I think they shouldn't do major releases like this. It floods the servers and causes unnecessary problems. Tell you customers that the deck will go on sale "Next week". Then put it out there whenever you feel like it. Sure you will have bots, and people rapidly refreshing and hitting your site, but the influx of traffic will be significantly less. Even if when they DO go on sale, posts flood facebook and forums, it will still take a couple hours for the message to reach everyone, you inherently defeat the 'boom' of traffic problem.
And yes, of course you will have the issue of people complaining that you released them at an unfair time for the time zone they live in and it wasn't fair because not everyone had an even shot at it, but such is life. If you want to release 250-500 at a time, you can just tell people that there will be another chance next week, and don't pick the same day/time every week.