Help Topic: Tagging Decks

What are Tags?

Contributed by Squire1

Tags are keywords that help other tappedouters to see a quick preview of what your deck is all about before the decide to click on it and check it out. The idea is that people can gain a quick glimpse of what your deck offers other player so that they can gain new ideas and perspectives on deck building and have an idea of what the deck builder was going for as to make their comments and critiques more meaningful to the deck builder.

As seen in the sample below, members are limited to the view of a deck concept before clicking on it. You can see the title, pie chart, tags and some stats. The title often gives some hints to the deck contents (i.e., If it says blah, blah, blah, vamps in the title, it probably has a good deal of vampires). The pie chart helps to show what color(s) the deck is working with. The tags however, can add to these things. The tags can help add to what a viewer knows. By looking at the example, the title and pie chart only show that it is some mono-blue deck. I would then not need to have a tag that says mono-blue as it would be redundant. The tags that I did place explain what perspective I took in building this mono-blue deck. It is identified as a combo deck that is centered around a mechanic, that mechanic is affinity. Clear concise and informative as tags should be.

sample

Vintage squire1

551 VIEWS

Why do/should we use tags?

The reasons why we do/should use tags are similar to those stated above. It is a way of being helpful and descriptive. We are all posting decks to get other players insights about how the decks will work from the rest of the community. For this to happen, other players need to be enticed to take a look at them. Some players may check all of them out to see what people are thinking, other people want to look at decks that will help them build specific types of decks.

If a deck is tagged correctly, it can be a valuable tool to those players who are looking for specific things or have an expertise in a certain paradigm or mechanic and are trying to focus their comments to help players that utilize that area paradigm or mechanic. So tags are put in place to make similar decks searchable. If I want to understand varying perspective on control decks all that I have to do is click on the control tag on a number of decks and I will get a list of only decks that have the tag control. As said previously, it is also important for players who are trying to help others with their comments. If I know ahead of time that I am looking at a combo deck rather than an agro deck I would comment differently based on that (this distinction is not always as clear as you may think by looking at some deck lists). So after looking at the ways in which tags can be helpful, we must inevitably discuss topics related to what can make them not helpful at all. I have narrowed these topics to 3 main issues: tag clutter, tag disorder, and lack of social norms related to tagging.

Clutter

Cluttering up tags is the most common issue so far. Tags are to help give a glimpse of the focus of your deck. If you have 20 tags and think that they represent the focus of you deck, then your deck needs much more focus. Tags are not the place to put a list of the key cards in your deck that should be reserved for the deck list or for the description. For example, if you have a deck centered around Ornithopter + Atog + Enduring Renewal, you should not list those cards as tags. That is a combo deck and should be labeled as combo in the tag.

Disorder

Disorder in tags relates to the order in which the tags are listed and specifically what should be denoted in the tags. This may seem like a tiny thing, but viewing decks and searching for similar paradigms is much easier if people are all using the same format or order to tag types. More on the new ordering of tags later.

Lack of Social Norms

Not to get to psychological or sociological, but all societies hold social norms. Social norms are a societies agreed upon rules of operation, whether formalized or not. One aspect of facilitating the creation of formalized social norms for tapped out is using a formalized tagging system. In order to do so there have to be shared meanings for tag words. In an effort to create this shared meaning team the site administrators have created a page for descriptions of tags which are being added as often as can be currently, found here: TappedOut Category List. Now I realize that not everyone will agree on how terms are written and phrased. These can be tweaked, but the point remains that if you are not sure what is meant by a tag term you can look it up. In the context of tappedout the term means whatever is said on that page to some degree.

How do I use tags?

Tags are very easy to input. In the deck builder, there is a text fill box in which you can input your tags. Each tag should be separated by commas not spaces as shown below:

Example

Combo, Mechanic, Affinity

Non-example

Combo mechanic affinity

The reason for this distinction is because when using commas you will display multiple tags, while if you use spaces the terms will become a concatenate of the terms and in the above example would create the new tag: Combomechanicaffinity. This can get confusing and will only appear on that deck, which means when someone searches by that term that is the only combo affinity deck they will see, though there may be tons out there.

