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Hey all!  I'm an old school kind of guy, so while I'm sure there is a Facebook group or something for this, I can't resist the archived knowledge of a forum.  I've been collecting decks for a few years now and I'm looking forward to reading all about what you guys have tracked down.  My dream would be to have a wall of cards that just runs through every deck from Ellusionist and Theory 11, but that is clearly going to take a long time.  I just think it would make fantastic decoration.  Right now I just have one wall display that holds 60 or so decks and that seems to do the trick to display my sealed ones that have meaning.

I do have a little bit of OCD, so card collecting is a challenge.  When I find out that there are different versions or variations of a deck, I have to have them all.  This has gotten expensive at times and I'm really trying to control it now.  Especially when some of these decks run 40 or 50 bucks (or more!) to get the variation/version I'm missing.  I did just pick up a sealed v1 Black Ghost that I'm pretty pleased with, but now I'm on the hunt for a v2 white ghost to finish that series off.  I'm trying to find an Ohio printed blue deck for the Bicycle 1800 cards too. 

Actually, if anyone reads this, I have a question on those.  How can you tell if you have the marked version or unmarked version without opening the deck?  For example, I have an Ohio and KY version of the red deck, but I have no idea which one is marked.  I don't know if anyone does, so even looking online to buy them is tricky because none of the sellers on ebay seem to know this was even a marked deck at all.

Anyway, good to be here and if anyone is in the DFW area and wants to talk cards, hit me up!  I'd love to know where you are finding yours.  I have a great source of cards up in McKinney from a guy I met on ebay if you are looking for recommendations. 

Hi, and sorry for the late reply!


Re White Ghost - As far as I know, Ellusionist made only one version of the Bicycle White Ghost deck.  Black Ghost came first, and was originally only available as a giveaway for celebrity magicians, then was a premium for making certain purchases - V2 came when V1 became really popular and people clamored to buy them.  White Ghost, never being made as a premium like the Black Ghost V1, only ever came in a single version.  Some people might get fussy about "oh, but what about this slight change from one print one to the next?", but you can drive yourself insane chasing different print runs, and there's no reliable publicly-available records of their print runs - you'd have to buy Ellusionist to know, and even that wouldn't guarantee it!


As far as marked and unmarked versions of a deck - it really depends on the deck.  I'm assuming you're referring to decks that were printed as marked at the factory.  Most often, there's some additional packaging around the deck when it's sold to indicate it's a marked deck, then the tuck box itself has nothing to indicate whether it's marked or not.  For example, GT Speedreaders are a popular marked deck made with the Bicycle Mandolin Back, and they're wrapped in cellophane that clearly describes them as a marked deck, while the tuck box inside that cellophane is the same as all the other Bicycle Mandolin Back decks.  If you have marked decks that somehow lost that outer packaging, well - you'd have no way to know without opening it.


In cases where there's no additional wrapping or other indications in the packaging, oftentimes that's because the deck itself only comes in a marked version.  An example of this would be Cohorts from Ellusionist - there's no unmarked version, they're all marked.  The very first Legends deck from Legends Playing Cards is another example - all of them are marked, in all three colors, if I recall.


There's an interesting caveat - Bicycle Rider Backs, or Bicycle Standard as they're more commonly known these days due to a packaging change.  Not long after USPC moved from Cincinnati to Erlanger, their legal department noticed an intellectual property problem.  Most of their artwork for their classic decks is no longer protected under copyrights, having been made too long ago to still be copyrighted.  While they can't trademark playing cards themselves, they were able to trademark the unique elements of their decks, such as back design, jokers and Ace of Spades.  While copyright law is a little liberal when it comes to creating derivative works, trademark law is a lot tighter when it comes to protecting those trademarks - allowing variations to exist in the marketplace amounts to "dilution" of the trademark, which results in rendering the trademark unenforceable.


So they stopped accepting variations from the standard designs on those elements, which included various gaffed cards and marked decks.  The legal team went back and forth a few times over what was permitted and what wasn't - for a while, Ellusionist was allowed to keep making Series 1800 decks (regular and marked), until they weren't, because one of their lawyers thought the fake weathering/aging effect was an unacceptable alteration, forcing them to create Series 1900 decks - a similar-looking design (and marked) but with the markings hidden in the border.  But even that was considered too much, and E was told by USPC they couldn't print more.  The legal team tends to waver a bit now and then, but by and large, if you have a Bicycle Standard deck that was printed around 2010 or later, it's probably not marked.  (A pair of French magicians did sneak in a print run of the Ultimate Marked Deck, but those are pretty scarce and these days are very expensive, so it's less likely that someone will confuse it for an unmarked pack.)  The only new development on that front was from Ondrej Psenicka - in 2023, he released a Bicycle Rider Back deck with a simple border design surrounding the bog-standard Rider Back image, and hidden in the border is a non-reader, binary-based marking system.  Aside from this thin red line with white stripes, the rest of the back design is completely, totally the standard design, and USPC gave it a green light.


Beyond that, if you wanted to make a recently-printed marked deck, you'd need a unique card design of your own, or you'd need to create it in one of their newer backs that they market to magicians looking for alterable backs - those being the Mandolin Back and the Maiden Back.  In market tests, the vast majority of consumers didn't notice any difference between those and the Rider Backs.  I even know of magicians who placed gaffed Mandolin and Maiden Back cards into a Rider Back deck, and their audiences never caught on because the average person (even ones attending magic shows) simply don't notice and remember enough of the design details to distinguish between them.

