Hi Don,
Thank you for the information. I would be interested in attending either, or both, conventions. I just worry about the virus and whether travel will be possible. If I can come, I will be there. What kind of attendance do you usually have? Do you have panels and discussions? What kind of cards are people interested in?
Yes, 30 is a collection, and your wife is a collector. I have hundreds, which I think makes me a hoarder. 
Laura
Hello, Laura,
The attendance naturally varies year to year. While close to a hundred would be normal pre-pandemic, it's very hard to judge what it will look like post-pandemic. In fact, we're hoping we'll still be able to even have the convention this year; it will depend on what restrictions if any will be in effect in Pittsburgh by mid-October.
YES, we do have panels and discussions, as well as raffles and auctions and deck premieres, including an annual club deck release, each year designed by a prominent artist in the field and produced by the Expert Playing Card Company. Lectures are often given by scholarly club members on a particular topic of interest in vintage decks, while some are present by artistic club members who have created decks of their own, explaining the process they went through when creating and implementing their designs. We also talk about general club business - what's going on in the club, what direction things are taking, etc.
As far as what kinds of cards - anything that conforms, even if a little loosely, to the international standard, and a few decks here and there that don't. Some collectors specialize in antique decks from far and wide, some dating back centuries. Some prefer decks that are merely "vintage" - roughly defined as anything from early 20th-century to up to twenty years ago. Some are fanatics of modern decks, made within the last 20 years or so. Naturally, there's a lot of overlap in people's collections - it's uncommon to find someone who's that much of a purist in their area of expertise.
We also have people who collect "singles" - individual cards rather than entire decks. They see it as a more affordable alternative, and most such collectors are more interested in the artistry of the card backs, especially in many of the older designs. And there are people who collect related ephemera - anything with a design that has a playing card theme to it.
And there's also a number of people with "uncut sheet" collections - allow me to explain: when cards are made at the factory, the first consideration is the paper, which is actually called pasteboard because it's a sandwich of two layers of stock, sometimes embossed with a pattern to allow for better slip of the cards, and held together with a layer of glue, usually infused with graphite to make the cards opaque. From there, the paper is either cut into individual sheets and fed into a sheet-fed press, printed a sheet at a time at high speed, or for larger-volume print runs, an entire roll large enough for 10,000+ decks is loaded into a web press printer and the pasteboard is printed first, then cut into sheets. These deck sheets are usually fed into a cutter that cuts them into strips, then the strips are fed into a die cutter that punches the cards out of the paper. But some sheets are taken right off the printing press, called "uncut sheets" - they have the entire deck of cards on a single sheet of pasteboard that's approximately 22 inches wide and 26 inches long. People collect these uncut sheets for their beauty, often mounting and framing them, but then the issue becomes whether you display the front to see the faces, the back to see the card backs, or you get creative and find a way to display BOTH!
So yes, there's a wide variety of different kinds of collectors out there, and many of them attend our conventions at some point or another.
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