So rather than provide a typical strategy article, I plan to take this opportunity to share a resource that I use for building and tracking my cards and decks.  The article, however, will not be devoid of all strategic content as a discussion of a black and red control deck will be included at the bottom of the article.

Like many other players, my time online is limited and I prefer to spend that time playing.  As such, I prefer to design and refine my decks offline. This allows me to spend as little time online buying cards from bots and using the inefficient deck editor as possible and reserving the majority of my online time playing games.

In order to develop decks offline, I needed the ability to access a database of cards and to accurately access which cards were legal for my formats of choice: Classic Tribal Wars and Pauper.  Neither of these formats was particularly easy to access for card legality through the Gatherer when I started Magic: The Gathering Online.  At the time, Pauper was not an official format and Gatherer is not particularly user friendly in trying to filter for common cards in the Classic environment (for example, cards will show up that are in Classic and common in a paper set printing, but not common Online).  The Gatherer also had holes in its Classic filter that excluded the Ice Age cards reprinted in the Coldsnap starter decks (Bounty of the Hunt and Giant Trap Door Spider for instance).

As Swords to Plowshares is a relevant card in most formats in which it is legal, I wanted a more complete and accurate database.  Thus began the creation of a comprehensive Excel spreadsheet including all cards available online.  I would now like to share that database with the readers of puremtgo.com as well as an introduction to how to maximize searching and filtering the database and capturing the decks you create.  I hope you enjoy it and look forward to any comments or suggestions for improvement.  If readers are interested I will post updates for the spreadsheet when new sets are released.  As of the time this article was written, the db is updated with both Worldwake and Urza's Saga.
 

So if you are interested, you can download the Excel spreadsheet from here.  The file is rather large (6 MB zipped, 27 MB unzipped).

When you open the file, you will see an Excel spreadsheet with seventabs: db, Std, Ext, Classic, Pauper, inv, and Slivers.  Here is a screenshot with the db tag open:

The db tab provides a database of the current card pool available online.  Here are what each column provides:

• # - this column reads from the inv tab to indicate how many copies of this card are in your collection
• Card Name - the name of the card
• Cost - the printed cost of the card
• CMC - the converted mana cost of the card except that any spell with an X in the casting cost is listed as X (not as if x were); split cards have 2 converted mana costs listed
• Color - the color of the card based on the casting cost (note Ghostfire shows up as red and Transguild Courier shows up as blank (i.e., colorless)).  Colors include White, Blue, Black, Red, Green, colorless (field blank), Hybrid: colorA/colorB, Gold: colorA, colorB, colorC, and Split: colorA, colorB -or- Gold 
• Super Type - this field is derived from the printed type line and includes modifiers to the card type such as Legendary, Snow, Basic, and Tribal (yes, Tribal is a card type, but in this database is shows up as a Super Type)
• Type - this field indicates the card's type as Artifact, Land, Creature, Planeswalker, Enchantment, Sorcery, Instant, or a combination of these types
• Sub-Type - this field indicates the card's sub-types such as tribal types (i.e., creature race and class such as goblin, wizard, rogue), planeswalker types (e.g. Ajani, Jace), enchantment types (e.g., aura), and artifact types (e.g., equipment)
• P/T - this field provides the card's power and toughness for creatures and loyalty for planeswalkers
• Text - provides the rules text contained in the text box of the card
• S - this column reads from the Std tab and includes an "S" for each card that is currently legal in Standard and this field is blank for all other cards 
• E - this column reads from the Ext tab and includes an "E" for each card that is currently legal in Extended and this field is blank for all other cards 
• C - this column reads from the Classictab and includes an "C" for each card that is currently legal in Classic and this field is blank for all other cards
• P - this column reads from the Pauper tab and includes an "P" for each card that is currently legal in Pauper and this field is blank for all other cards

Every time a new set is released, I update the db.  For building decks, the autofilter feature of Excel provides a powerful means of search the db for cards.  What follows is a brief guide for using the spreadsheet based on the lessons I have learned in using/growing it over the past two years.

Each box with a downward facing triangle on row 1 is an auto-filter icon.  By clicking on the icon, a drop down menu is shown which lists the first 1000 choices (alphabetized) for that column as well as All, Top 10, Blanks, and NonBlanks.  Ignore the Top 10 option as it does not have an effect in most columns.  In most columns, Blanks and NonBlanks will have little effect, but there are a few cases where these fields can be useful (for instance if you select Sorcery for Type and then Blanks for Cost, you will see a cycle of sorceries that can only be cast via Suspend such as Ancestral Vision).

I will get back to how filtering multiple columns in a bit.  Most of the time, I recommend choosing custom as it is the easiest option to choose to fit your needs.  When selecting the Custom Filter option, a pop-up window will come up.  It will allow you to request two filters for that column, including:

• Equals (nearly the same as selecting one of the drop down choices instead of choosing custom)
• Does Not Equal
• Is Greater Than
• Is Greater Than Or Equal To
• Is Less Than
• Is Less Than Or Equal To
• Begins With
• Does Not Begin With
• Ends With
• Does Not End With
• Contains
• Does Not Contain

Most of these options do exactly that they say, but this screen allows you to use wildcards (? for one character and * for any number of characters) which can let you use equals in different ways than the auto-filter drop down menu.  Contains is the most useful of these options, but the greater than and less than options are very useful the CMC column (excluding the costs of the Split cards.  With the ability to define two filters you can create searches like (Contains 'Flashback' -and- Contains 'Retrace') if you are looking for a card that can be played from your graveyard.  I often use a filter for enters the battlefield, but this db grew over time so it still includes earlier terminology, so the filter criteria is (Contains 'comes into play' -or- Contains 'enters the battlefield').