Sorry it took so long to get to this.


There is s limit to the size of an image file that you can post - 3 megabytes is the ceiling, and a max of five files per post.  It's to keep the storage requirements lower.  The problem you run into, though, is that modern smartphones with built-in multi-megapixel cameras can create images that exceed this file size without much difficulty.


You can use simple image software to create a copy of your image file that's lower in resolution or smaller in size, thus reducing the size of the file.  You can also try to lower the resolution of the image in the camera software when you're taking the picture, making it easier to post without an editing step.

Getting to the end of selling my accumulation and not sure how rare this box and wrapper are. I know sealed decks are common and these are not original to the Box.

Any time you find even a pack of cards in the box from the "vintage era" - between 20-100 years old - it's not common.  Sealed and unused, less common.  An intact brick box like that one - I'd have to call it super rare.  It's not the kind of thing your typical playing card consumer would have gotten their hands on, unless they were buying for a poker club or something like that.  In the condition they're in - it's really an awesome find.

Hello, and welcome to the forum.


I took the liberty of moving your post to a more appropriate message board.  Introduce Yourself is more for just that, introductions, while here in the Playing Card Plethora is where people come to learn about decks, new and not so new!


Let me know if you have any questions!

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That's the site that got me into collecting! Best resource out there for all things Bicycle.

I'll be the first to say it's a great website, but it's really more for the vintage collector going for the older card backs from the 1950s all the way to the origin of the brand.  There's much less info on modern decks - for that, portfolio52.com, while imperfect in terms of getting all things in print, has a much more extensive record of newer decks, and for brands beyond just Bicycle.  It's run by club member Alex Chin, if I recall.

I went to check out your Etsy shop - looks like it's offline.  The link you gave is dead.

Greetings everyone, I am Rubenith! I come from Australia

I like to perform cardistry and magic, albeit unskillfully, alongside playing general card games (Like Blackjack and Poker!)

I hope I can get to meet some of you around the forum, you might see me around the "Deck Review" areas!

よろしくお願いします! (Nice to meet you)

Hey, welcome to the forum.  Give me a shout if you need anything.

This topic has been moved to Magical Cardistry Bonanza .

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This topic has been moved to The Conversation Parlor.

https://www.playingcardforum.com/index.php?topic=13948.0

Hi all! My name is Justin and I am from Texas. I love to play poker and have always collected cards. I recently designed and had my own setups created. Looking forward to seeing what you all have in your collections.

Welcome aboard, Justin.  Pull up a chair at the table and we'll deal you in!


Our club's convention is about a month away now - go to https://52plusjoker.org for more information.  Some of it will be presented live via Zoom; it's worth checking out.

https://www.instagram.com/roomonecards/

I'm looking at the designs in Instagram.


In my opinion, the faux aging isn't doing your deck any favors.  If you want it to look like newspapers, then make it look like newspapers - color it to match the color of new newspaper stock of the era, which was probably a grayish white.  Faux aging has been very overused at this point by other designs over the past several years.


On the Joker index, the text is hard to read.  Perhaps printing it at a ninety-degree angle in a single line instead of one letter on top of the next would give a cleaner, easier-to-read look to it.


What the hell is up with that scribble on the deck back design?  It takes what looked like a promising design and makes it kind of ugly.  I'd suggest doing something - almost anything - to replace this with some kind of symmetrical image.  Perhaps the gauge of a Geiger counter?  Then you can also render those numbers around the circle in the center in a way that doesn't turn the deck's back into a one-way design.  There are a lot of people who are dead set against buying one-way backs.


I'd also avoid having face designs that extend past the bleed line, like that airplane on the two of hearts.  Believe it or not, you can spot that line work from the edge of the deck in a stack of cards, meaning anyone could cut straight to that two of hearts on demand, if they know what to look for.  Whenever you want to print into the bleed, you really should do it not just for a few cards, but for every card in the deck, in a uniform, radially-symmetrical manner, so you can't identify a card from the deck's edge.  But honestly, you're best off not even doing that, because if your printer doesn't have perfect registration when cutting the cards out of the deck sheet, you'll wind up with a one-way design that's nearly as easy to use as a stripper deck.


The overall concept is pretty good.  I'd tweak those pips a bit - they look a little on the crude, hand-drawn side.  You may also consider removing the frames from the indices to make them easier to read - just have some blank space around them to separate them from the background art.  Lighten the newspapers a bit and make the pips darker, so they stand out more - if people have a hard time seeing the pips, they have a hard time using the deck to play cards with as well.  I suspect you really like your newsprint, but it's dominating the design when it's supposed to be in the background.


And on the topic of those newspaper images...  If this is the "Oppenheimer" deck, why are we seeing images of all sorts of events from World War II, many of which have nothing directly to do with Oppenheimer?  Maybe instead of having newspaper front pages, you should look into getting a hold of technical drawings of the Manhattan Project's "A-bomb" or some of the other government files about Oppenheimer.  Many of those documents will have been typed on a manual typewriter, so they'll have a look that's more in line with your indices and other select elements you've chosen.  It would not be hard to find enough images of such documents to fill out a deck of 52 cards, and if they're redacted, all the better - it would look kind of cool, I think.  Instead of hand-drawn images of elements like a bomb, a fighter plane or a skull with what looks like worms coming out of it, leave them out and go with just the technical docs printed light and your pips printed dark - not too big on the pips, but not so small that they get lost in the background image.


That's my two cents.