I had asked on E's FB page how many Blue Artifice V1's were printed and they said about 100,000 (one hundred Thousand. And those are considered a medium rare deck.
This doesn't surprise me one bit. The blue v1 decks are only "rare" simply because they're out of print with no more ever to be made, not because of anything to do with quantity created.
Quantity available and price of a deck often don't move in anything resembling a linear fashion from deck to deck. Jerry's Nugget decks were easily made in the tens of thousands, and they cost way more than any short-run deck of this age. Even counting nothing but recent decks (<10 years old), countless uinque issues of 5,000 decks sell for amazingly different amounts of money in the aftermarket. While being out of print is a factor, a bigger factor is what people are willing to pay for it at a given point in time. Some are practically cheap as dirt, others run into the triple-digits.
But back to the topic...
Anep21, I suspect this might have been printed in a larger number than the Series A Blue simply because DB Productions knew there was a pent-up demand for the deck. The fact that they didn't charge gouger's prices for them is laudable.
What I'm dying to know is - what about the White Lions BLACK LABEL decks...? Who here wouldn't want to get a hold of a silver-metal version of the White Lions? Let's just hope that 1) they aren't insanely rare like the purple "Rainbow" Series A decks, and 2) they won't just be dropped on the market as a big surprise, only to vanish without a trace before half of us know they were even available. I missed out on the Split Spades Lions VB because I simply never saw it coming - I didn't even have the "deer-in-the-headlights" look; I was looking away somewhere when the truck hit!
