Decked Builder

I’ve been using this app since probably around 2013, it was one of the first and one of the only apps I’ve paid money for. Used to be the best option for deck building and collection management. A recent update to the entire interface has soured several features that were much more important than the improved design aesthetics. Card search for specific versions of cards requires making the search, clicking on a card, selecting a drop-down menu only available within the view screen of one card to view multiple versions, which must be followed up with backing out of that card view to now see multiple versions of the cards. That’s three steps more than it should take, and must be repeated for each card you search. The card search functionality in general is nonintuitive and buggy. Hopefully these issues will be fixed in the future, but the current state of the app is a classic story of a new front+backend rolled out to look nicer but without proper design choices for ease of use, much less sufficient testing for bugs on the basic functionality of the app.

I’ve used this app on my phone and computer for years. It was solid for a long time. Would have been 5 stars. Then the app on my phone would crash a lot for a good 6 months (a year or 2 ago). Once that was fixed, the app started having issues fetching my collection and decks from Dropbox/Google Drive. It was never a problem before, but then it started happening for the last year. Instead of it automatically loading my collection and deck upon first opening the app, I have to manually open them a few times. Rather annoying because if I close out the app, even for a few seconds, I’ll have to reopen all the files a few times to get it to work. I’ve reached out multiple times and the questions I always get are “does it work when you save locally?” It does, but I use online storage managers so I can access these files on my computer and phone easily. I’d have to constantly sync these files with one other if I saved everything locally each time I updated one. Used to be a great app, but over the years it has slowed down into something lesser. I still recommend it if you are just going to use it on your phone. But if you plan on using it across multiple devices, you might find issues with the online storage option.