The blue one is just a money making scheme... it's like recolouring an orange blue and selling it because people prefer the colour. It's still an apollo deck and it still has the word sun infront, still sun themed... just blue.. unless they did a deck about the moon or something I'll pass..
You make it seem like this company is doing something way out of the ordinary.
And that makes no sense to me. ALL of the companies do this. ....
D&D - Smoke and mirrors, Plaids
T11 - Centurions, Monarchs, deck1, the titanium decks
E - Arcane, Artifice, Masters, Ghost, Black Tiger,
The Blue Crown - Crown Decks
HOPC - NOC
BigBlindMedia - all of their decks
David Blaine - the multiple different sets of SPlit Spades
and a lot of other artist release 2(or more) decks that are different colors..
The Seasons
The New Fan Backs
Bicycle Vision
Actuators
Dragon Backs
Raider
Transducer
etc.. etc.. etc..
and let's not forget the crazy amount of color variations of Tally-Ho, Bee, and Bicycle RiderBacks
This is the way it been since the custom cards craze started.. I think it was E with the Black Tigers... but wait.. this one has red in it! OOoooOooo
So.. if you're going to condemn one.. you have to condemn them all.
But I'm pretty sure quite a few of us will be lining up for the next release on White Monarchs, and the V& from d&d
Just color variations with small changes
CBJ
Well, there is a bit of a difference in the comparisons you were just making - it's not fair to lump them all into the same category. I'll go over them to the best of my abilities. Please correct me if you spot any factual errors in my lists.
First of all, I'm not going into great depth on the Bees. CARC cranks them out like the Franklin Mint makes tchotchkes that end up as dust collectors. T11 made the two Stingers decks, USPC themselves released a few different models, mostly variations on the Diamond Back.
Tally Ho - there's not a whole lot of Tally Ho variations. One guy made the Circle and Fan backs in black. There's the Titaniums (Circle backs only) and the Vipers (Circle backs recently discontinued, Fan backs only). There's the "Platinum Edition" (Maeda's Green deck, Circle back only). There's the gold-bordered red and blue decks (Circle backs only), and the Maeda versions of those two decks PLUS a light-blue backed deck (also Circle backs only). And THAT'S IT - there are no more variations released in a good number of years based on the Tally Ho design. So you can't exactly say they're flooding the market in any way, shape or form. I really wish there were, since it's my favorite deck and a true New York original.
Bicycle - there's just too much out there in regard to the entire plethora of colors. But remember, in the earlier days of this wave of collecting, those were the most commonly found variant decks, and the cool stuff didn't come until later. I'd need an encyclopedia to track all the whacked out colors - but bear in mind that many of those decks were made by different companies. I can think of at least a half-dozen different firms involved in making the various Bicycle Rider Back colors. Some of these decks were specifically intended to be used as magic props or flourishing-specific decks, so it's hard to include those.
Take note of the decks appearing in red. They're the instances that most of us were referring to - cases where a new color was put forth and called a new version or design. You'll notice that those decks comprise a pretty small number of the examples you offered above.
DECKS THAT CAME OUT IN MORE THAN ONE PRINTING WITH IDENTICAL CARDS AND ALTERED BOXES
Deck:ONE Industrial Edition
Bicycle Titanium, both colors, version 1 and 2
DECKS THAT HAD BOTH OR ALL COLORS RELEASED AT THE SAME TIME (or very close to it)
Some and Mirrors, versions 1 through 3
Vintage Plaid/U.S. Regulation
Bicycle Titanium, versions 1 and 2 (they fit here as well)
Bee Titanium
Tally Ho Titanium
Bicycle Centurions (I think)
Arcane (I think)
Bicycle Black Tiger
Tally Ho Viper
Artifice versions 1 and 2
Bicycle Masters (blue and red)
Crown Decks versions 1 and 2
NOC (all five colors)
Split Spades Lions
Seasons
Bicycle New Fan Backs (black and white)
Bicycle Raider
DECKS THAT HAD NEW COLORS RELEASED AS A NEW VERSION OR MORE THAN A LITTLE TIME AFTER THE FIRST
Monarchs
Bicycle Ghost/Black Ghost
Smoke and Mirrors, versions 4 through the upcoming 7
Bicycle Vision
Bicycle Actuators
Bicycle Dragon Backs
Black Crown Deck - though one could argue the metallic inks makes them different from the originals
and now, Bicycle ApolloDECKS WHOSE SUBSEQUENT EDITIONS WERE DIFFERENT DESIGNS FROM THE ONES PRECEDING IT
Bicycle Transducer series (Aqua, Lava, Fire and the still-unreleased Night Sakura)
SPECIAL CASES
Big Blind Media - Bicycle/Karnival series: the second deck, Karnival Midnight, was pretty much a reverse coloring of the first deck, Karnival - but all the decks after that had unique designs. The recent limited editions in foil boxes could be counted more as reprints/revivals, with the exception of Bicycle Karnival Dose Redux, because they're practically identical to the original release except for the ad cards/gaffs. Were it not for the box, we'd simply be calling it a second printing.
Split Spades (original Tally Ho version and Bee version): so the backs of all of these decks were largely identical in design. Granted. But the initial release was done with Tally Ho stock and faces (aside from the altered courts) and the second release was done with Bee stock and faces (with a DIFFERENT set of altered courts). (The faces are pretty much identical on Tally Ho and Bee decks, but they do have unique jokers and AoS between them.) Compare them with Split Spades Lions, which have an altered back design with a unique AoS and jokers and "Bicycle Standard" faces with a THIRD set of altered courts. Each progressive release had more altered courts than the one before it. So while they're pretty similar, I'd say they're adequately different enough from each other to qualify as different designs and not just different colors of the same design.
Bicycle Shadow Masters: yes, there were Masters decks in red and blue preceding this deck. However, this deck's design, while sharing many characteristics of the original releases, was actually modified enough in design that it doesn't really qualify as simply being "another Masters color". The shadowing added to all the cards in the deck made this a different deck, not quite the same as the first.
------------------
In all of this, the biggest thing we're bothered by, at this point in the collecting game, are decks that simply get a color tweak and VOILA, a new version is here! Back in the days of multicolored Bicycle decks, we might have thought this was cool - but these days, it's just lazy. Take the original art files, do some fairly simple color substitutions, and in less time than it takes the delivery boy to arrive with your pizza or your moo goo gai pan, you've just made the next version of the (fill-in-the-blank) deck. Anyone with a little basic knowledge of how Photoshop works could have this recoloring done in minutes, not months - at the most, it's done in under an eight-hour shift.
Color-changed decks are nice, to a point. If we didn't have blue Apollo to go with the red one, we'd need another deck for playing poker, right? But if that's the artist's intent, just do it either all at once or in a short time span, and don't drag it out over a few years of many different "versions" which are nothing more than recolorations. "We've seen that deck - what else have you got, or did you become a one-hit wonder all of a sudden?"
