best way to implement a deck for a card game in python

Question

What is the best way to store the cards and suits in python so that I can hold a reference to these values in another variable?

For example, if I have a list called

Answer 1

The simplest thing would be to use a list of tuples, where the cards are ints and the suits are strings:

hand = [(1, 'spade'), (10, 'club'), ...]

But simplest may not be what you want. Maybe you want a class to represent a card:

class Card:
    def __init__(self, rank, suit):
        self.rank = rank
        self.suit = suit

    def __repr__(self):
        letters = {1:'A', 11:'J', 12:'Q', 13:'K'}
        letter = letters.get(self.rank, str(self.rank))
        return "" % (letter, self.suit)

hand = [Card(1, 'spade'), Card(10, 'club')]