If you are designing a card game, the phone is the wrong tool for the part where you are typing card text. The Deck Builder web app now takes a deck all the way from empty to playable in the browser: create it, fill it with cards, then shuffle and draw from it with a real keyboard in front of you.
Here is the whole flow.
1. Open the web app
Go to app.deckbuilderapp.app. There is nothing to install and no account needed to start. Your decks are stored in that browser, on your machine.
2. Create a deck
Choose to create a local deck, give it a name and, if you like, a description. It appears as a chip you can open, and you can rename or delete it later from inside the deck.
You can keep up to three local decks in the browser for free, which mirrors the free tier in the Android app. Pro lifts that cap here just as it does on the phone, and it is the same entitlement either way: buy it in the browser and it applies on Android, or bring the Pro you already own across by signing in.
3. Add your cards
Open the deck and you land on its own screen with a card grid. Add card opens a dialog for the card’s details, and you can add as many cards as your deck needs.
A few things worth knowing while you fill a deck in:
- Editing prefills. Opening an existing card loads its current values, so fixing a typo is a two-second job rather than a retype.
- Removing asks first. Removal is behind a confirmation, so a misclick in a grid of similar-looking cards does not quietly delete a card.
- Card art comes from a URL. Point a card at an image on the web and it renders in the grid. Only
httpandhttpslinks are accepted. Cards without an image get a clean placeholder instead, so a half-finished deck still looks readable. - Your cards persist. Close the tab, come back later, and the deck and its cards are still there with the right counts.
4. Shuffle it and play
Once the deck has cards, take it into the simulation: shuffle it, draw from it, and work through it to an empty pile, exactly as the app does on a phone. This is the point of the whole flow. A deck you typed at your desk is immediately a deck you can playtest.
Who this is for
Mostly two groups:
- Print-and-play designers. This was the most consistent request from the print-and-play community: build and playtest a deck at a desk, on a real keyboard, then take it to the table. Drafting 60 cards of rules text is simply faster when you are not thumb-typing.
- Anyone without the app to hand. A borrowed laptop, a work machine, a Chromebook. Open a browser, build a deck, shuffle it.
If you are new to designing a deck at all, making your own card game walks through the design side, and exporting print-ready cards covers getting a finished deck onto cardstock.
Does it sync with the Android app?
Yes, if you are signed in with Pro. Decks, cards and collections merge both ways against your account, so a deck typed on a laptop opens on the phone and an edit made on the phone comes back to the browser. Where the same deck changed in both places, the most recent edit wins, and deletions travel too rather than quietly reappearing. There is a Sync now button in Settings when you want it immediately.
Current limits, stated plainly
- Camera scanning stays on the phone. Scanning physical cards, and the Magic card scanner, run on-device machine learning that has no browser equivalent. A deck built from photographed cards still starts on Android.
- Import mapping is automatic, not manual. The browser importer auto-maps CSV columns and tells you which headers it could not place, where Android lets you map them by hand.
- Uploaded art is downscaled. Images added in the browser are re-encoded to WebP at up to 720px. Android keeps the original resolution.
- Storage is local until you sync. Decks live in your browser, so clearing site data removes anything not yet synced. Signed in with Pro and sync on, they are mirrored to your account and come back after a fresh sign-in.
Try it
Open app.deckbuilderapp.app and build something. If a step feels clumsy or you hit a wall, say so in the Discord: the browser version is being built out one piece at a time and that feedback is what picks the next piece. You can also read about building a custom deck from scratch, or back the work on Patreon.
