The Foilio Handbook

Getting started

There is nothing to set up. Open Foilio and it already knows every English Magic card ever printed — that database ships inside the app, so the first thing you do can be scanning a card on a train with no signal.

You need not organise: A container called Unsorted always exists. Scan your first card before you have decided what a shelf is called, and move it later.
Nothing is uploaded: Your collection is a file on your device. Foilio never signs in to anything, and no server holds your cards.
The window adapts: Turn a phone on its side, or drag a desktop window wide, and the tab bar becomes a rail down the left. Narrow it and the bar comes back.

Home

First tab

The dashboard: what you own, what it is worth, and where most of it is sitting.

Search box: Typing here takes you to the Search tab.
The counts: Cards owned is every copy. Unique printings counts a playset of Lightning Bolt once. Then Containers and Decks — and Cards wanted, which appears only once something is on your wishlist. Each one is a tap through to the screen behind it.
Collection value: What everything is worth in your chosen currency, with a count of cards nobody has a price for. It shows a dash rather than a zero when nothing could be priced — an unpriced shelf is not a worthless one.
Your fullest containers: The two biggest, each with its kind, its card count, what is inside it is worth, and a bar comparing it to the fullest.
Decks: Every deck with what it would cost to buy, at normal (non-foil) prices.
Wishlist: The next few cards you are hunting for, most wanted first, with what the rest of the list would cost on the header. Tap through for the whole thing.
Recently added: The last cards to arrive, each showing its set, collector number and the container it went into.
Put away · New deck: The two things people do most, as buttons.
Header: + adds a card by searching for it; the gear opens Settings. The line under the title says which container scans are going into.

Search

Second tab

Every printing, offline. Search by name, by rules text, or by set and collector number — dmu 123 finds exactly one card.

Sort the results: Best matchNamePriceCountNewestSet Best match is the default and is the ranking the search itself produced; the others replace that rather than refine it. Under Price, cards with no price sort to the bottom rather than counting as zero.
Filters: The control at the top right narrows the results, including down to cards you already own.
A result row: One row per card, not per printing — the badge says how many printings exist, so 65 Lightning Bolts are one line. Mana cost and colours sit on the row, and an orange badge shows how many you own.
Open a card: Answers first: how many copies you own and in which container, then every printing so you can say which one you actually have, then the rules text.
Tap the picture: Opens the card full screen. Pinch or double-tap to zoom in, then drag — enough to read the collector number in the corner or the fine print at the bottom.
Printings: Four at a time, scrolled. Lightning Bolt has 65; showing them all would bury everything else on the page.
Mana symbols: Costs and rules text are drawn as coloured pips rather than printed as {2}{G}. A hybrid symbol is a two-tone pip.
Add a copy: The + opens the add sheet: container, quantity, finish, condition, and an optional position within the box.
Want a card: The heart puts it on your wishlist. A filled heart means the card is already on the list — tap it again to change how many you want, or to take it off.

Storage

Third tab

Where everything lives, as a tree you can nest as deep as you like — a room holds shelves, a shelf holds boxes, a binder holds pages.

Container kinds: RoomShelfBoxBinderPageDeck boxBinOther
A tree row: Its name, what everything inside it is worth, and a count. That count is olive when the container holds every card itself and orange when some are in containers underneath it. The arrow collapses a subtree; the + makes a container inside this one.
Open a container: Lists what is in it with a price on every row and its own sort control. Cards can be moved out to anywhere else.
Take out several at once: Press and hold any row. Checkboxes appear on every row, tap to pick more, and All takes the lot. Remove asks first and tells you how many copies are about to leave the collection. Unpicking the last card leaves selection, and so does Cancel.
Scan target: Any container can be made the one scans go into, so a put-away session fills the box in front of you.
QR labels: Print a sheet and stick one on each box. Then, with the Scan tab open, hold a label up to the camera and that box becomes the scan target — everything you scan next goes into it. You get a tap you can feel and the box's name on screen. It is for putting cards away without touching the phone between boxes, so the label goes in front of Foilio's own camera, not your phone's camera app. Scanning one with the ordinary camera does nothing at all, deliberately: the codes mean nothing outside Foilio, so a shelf of them gives away nothing and a stray code on a card box cannot hijack a scan.
Rename, move, delete: A container will not delete while it still holds cards or has containers inside it.

Decks

Fourth tab

A deck is a list, not a place. Building one moves no cards — the pull list does that, when you are ready.

