title: Store a playing cards deck in MySQL (single column)
body: <p>I'm doing a game with playing cards and have to store shuffled decks in MySQL.</p>
  
  <p>What is the most efficient way to store a deck of 52 cards in a single column? And save/retrieve those using PHP.</p>
  
  <p>I need 6 bits to represent a number from 0 to 52 and thus thought of saving the deck as binary data but I've tried using PHP's <code>pack</code> function without much luck. My best shot is saving a string of 104 characters (52 zero-padded integers) but that's far from optimal.</p>
  
  <p>Thanks.</p>