When you filter one column, it impacts the filter options displayed for the other columns which can help streamline your requests to narrow your search for the perfect card for your deck.

So, if you used a custom search to filter for Sub-Type to contain 'ape', you would get an output that listed all apes, but this filter would also include all shapeshifters and shellshapers.  However, selecting just Ape from the drop down menu would exclude Gorilla Shaman who is an Ape Shaman and thus his Sub-Type is not equal to Ape.

By updating your custom filter to (Contains ape -and- Does Not Contain shape), the list of cards provided would include only apes.

From this point, you can use other columns to further tune your search so that you are looking through the narrowest subset of cards that might fit your need.  For instance, if you are working on a mono-green Ape tribal deck, you could click on the autofilter icon for Color and see that all apes are red or green.  Selecting green here will reduce the cards displayed on only green Apes. 

When building decks, I tend to think in terms of which cards can be cast based on the mana sources in my deck and not what color they are.  In short, in many decks hybrid cards are just a relevant as single color cards.  If your goal is to filter for all cards that can be cast with a single color of mana, a custom search can let you see both monocolor cards and hybrid cards that can be cast with a single color of mana.  For example, using the following filter would be useful in building a mono-blue deck:(Equals 'blue' -or- Contains 'i?:*blue').  The last search field might seem odd, but it allows the filter to identify both Hybrid and Split cards that can be cast with only blue mana.  To search for artifacts requiring only colorless mana, can choose (Blanks) at the bottom of the drop-down menu for Color and a custom filter of (Contains 'artifact') for the Type filter.

This spreadsheet includes format filters for standard, extended, classic, and pauper.  So the last four columns S, E, C, and P can be used to help limit the cards displayed to ensure that they are relevant for the format you are building.  When I was working on my Armory of the Righteous deck (a deck based on creatures that gained bonuses while equipped), I set the type to (Contains 'creature'), text to (Contains 'equip'), and selected P from the drop down menu of the P column.  That provided a list of cards that became the starting point for my deck.

With the resurgence of the Nightsky Mimic deck in pauper, there are times when it is desirable to find gold and hybrid cards that share a color.  For those cases, I use the Color tab to set a custom filter for (Equals 'Hybrid: White, Black' -or- Equals 'Gold: Black, White').  That let's me get all of the gold cards that are both black and white.  This works very well for all cards except the Hybrid: Gold cards from Alara Reborn and the Split cards with .

Any time you set up a filter, if there are cards displayed that you know you don't want to consider, you can highlight that line and right-click with the mouse and select hide.  There are a ton of options for searching the db to find a group of cards that will fit the need of your deck on this sheet.

Of the remaining sixtabs, five of them are used by the db tab - Std, Ext, Classic, Pauper, and inv.

The Std, Ext, Classic, and Pauper tabs will be updated with each release of the spreadsheet and you do not need to edit them.  The inv tab is the final tab that is used by the db tab and its use is completely optional.  This tab can be used to incorporate an inventory of your MTGO cards into the spreadsheet.

To populate the inv tab with your collection:

1. Bring up MTGO and go to deck editor. 
2. From the drop down menu, choose All Cards (Online).
3. Unclick the My Cards check box.
4. Unclick the Show All Versions check box.
5. Change the view for your Card Pool to table form.
6. Ensure that the deck and sideboard areas are empty.
   
   
   
    
7. In the Card Pool area, use your right mouse button to select all.
8. In the Card Pool area, use your right mouse button to export to .csv.
9. Open the .csv file and select columns A and B and then select Sort... from the Data drop down menu.  Ensure the Header Row radio button is selected, then choose Card Name for the top sort by filter with the Ascending radio button selected, and press OK.
   
   
   
    
10. Highlight columns A and B and copy them.
11. Open mtgo.xls and select the inv tab.  Select cell A1 and paste.

That sets up your inventory which will be pulled into the database and your decks.

If you ever change anything in the spreadsheet, and you do not see a ripple effect of changes (such as changing the inv tab contents, but not seeing the db sheet update), press F9 to force a new calculation.  This should fix the issue.

Now onto the last tab which is for creating, editing, and archiving decklists.  I assume most of you will want to track multiple decks and this is easy to accomplish.  Simply right mouse click on the last tab (currently titled slivers) and choose Move or Copy.  In the pop-up window click the box next to Create a copy, highlight (move to end) in the menu, and click OK.  This will make a copy of the deck tab (a new tab labeled Slivers (2) will be displayed).  Double click the new tab and you can rename the tab so that it is named appropriately for your deck.

Here is what the decks look like:

There are only three columns you ever need impact on this sheet: Deck, Side, and Card Name.  Everything else is auto-populated and calculated.  Deck is the number of copies of that card in your deck.  Side is the number of copes of that card in your sideboard.  Card Name is self explanatory.  All of the fields for that card are then pulled in from the db tab and the charts and graphics at the top of the page are calculated.

If you need more lines for because your deck includes more unique cards than the example Sliver deck provided in the file, copy any number of the entire lines currently holding card info (e.g., lines 13 through 31) cards in the deck list and paste them above the solid gray line (but not above the first line of the deck, line 13 which is currently Forest).

You will notice in this deck that the entry for Raise the Alarm is highlighted in an unpleasant shade of orange.  This indicates that I own fewer copies of the card than needed by the deck.

The stats and graph at the top of the page will be automatically updated.  If it is not, F9 (the function key in excel for forcing a calculation now) should resolve the issue.

I hope you enjoy this tool and I look forward to any comments or suggestions for improvements.

Good luck and enjoy the game.