Make a deck: + for an empty one, or the download arrow to paste an Arena list.
Paste an Arena list: Preview import shows how many cards were understood and how many lines could not be matched, before anything is created. Set codes and collector numbers are used when present and ignored when not.
Deck rows: Name, format, and what the deck costs, with a count of cards that have no price.
Rename a deck: Tap the title. Imported decks are named for the day they arrived, so two imports never collide.
Mana curve: Cards by mana value, with a count per colour underneath.
Card list: Grouped by card type, with its own sort. Sorting reorders within each type group rather than flattening it.
Boards: CommanderDeckSideboardCompanion
Export: The share icon hands the list back out in Arena format.
Delete: Warns you first when the deck has cards still pulled out of boxes: those records are the only thing that knows where to put them back.

Pull list

Inside a deck

The payoff. Instead of hunting card by card, the list is ordered so you walk the room once — every card in the first box, then every card in the next.

The header: What the deck is worth, how many cards you have pulled, and a progress bar.
Order: Walk orderNamePriceCountSet Walk order is the default and is the route through your boxes. Every other order trades that away — sometimes worth it, never the right default.
Walk the room: The cards you own. Each row gives the count, the price, and which container every copy is in. Tap to check one off: that takes it out of the box in the app too, and remembers where it came from.
Put one back: Tap a checked row again. The copy returns to the exact container, finish and condition it left. A pulled row is filled in, so it reads as done at a glance.
Pull all: Does the whole owned half at once. Cards are marked as they are pulled, so if something fails partway the list still tells the truth about what is already out.
Need to acquire: Everything the deck wants that you do not have, priced on the shortfall. Tap one — or Add all — to file cards into a container once you have bought them.
New container, mid-flow: Every container picker offers New container first, so a box that does not exist yet is never a reason to abandon what you were doing.

Wishlist

From Home

The cards you are hunting for. Unlike everything else in Foilio, this is a list of cards you do not own — so it changes no count, fills no container, and is worth nothing towards your collection total.

Get there: The Wishlist panel on Home, or the Cards wanted count above it. From a card page, the heart.
Want a card: + in the header searches for one. The sheet asks how many, how badly, and whether any printing will do.
How badly: Next buyNormalSomeday Three levels, because a shopping list is read to decide what to spend this month on. Next buy is the only one that gets the orange mark.
Any printing, or one: By default any printing counts — “I want a Rhystic Study” — and the price shown is the cheapest one. Switch This printing only on and it means that art specifically: owning a different printing will not tick it off.
Notes: Free text, for the reason: for the Atraxa deck, only if under $20.
Order: PriorityNamePriceCountNewestSet Priority is the default. Under Price, cards with no price sort to the bottom rather than counting as free.
Left to buy: What finishing the list would cost, counting only the copies you still need, with a count of cards nobody has a price for. A card you have already got stops adding to the bill.
To buy: The number on the left is how many you still need — the copies you want, less the copies you already have. The basket is “got it”: it files what you bought into a container, and the number drops on its own. Buy one of the four you wanted and three stay on the list.
It notices either way: You need not use the basket. A card that arrives by scanning, or that you add from its own page, ticks itself off the list — and if you later give it away, it comes back.
Got it: Cards the collection has caught up with, filled in and ticked. Foilio notices this on its own: a card that arrives by scanning, or through any other route, moves itself down here. The row stays until you clear it, so you can see what turned up.
Take one off: The remove icon on a ticked row, or Remove in the edit sheet. Neither touches a single card in storage.
Clear the list: The remove icon in the header empties it, after telling you how many cards are going. It cannot be undone — and it changes nothing in your collection.
It is in your backup: The wishlist is your data like everything else, so it travels with a backup file and comes back on restore.
Who has one: If you have saved a friend’s collection, rows say so — Mark has this — and a filter narrows the list to just those. See Friends’ collections.

Wanting a card never pretends you own it. Nothing on this list counts towards Cards owned, your collection value, or what a container holds. Buying a card is what moves it into your collection, through the same add sheet as everywhere else.

Scan

Phone only

Point the camera at a card and Foilio recognises it from the artwork — no typing, no internet. Hold it inside the guide rectangle; it need not be perfectly square or perfectly placed.

