Introduction

This document contains an overview of the features of the Star Chamber Deck Viewer utility program. 

Collection Viewer

• List the contents of your collection
  
• Write the contents of the collection in each of the following formats
• Space separated text
• Comma separated text
• Tab separated text
• Excel sheet.

• Show the following information about each card
• Number
• Name
• Collection (Origins, Incursions, etc)
• Tech required
• Card Value (retail prices loaded from prices.txt file)
• Card Rarity

• Abitity to calculate Retail and Wholesale value of your collection, and retail value of any deck.
• Filter cards by rarity
• Filter cards by tech type
  
• Click on a column header to sort.

Deck Viewer

• Show total cards, total tech, and retail value of any deck.
• Show same information about each card as in Collection Viewer.
  
• Abitity to show odds of drawing each card in a deck.
• Show odds of drawing any native one or two tech card.
• Can refresh deck so any deck created in Star Chamber client can be easily analyzed.
• Click on a column header to sort.
• Select any set of cards with a check mark to compute the odds of drawing a card from that set.
• Compute odds of drawing 1, 2 or more of any set of cards. Want to know the odds of having cards to play on each of the first 3 turns of the game?  DeckViewer can show you.
• Real Hierarchial deck list support, choose a directory and show only the decks in tha directory.

Trade Viewer

• Manage a trade list, loads your trade card wants from your collection and will regenerate a new trade list each time your collection changes.
• Each card can be given a trade priority, and you can sort by this priority.
• Cards can be give a "none" priority causing them to not show up in any trade list.
• Copy Current trade and want lists in short form suitable for pasting into SC chat window.
• Click the "Number" button to add the number of cards you have/want to the windows cut buffer.
• Write long form trade list to text file suitable for posting to the Markeplace forum.
• Click on column header to sort.
• Click on a card to show that card to left of collection listing, click on card to dismiss

How do I get a copy?

Collection Viewer

The collection viewer can be used to examine and dump to a human readable file all the cards in your collection.  The output of the text dump will contain exactly the same columns as you see in the preview window shown here.



The check boxes to the right of the card list can be used to add or remove card by their Rarity, collection, or tech used.  To show all cards that use from 3 to 5 order set the values next to the order tech to 3 and 5.  To remove all order tech cards from the list just uncheck the order box.  The "show all cards" check box will enable even those cards not currently in your collection to be added to the list. 

A price filter has been added as well. The price filter is never enabled by default, to enable it click the checkbox next to the price filter.



Each of the columns of card information, other than card name, can be removed by toggling the entries in the select columns menu.  The value displayed for each card is the value of a single card, Common cards have a hard coded value of  zero. 

In the lower left hand corner of the Collection Viewer you will see a computation of the wholesale and retail value of the cards currently listed in the collection viewer calculated by using a price list automatically dowloaded from scfans. This price is the total value of all cards currently shown in the collection viewer, if you want the value of every card in your collection, be sure to select all cards by checking all the items in the various filters.  Note, common cards are harded coded to have no value, due to commons pool.

Click on the Write Collection Button to write your collection file in the current output format to the output directory.

Click on the Refresh Button to reload your collection from disk.

Deck Viewer

The deck viewer will show you detailed information about each deck you have created.  The deck viewer will not let you create or modify your decks, but it will show you additional information about your decks that the Star Chamber Collection Manager won't.



On the top left is a list of directories that you have that contain decks.  Select one to show the decks in that directory.  Below this is a list of all the decks you have created in that directory, clicking on a deck in this list will show its contents in the table on the right side of the deck viewer.   The columns show here are the same as in the collection viewer, and can also be changed via the "Selected Columns" menu item.

Along the top of the deck is the same information shown in the Star Chamber Collection Manager, the number of cards in the deck, as well as the maximum of each kind of tech the deck uses as well as the total amount of tech needed to use all the cards in the deck.  The retail value of  the deck is also shown here.  This top display can be toggled off with the "Show Deck Totals" toggle button.

The buttons along the bottom allow you to either write the currently selected deck to disk, or to publish it to the Trade Database. Decks written to disk are placed in the output directory in the currently selected output format. In addition you can reload all your decks.  This is handy if you are building a new deck.  Simply build the deck in the Star Chamber Collection Manager, save it, and then click the Refresh button in the Deck Viewer to view your newly created deck.

When you publish a deck to the Trade Database you can then go to your personal page by logging in and clicking on the "'s Personal Page" link. You can then add a discussion about this deck, change its name, and make it public. Public decks may show up on the main page of the trade database, as well as the card page for any cards that are in that deck. You can send the hyperlink for any published deck to allow anyone else to see your published deck.
One of the most interesting features of the Deck Viewer is its ability to calculate the odds that you will draw each card in your deck after a settable number of draws from this deck.  You start each game with 6 draws, so by default Deck Viewer shows you the odds of drawing each card at the start of the game.  You can edit this value to see the odds of drawing a card after 18 draws (normal turn 12) or whatever interests you.

