What is the best way to create a deck of cards?

Question

I was thinking about making a deck of cards for a card game. I could make a list of all of the cards (I don't really care about the suits), but I was wondering if there was a much easier way to do this.

cards = ['1','1','1','1'....]

I'm positive you could make a for loop to create 4 cards of the same value and add it to a list, but I was wondering if that was the best solution. I am not advanced enough to know about or create a Class which I have seen to be offered as other solutions, but I am open to explanations.

I have already made a dictionary defining the card values.

Answer 1

I propose you a solution with a basic class usage.

First, let's make a Card class:

class Card:
    def __init__(self, value, color):
        self.value = value
        self.color = color

Then, let's make a list of colors:

colors = ['heart', 'diamonds', 'spades', 'clubs']

Finally, let's build your deck with a list comprehension:

deck = [Card(value, color) for value in range(1, 14) for color in colors]

The Card class is only a wrapper, just to manipulate cards instead of tuples, which feels more natural.

In this current state, it's almost equivalent to renaming the tuple type... Basically, it only consists in a constructor, __init__, that sets the attributes of the instance.

So when I call Card(value, color) in the list comprehension, so for example Card(11, 'spades'), a new instance of the Card class is created, which has its value attribute set to 11, and its color attribute set to 'spades'.

I recommend you read some tutorial about OOP for an in-depth understanding of the concepts.

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Now, you can try and improve this idea, for instance by using a more detailed values list instead of the range(1, 14):

values = ['ace', '2', ..., 'king']

Answer 2

Another approach can be done using namedtuple from collections module, like this example:

from collections import namedtuple

Card = namedtuple('Card', ['value', 'suit'])
suits = ['hearts', 'diamonds', 'spades', 'clubs']
cards = [Card(value, suit) for value in range(1, 14) for suit in suits]

And you can access to the values like this:

print(cards[0])
>>> Card(value=1, suit='hearts')
print(cards[0].value, cards[0].suit)
>>> 1 hearts