Identify: Shows you the card and where you already own it. Nothing is written.
Put away: Files each card into the scan-target container as you go, at your default finish and condition. A stack becomes a session list you can review and save to a container or a deck.
Put away here: On any container, this opens the scanner filing into that box for the session, without changing your default scan target. When you save the session, “Add to a container” already knows which one and does not ask again.
The same card twice: A card is recorded once and then held: leaving it in the guide will not file it again. Take it out and the next one — even another copy of the same card — scans normally. A double-filed card is worse than a missed one, because nothing tells you it happened.
Foil: The camera cannot see foiling, so Foilio records your default finish. Every finish the card was actually printed in appears on the result strip; tap one to move that copy across. A card never printed in foil offers no foil.
The whole card: The result strip and the session list show the entire card, not just the art — the name, set symbol and collector line are where a wrong match gives itself away, and all three are outside the artwork.
Clearing up: Saving a session offers to empty the list. Worth taking: the list is what you check the next box against.
Change box without touching the phone: Hold a printed container label up to the camera and that box becomes the scan target. A tap you can feel and its name on screen confirm the switch, and the cards you scan after it go there. Meant for working through a shelf with both hands full of cards.
Audit: Counts a container by scanning it. See below.
Many printings: The artwork identifies the card; Foilio then reads the collector number to tell which printing. It asks rather than guesses.

On a desktop the Scan tab says so. The camera is a phone feature. Everything else — search, storage, decks, pull lists, audits, backup — behaves identically, and you add cards through search instead.

Audit

A scan mode

Count a box and find where your records drifted. An audit changes nothing on its own: it sorts the differences and leaves the judgement to you.

Missing: Recorded here, not found when you counted.
Unexpected: Found here, not recorded here. The row says where Foilio thought it was, which is usually the whole story.
Wrong quantity: Here, but not as many as recorded.
Accept: One line at a time, only when you say so. It means “the count was right and the records were wrong.”

Cards that matched are counted, not listed. A hundred correct rows is noise.

Settings

Gear, top right of Home

Setting	What it does
How scanning works	Replays the short explanation of the guide rectangle.
Default container	Where scanned cards go.
Default finish	Normal, Foil or Etched, applied to every card you add without saying otherwise.
Default condition	NM, LP, MP, HP or DMG.
Treat every scan as foil	For putting away a foil binder without setting it card by card.
Sound on match	A confirmation you can hear, so you are not watching the screen while handling cards.
Keep the screen on while scanning	Holding cards up is not touching the screen, so the phone would otherwise lock mid‑stack.
How crooked a card may be	Strict reads only a card squared up in the guide. Tolerant also tries it tilted, off‑centre or the wrong size. Generous tries harder still, and costs battery.
Guide rectangle size	How big the target is on screen, with a live preview.
Appearance	System, Light or Dark.
Currency	USD or EUR, everywhere prices appear.
Card database	How many printings this build knows, and whether an update is available.
About	A link to the Foilio web site, a link to rate the app on Google Play, and where the card data comes from with the notices that come with it.

Card database updates

Settings ▸ Card database

Foilio ships knowing every English card, so it needs no update to work. Updates bring cards from new sets and refreshed prices.

You are asked once: Foilio checks once a day — a few hundred bytes, no matter where you are. The first time it finds a new database it says so, with Not now and Download. Say Not now and it will not ask again about that version; it asks once more only when a newer one appears.
Nothing downloads on its own: A card database is about 35 MB. That is a real amount of somebody's data allowance, so the tap is the permission — on any connection, every time.
Whenever you like: Settings ▸ Card database always has it: the version you are on, a Check now button, and the download with a progress bar you can cancel.
Your collection is not involved: An update replaces the catalogue of cards that exist, never your record of the ones you own. Containers, holdings, decks, tags, wishlist and audits are all untouched.
A failed update changes nothing: The download is checked against a fingerprint and opened and counted before anything is replaced, and the replacement itself is a single indivisible step. Interrupt it, lose signal, or run out of space, and you keep the database you already had.

Prices

Prices appear on every card row, every container, every deck, and both halves of the pull list.

Where they come from: Scryfall, as a snapshot taken when the card database was built and shipped inside it. Foilio never fetches a price, so no screen ever waits on the network.
How old they are: Settings ▸ Prices gives the date the snapshot was taken. Treat every total as an estimate of what a collection is worth, not a valuation — card prices move daily and these do not.
They go stale: New prices arrive as a new card database — see Card database updates.
A dash, not a zero: Many cards genuinely have no price — promos, Secret Lairs, The List. Those show — and are counted as “not priced” beside every total. A zero would be a lie you could not spot.
Finish matters: A stack of foils is priced as foil. A deck is priced at normal, because “4 Lightning Bolt” does not say which four.