Spelling is also essential for avoiding these pitfalls. I personally am a horrible speller, so I get the issue. Problems arise when a word is typed/spelled incorrectly. I have found 4 different Aggro deck types in tapped out, when they are really going for the same thing (e.g., agro, agro, argo, arrgo). The tag text fill box does detect word now so this problem should diminish, but just try to be careful in entering these tags in and remember to use the reference page given above to guide you if you do not know how to spell it.

Tagging protocol

Tagging protocol should answer the following questions in order.

1. Communal set or not

With the onset of some challenge and article that concern this it is important to denote if you are using real cards only or some from the communal set. The reason for this is that some player are competitive player and do not want to have their viewing confused by nonexistent cards. If you are using real cards only you skip this step and leave it blank. If you are using communal cards you will input the tag communal here.

2. Archetype/Paradigm

While these are most often referred to as archetypes, I like to think of them as paradigms or schools of thought related to the overall style of play and tactics around which the deck focuses. The major paradigms used are generally: combo, aggro, control, and burn. There are many of these can be combined in some cases. There are many aggro/control decks. These would be entered by each separate paradigm (i.e., aggro, control). While some people may argue that there are more paradigms, I am hard pressed to find decks that do not fit one of these categories or combination thereof. If there is, please contact me and an edit will be made to this article and it will be added to the descriptions list. If you feel that none of these describe your deck, leave this as a blank as well.

3. Concept/Theme/Focal Point

Many decks that players design follow both a paradigm of thought and a concept/theme/focus to drive the functionality of their deck. This is often something that a player would want to know before perusing a deck. These foci are: Tribal, Mechanic, Card type, and Card based.

Tribal

A tribal deck is one that is based around using a creature subtype to ones advantage by have multiple cards of that subtype in their deck and often cards that augment or play off of those creatures to reach an advantage. If you are tagging a tribal deck your tag would include tribal, name of subtype, so for example if I had an aggro goblin deck that used real cards my tag would be: Aggro, tribal, goblin. Note that the subtype is written in singular terms as written on the card itself.

Mechanic Based

A mechanic based deck is one that focuses on using a mechanic. Let me say that again, focuses on using a specific mechanic. Having a couple of creatures with deathtouch in your deck is not the focus of the deck, playing a Jund deck does not have a focus of cascade. To label these decks you would use the format mechanic, name of mechanic, for example exploiting Empty the Warrens and Dragonstorm would be labeled as combo, aggro, mechanic, storm. A list of what I am pretty sure is all mechanics current to the game can be found below. Descriptions on the description page for these are being added and will be updated as new set come out.

Card Type

Some decks are based around a card type (i.e., lands, enchantments, aura, instants, sorceries, artifacts, etc.). For example a deck may be based around aura cards, using Yavimaya Enchantress, Rabid Wombat, and tons of enchantments. Notice that the card type is the focal point here. Everything works because of the aura cards. So in this case the tag would look like this: aggro, cardtype, aura.

Card Based

Now this is a bit different. Some decks are based around one card. There is no need to list the card in the tags but you can indicate that it is based on an individual card by tagging it with Cardbased. The description in your deck is where you should write what card it is based around. For example, if a deck used Dragon Fodder + Polymorph + Progenitus then the label would look like: combo, cardbased.

Challenge related

Decks that are challenge related are like a tappedout special. Thanks to some of our contributors challenges are issued every few weeks or so and players build decks to win the coveted awards they yield. This too should be indicated in your tags so that more serious player can bypass these decks in searches for aid and inspiration. If a deck is a challenge deck, simply add challenge as the last tag to your deck. If it is not for a challenge do not put anything.

Now that we have looked through the different types of tags I would like to reiterate a few things. Tags should not be a list of cards, colors, mechanics, or types in your deck; they should be the key concepts of your deck according to the above lists. Only place a tag on a deck if it is the focus of the deck. This is helpful to other players and you, in that people will be better educated about the angle you took with your deck.

Some people might be wondering, "Where are all of my crazy tags going when they disappear?" Tags that are clearly not legitimate will all be combined into one category labeled misc. If it is a misspelling of a category or mistyped, they will be combined with the appropriate category.

List of definitions for these found here, if these need to be changed/refined please contact me and I will change them. Contact me via my tappedout page or at [email protected]. Hope that you all have enjoyed this information, so please go forth, build and tag.