@Don... I agree... Although there is a place in my heart for Bicycle and it's what I mainly collect along with Bees... I would say that the Tally Ho has always been my favorite brand of card... I always enjoyed performing with them and loved the backs and especially the box... It's funny that after getting into card collecting years later and obtaining vintage decks, the Tally Ho box is reminiscent of the decks of old...
It's remained a classic. As far as I know, the box is entirely unchanged. Again, I just wish it was a national brand. There's sort of a vicious circle at play.
USPC pushes Bicycle as the inexpensive but reasonably good consumer brand, and Bee as the higher-end poker brand, popular in casinos around the country if not the world. Aviator is still popular at airports because of the matched theme. Maverick, one of their cheapest brands, has a strong following in the South and maybe even the Midwest, I'm not sure. Streamline, the cheapest brand but better in quality than Maverick, is carried by the world's largest store chain, WalMart, for a buck a pack. Congress is doing OK, sort of - they're still popular as a bridge-sized paper playing card brand, but there's a lot of competition from cheaply-made decks from overseas as well as from plastic brands like USPC's own Kem, plus Copag, Piatnik, etc.
In that broad mess, Tally Ho gets marginalized. It's one of the original A. Dougherty designs, originally printed in New York City, and historically it may have been regional to the Northeast while still available elsewhere - it was Dai Vernon's favorite deck. But without the national push that Bicycle and Bee get, plus the higher price tag (it's often more expensive than both Bee and Bicycle at the counter), that region's been shrinking. As the region shrank, the national chain stores decided to simplify their supply chains by offering only brands with national appeal. Because USPC doesn't push Tally Ho, it hasn't had that national appeal for a long time, and now the only place you can find Tally Ho outside of a specialty shop like a magic store is in New York City. Not even the suburbs; just New York City.
On top of that, USPC stops carrying the traditional Tally Ho stock because of the relatively low sales of the Tally Ho brand and replaces it with a variant of Aristocrat. It's a good stock, but I have to wonder if it's truly equal to the old stock. I wouldn't know, since I haven't own an old-stock Tally probably since I was a kid, if ever.
The brand did see a resurgence with the flourishing community - it's by and large their most popular deck - but that community, just like magicians, are still just a small niche, not enough to boost the demand to nationally-worthy levels. And as good as they are for magic, the vast majority of gaffed cards and decks are done in Bicycle Rider Back designs, with any new altered backs changing to the Bicycle Mandolin Backs. The Mandolin Back is close enough to the Rider Back that most spectators wouldn't notice if you swapped a Mandolin Back gaff card into a Rider Back deck, or vice versa.
FYI, for anyone interested in a deal:
Here you can buy the circle backs by the dozen for between $2.00 and $2.10 a pack:
http://www.batteriesandbutter.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=bb&Product_Code=TALLYHO-9-CIRCLE&Category_Code=And here you can buy the fan backs by the dozen for between $1.65 and $1.75 a pack:
http://www.batteriesandbutter.com/Merchant2/merchant.mvc?Screen=PROD&Store_Code=bb&Product_Code=TALLYHO-9&Category_Code=They also have some really, REALLY old-school looking Tally Ho Pinochle decks!