Backup

Settings

A backup holds every container, holding, deck, tag, wishlist entry and audit — everything except the card database, which the app ships and updates on its own.

Export, on a phone: Opens the share sheet, so “Drive” saves it straight to Google Drive, or you can mail it to yourself. Foilio itself never signs in to anything.
Export, on a desktop: Asks where to save the file.
Restore: Pick a backup file. Foilio says when it was made and how many rows it holds, and asks you to confirm.

Restoring replaces everything. Every container, holding, deck, tag and wishlist entry currently in Foilio is swapped for what is in the file, and it cannot be undone — so export first if there is anything you want to keep. If a restore fails partway, nothing changes at all.

Friends’ collections

Home ▸ Friends’ collections

Collections other people have shared with you, kept on your device beside your own. Open the file they sent and it stays until you remove it.

Open a shared collection: Pick the .foilio file a friend sent you. A new one is saved straight away — there is nothing to confirm, because it adds to what you have and takes nothing away.
A later file from the same person: Recognised as them and used to update the collection you already have, rather than added as a second copy. Foilio then says what moved — “142 added, 9 gone”.
Rename: Only you see this name, and a later file from them will not change it back. Call them whatever you actually call them.
Forget: Removes your copy. Nothing of yours changes, and they still have theirs — ask for the file again any time.

What each of you is after

Open a collection and the first thing on it is the answer to the only two questions that matter:

Cards you want: Cards on your wishlist that they are holding. The number beside each one is how many they can actually help with — five copies of a card you need one more of counts as one.
Cards they want: Cards on their wishlist that you are holding. This is the half you would never work out on your own: you know what you are hunting, but not what somebody else is.

A wish for a specific printing is only matched by that printing. A wish for the card in general is matched by any of them — the same rule your own wishlist uses to decide whether you already own something.

Both answers are worked out on your device, from the one file. Nobody has to negotiate, and neither of you is waiting on the other: once you have their collection and they have yours, each side sees both lists. Send them your collection and they get the same two lists from their end.

The counts only appear if they included their wishlist when they shared. If a friend’s collection shows their cards but nothing under “cards they want”, they had that switch turned off.

Asking for cards

Reading through somebody’s collection, tap the bookmark on any row to add that card to a list of what you want from them. The list appears at the top of their collection with a running total at your prices.

It is only a note: Nothing is sent, nothing is reserved, and they are not told. Foilio never moves a card between two collections — you work the trade out between yourselves, and each of you records what you actually did afterwards.
It changes nothing of yours: Asking for a card adds nothing to your collection, your card count or your collection value. A card in somebody else’s box is still a card you do not own.
Cards they no longer have: If a newer file arrives without a card you had asked for, the row is marked GONE and the list says how many. Better to find out here than standing in front of them.
It survives a backup: What you have asked people for is your own data and travels with a backup. Their collections do not — those are copies of their files. After restoring a phone, open their file again and the two pair back up on their own.

Forgetting somebody’s collection also clears what you had asked them for. The confirmation says so before it happens.

On your wishlist, and on any card

Once you have saved somebody’s collection, Foilio adds a line wherever it is useful:

On a wishlist row: Mark has this, or Mark and Sara have this. Past two names it counts the rest. Tapping through to a card page shows the same line.
Only cards a friend has: A filter at the top of the wishlist that narrows the list to the cards somebody could actually hand you. It resets when you leave the screen — a filter that hides most of a shopping list is not something to leave on by accident.

Neither appears until you have saved at least one collection, and neither counts a friend’s copy as yours. A card somebody else has is still a card you do not own: it adds nothing to your totals and the wishlist still lists it as wanted.

A shared collection is a snapshot, not a live view. It is a copy of a file, dated when they exported it, and every screen says so. Nothing verifies it — there is no account and no server anywhere in this — so it shows what their app reported, on the day it reported it. Anything older than about two months is marked OLD.

None of it counts as yours. A friend’s cards add nothing to your card count, nothing to your collection value, and fill no container. Prices shown are from your card database, not from anything in the file.

The free plan keeps two collections at a time; Foilio Pro keeps as many as you like. As with every limit, it only ever stops a new one — nothing already saved is affected, and you can forget one to make room.

Free plan & Foilio Pro

Settings ▸ Your plan

Foilio is free, and the free version holds a limited amount. One payment removes every limit and turns the advertising off. There is no subscription and no account.

