Quote from: robobooga on June 25, 2018, 04:36:00 AM

Hi guys,

Just wondering about the origin and possibly current value of the gold border tally ho decks. I am aware of the Maeda ones which have sky high prices. But I'm more interested in the regular gold border tally ho. It looks like it's pretty rare as I've not seen many pop up in ebay or people discussing about it.

Looking forward to your replies.

Thanks!

Strictly at a guess, and it's a broad guess at that, I'd say between $20 and $50.  They aren't traded a lot on eBay, but they aren't that old just yet, either.  The biggest problem you have with them is that there is absolutely no way to tell the difference between a sealed box of the original gold border TH decks and the sealed Maeda-commissioned TH decks, with the exception that the Maeda decks came in a third color, light blue, that fetches a significant premium over the red and blue decks.  The red and blue decks have exactly the same packaging, right down to the bar codes - only upon opening would you see (or not see) the Maeda custom joker.  That inability to tell the difference has led to a little confusion in the market and kept the price of the Maeda decks in red and blue as low as the regular gold-bordered sealed TH decks in the same colors.

I've seen the light blue deck selling on eBay for $500 - that's patently ridiculous, if you ask me, but there's no law that stops people from asking any price for anything they can sell on eBay.  It's not the same as people being willing to pay that price!  When using eBay to gauge the value of something, it's better to look at the completed sales rather than the ones that are still active, so you're seeing what people actually paid and not what sellers are asking for.  The closest I've seen to a real price for a gold border deck is, unfortunately, a three-year old sale on a Singaporean website for SG$35.  It's a foreign market and not even remotely current, so it's a poor yardstick by which to measure the current value.

I should also point out that performance-wise, I certainly noticed no real difference between the gold-bordered decks and any other deck of the same era, meaning a deck made in the latter years of the Cincinnati factory.  The Erlanger decks in red and blue are at this point not much better than the mass-produced Bicycle decks in those colors and the stock is no longer any different - the quality of those mass-produced decks has taken a significant hit in the years since the move to Kentucky.  The black ones, which are made specifically for magic shops, are somewhat better and worth getting.

I recently had to crack open a lot of decks of both Bicycle and Tally Ho as part of a commission for a magic distributor - I altered the decks into "magic decks" for sale in magic shops; of the nearly 300 decks I opened, a shockingly large quantity were badly off-centered in their die-cutting and some were so bad, they were actually canted!  I've tried talking the selling into a quality upgrade of the decks used, but to no avail so far - it would mean increasing the selling price of what is already a pretty expensive product.