About the Elemental cards idea: It could be restricted to the types of cards, to prevent turning a Nova into a Discord. So for Death, it would look like this:
Death - Pillars/Pendulums
Death - Permanent
Death - Creatures
Death - Spells
So you divide the cards into the four types, which would restrict things while keeping much of the freedom. This would also solve the conversion problem.
I don't think that's a good idea. Adding unnecessary complexity should be avoided. I wouldn't dare to imagine the human errors that could happened due to this.
The purist in me will protest (ever so slightly) that freely distributing these tools to every team takes away the advantage from the players (and their teams) who possess the skills and ingenuity of designing spreadsheets (or other tools) which make the card-accounting tasks more accurate. On the other hand, I think most would agree that card losses are preferable on the battlefield as opposed to on the ledger books.
Sounds fine to me.
I never saw the deckcheck spreadsheet as much of an advantage. I'd assume most, if not all, teams had their own versions running. That one is just dealing with the accounting, some teams have other tools for advantages. Handing that out would partially fix one of the disadvantages team underworld faces as well. By the time UW enters the war, teams already have their tools built and in place, whereas UW just formed their team. Handing them some basic starter tools is probably a good idea.
This is just my personal opinion; your statement above, Skydaemon (esp. the highlighted part); has put an impression to me that if tools were given to every team, people like myself (who sux at PvP, deckbuilding, testing and everything else) has no asset left to secure a place in the war bidding (that is assuming there're other people as worthless as myself >.<). Aside being selfish, I do agree that "card losses are preferable on the battlefield as opposed to on the ledger books". So, I guess I need to stop being selfish.
...snip...
//edit - Come to think of it, you could embed the spreadsheet directly into the round deck and salvage threads if someone had permission on the teams. If the SS's were owned by a warmaster, they could disable editing at the cutoff time.
I don't think that's a good idea. Enabling editing could open up the possibility for an exploit of previous rounds' data or even messing up the formulas. Also, I believe only SG is able to embed stuff on a thread. IMO, too much unnecessary work.
....snip...
Well, I'm working on a spreadsheet now that will automatically update the vault after the salvager (or another team member of course) puts in the codes for the right cards.
First screeny:
The warmasters (of which I might be one next war) will be able to use that same spreadsheet to check the decks and the salvagings and discardings
Based on the screen shot, I assume that you need to have at least 10~11 premade tabs with the same content (SPDC input). Then, I think you will have one dedicated tab to compile all the data from those 10~11 tabs to produce a result in another tab, which is the vault itself. So, basically, despite having one "vault tab" for each round, you will have one "SPDC tab" for each round; and only 1 "vault tab". Am I right so far?
Anyways, my point is I hope this new vault stuff will be able to record vault history, same as what we currently have; at least is one way or the other. On a surface, I don't think what's you're working on have an efficient way of keeping the history. Though I'm no expert in auditing stuff, but I would imagine to do it properly, you need to have an easy access of data history - the easier to tell the origin of the cards, the better it is for audit.
Few words of advice - need lots and lots of foolproof instances in that spreadsheet. Naming a few: user input tab shouldn't have formulas (googlesh*t can't lock individual cell), mark-code friendly, avoid macros (I don't think it's needed), use variables instead of definite numbers because some might change due to event cards and lastly pray that people won't mess it up.