The limits only ever stop something new. Nothing you have already saved is affected by them, nothing is hidden, and nothing is deleted — if you already have more than a limit allows, everything stays exactly where it is and Foilio simply will not add more.

What the free plan holds

5 containers: Counting the whole tree, so a box inside a binder is two. “Unsorted” counts as one, because it is a real place that cards live in.
5 decks: Renaming, editing and deleting are unaffected.
200 cards in each container, and in each deck: Copies, not stacks: four Lightning Bolts are four cards. It is per container rather than a total, because Foilio has no global quantity — each box is counted on its own.
100 cards scanned a day: Watching a short advert adds ten more, as many times as you like. The count resets at midnight, your time. Everything except recognising a new card keeps working when it runs out — the camera stays on, and nothing already scanned is affected.
A 50-card wishlist: Fifty cards you want, not fifty copies: asking for a fourth copy of something already on the list costs nothing against it.
Two friends’ collections: Two shared collections kept on the device at once. Opening a third asks you to forget one first, or to get Pro.

Everything else is in the free plan in full: search across the whole card pool, storage, pull lists, audits, QR labels, Arena import and export, price totals, backup and restore — and the entire card database, all 106,020 printings, on the phone.

What Pro changes

Every limit above, gone: As many containers, decks, cards, scans and wishes as you like.
No advertising anywhere: The band at the top of the screen is removed rather than left blank, and no advert is ever requested again.
One payment: Through Google Play, in your own currency. Not a subscription. Foilio never sees your card details — Play handles the whole transaction and tells the app only yes or no.

What the money is for

Buying Pro pays for the time that goes into Foilio — new features, card database updates, and keeping the whole thing running. The Pro screen says so plainly above the buy button, and it is the only place in the app that asks you for anything. If you would rather not, the free plan keeps every feature: nothing is behind the paywall, only quantities.

Warnings before walls

Foilio says something before a limit is reached rather than only when it is. A thin green band appears on the last fifth of any limit — on the storage screen, inside a container, on a deck, on the wishlist — telling you the count and how much is left. Only when there really is no room does anything get refused, and then it is explained rather than silently ignored.

If you reinstall, or change phone

Because there is no account, the purchase is remembered by Google Play rather than by Foilio. Settings ▸ Your plan ▸ Foilio Pro ▸ Restore purchase asks Play what your Google account already owns and unlocks the app again. It never charges twice.

Advertising and your privacy

The adverts come from Google AdMob, and they are the only part of Foilio that collects anything at all — the advertising ID, the device model, an approximate region and which adverts were shown. Your collection is never part of it; Foilio has no user identifier to send. In Europe, Foilio asks for your consent before the first advert and Settings ▸ Ad privacy options lets you change your answer at any time. Buying Pro stops all of it.

Phone and desktop

Foilio is built for Android. A Windows version — the same app with one difference — is built but not released yet; this is how the two compare when it is.

	Android	Windows
Scanning	Yes	No camera — add cards through search
Everything else	Yes	Yes
Navigation	Bar along the bottom; a rail when you turn the phone sideways	Rail down the left
Backups	Share sheet	Save-as dialog

The two do not share a collection. Each keeps its own, and a backup file is how you move one to the other.

Two promises

Cards are never lost: Moving a card is one indivisible step. There is no moment when a card has left one box and not yet reached the other, so an interruption — a crash, a flat battery — cannot make a copy disappear.
A card is in exactly one place: Location is a single container, and quantity is always per container; “how many do I own” is the sum across all of them. Tags are the opposite — a card can carry as many as you like, and a tag is never a place.

Credits

Settings ▸ About

Foilio is built on other people's work, and says so.

Foilio on the web: Opens foilio.cc in your browser — this handbook, what the app does, and the privacy policy. It is the same site whether you are on the phone or the desktop build.
Rate this app: Opens Foilio's page on Google Play, where you can leave a review. It appears on Android only: a desktop build did not come from a store, so there is no listing of its own to rate.
Card data: Every card name, printing, set, rules text and price comes from Scryfall, whose data is free to build on so long as it is credited. Card pictures are loaded from Scryfall while you browse and are never stored in the app — which is also why a card image needs a connection and a card's details do not.
Magic: The Gathering: The game, the cards and the artwork belong to Wizards of the Coast. Foilio is a fan-made catalogue and has nothing to do with them.

Foilio is unofficial Fan Content permitted under the Fan Content Policy. Not approved/endorsed by Wizards. Portions of the materials used are property of Wizards of the Coast. ©Wizards of the Coast LLC.