enter in the name); status and size save as soon as you pick them.

History shows the deck's version history: Save snapshot, Filter, and Restore this version, as described in Notes & Version History.

Delete deck sits at the bottom of the dialog as well as in the context menu.

Deck status

Deck status mirrors card status:

• Draft: in progress. The default for a new deck.
• Active: the current shipping version.
• Archived: kept for reference, out of the way.

Setting a deck to Archived doesn't archive its cards. An archived deck's tab is dimmed in the rail.

A workflow that scales

1. Keep All cards as the single library. Every card you've ever written lives here.
2. Make one deck per product: core set, each expansion, promo cards.
3. Make throwaway decks per playtest build (Playtest 2026-03) so you can reproduce exactly what was on the table when feedback came in.
4. Archive playtest decks once you've mined their Notes.

Because cards can sit in many decks, this costs you nothing in duplication.