You can also do complicateds odds calculations.  For example what are the odds of being able to play a card each of the first 3 turns?  You will need 3+ cards after 8 draws that are of "1-2 Tech", just set the values of "3" and "8" and then look at the line that corrosponds to the "Native 1-2 Tech Cards", for this deck you will see the odds are 17%, not good, less that one hand in 5 will we be able to play 3 cards in the first 3 turns without capturing an artifact world, bummer



But wait, this is a splash deck that conains labs, we can play our lab cards in those first 3 turns.  In that case let's use the "checked cards" line to do a more complex calculation.  Here we'll want to check the "Native 1-2 tech cards", and the cyber labs that are contained in this deck.  We see that the odds of drawning 3 of the checked cards after 8 draws is 54.8%, that's considerably better than 17%, but not very good.  When designing my decks I like to see these numbers well into 85%+.

Trade Viewer

Trade Viewer allows you to create, view, edit, and print your trade list.



Trade Viewer shows you a list of each card in the game, you can work on a subset of cards by using the rarity filters just as in the collection manager, or the Trade Filters at the bottom of the window.

In addition to the columns in the collection viewer, several new colums have been added.

Desire

This is a hint to Trade Viewer about how much you want any given card.  You can click on a desire value to change it.  Value is one of  Low, Med, or High, or None. Cards at priority None will not show up in any trade list, including the Web Trade DB reguardless of how many of that card you have to trade or need. Setting the desire will affect how cards are displayed in the Trade Database.

Want

This tells the trade viewer how many of each card you want to have.  This value is loaded with your collection and cannot be modified in deckviewer, to change your want values you must go into the man StarChamber Collection Manager, log in, go to the graphical view and use the up and down arrow buttons to change your wants. Once you have saved your changes click the "Refresh" button to load the new values into deck viewer.

Trade

This value is calculated from the number of cards you have and your want value for each card. This is the number of this card available for trading.

Need

This value is calculated from the number of cards you have and your want value for each card. This is the number of this card you are looking to aquire through trades.

The Desire values are saved to disk when the application exits, so you should only have to set them once.  Each time your collection changes Trade Viewer will automatically compute new values for Trade and Need for each card.  By simply starting up Trade Viewer you can easily generate an up to date trade list each time your collection changes.  Let deck viewer do the work of generating your trade list.

Using Trade Viewer for easy Mezzanine Trades

The two special buttons in the lower left corner of the trade viewer allow you to copy both your needs and your cards available for trade to the windows clip board for easy pasting into the Star Chamber client window.  Here is how you do this.

1. Select the cards you want to trade by filtering the trade list by rarity.  If you are only trading uncommons today then turn off all but uncommons.
2. Start of your Star Chamber client and go to the Mezzanine.
3. Decide to include the number of each card you have/need with the Numbers button.
   
4. Click the Copy Needs button.  Your needs are now placed in the windows clip board.
5. Click in the chat window in the Star Chamber client where you normally type text.  But instead of typing out your trade list type <Ctrl>-v (hold down the control key and type the letter v).  You should See something like this: "W: Bar Shld, P Cannon, Vet Crew, B Rays, Empathy, Fld Eng, Inf Drv, U Platng, X Missile" pasted in the window.  Now hit <enter> to send the text to the Mezz.
6. Now click the Copy Trades button, and <Ctrl>-v in the Chat window to send your trades.
7. You have now listed your most desired cards for easy Mezz trading.

This is where specifying a desire is critical.  The chat window in Star Chamber has a very limited amount of text you can send.  Deck viewer will walk the cards from first to last in the Trade Viewer searching for all the High desire cards available that you need.  If there is room it will continue on to the Med desire cards, and finnally onto the Low desire cards.  By tellling Trade Viewer which cards you desire the most it can make sure to always put have those cards you want most first in the list. 

If there are too many cards to fit in the chat window, the you will see a number such as "Trades (1)", clicking on this button a second time will put the next set of cards onto the PC clipboard.  In this fashion you can cycle through your entire trade list.

Using Trade Viewer for Forum Trades

The Write Trade List button will create a file in the current output format in the output directory called TradeList.  This file will contain a list of all your trade needs as well as your cards available for trade.  This file can then be posted to a forum and you are ready to trade.

Changing Collections

Deckviewer is able to manage all your collections, if you have multiple accounts, or help manage commons pool Deck Viewer will let you choose which collection to view. By default it will pick the first account it finds. If you want to change the account select the Other Settings/Change User Settings menu item to enable the user settings panel as show below.



From here you can change you output directory, or the collection that DeckViewer is currently showing.  As with most settings DeckViewer will remember this setting the next time you start it and use the last collection you were viewing.

Getting a copy of the Star Chamber Deck Viewer

This application represents several nights and evenings of work, and I believe it provides many useful features to allow Star Chamber players to more easily manage their card collections.  World's Apart will not allow me to sell the program so I have decided to give it away and ask for donations. Hopefully these donations will be sufficient to allow me to continue supporting the program. If I can increase my card collection by providing these useful tools to the community then I will continue to do so, if it doesn't work out that's fine.  I'll simply stop taking the time necessary to make them available for external consumption.

Download Deckviewer now.

Support is only $6 for 6 months or $11 for a year, and gives you access to extra stuff.