I know I really cant wait to see the next box he puts together. I would buy some more but i have to be careful with my spending, She is an amazing woman but, my wife is only so tolerant of my playing card habit. and i picked up a few ornate decks and half a brick of the truth gardens earlier today so I need to lay low for a while.
oh by the way were you able to scoop up some of the truth garden decks today don? i remember you saying in another thread you were worried you were gonna miss the boat.
In some ways, his Variety Boxes are a lot like the D&D boxes - the first was great and the rest progressively less so. I'm not knocking the later ones - I wouldn't mind owning any of them - but the first was and will be hard to top. I have two of the first one, and one of the second (which if memory serves was all Split Spades Lions in blue, red and "sepia"). I picked up a few of his releases in the two-deck sets after they'd sold out at retail (I didn't mind the increase because the value had also gone up and it's cool to have his autograph) and I got the second-round release of his leather clips (which was the first round to include the White Lions gaff cards - the most recent was the third round).
I've heard from one source that he was looking to release the set as a complete deck eventually - but heard from another that it won't have the exact same set of cards that he had before. The early-release versions with the leather clips were only thirty-some-odd cards, not full decks, and the remaining cards were for himself to keep and use in performance. I got a quick look through a complete deck including the unreleased cards recently, courtesy of William Kalush - his collection of modern cards alone would turn most of this entire board green with envy! The full-deck release will likely have duplicates of some of the cards from the short decks, with maybe a few new original cards.
In the short deck, ALL of the gaffs involved using red and blue decks. If you ever see David Blaine perform with a White Lions Black Label deck, there's a so-so chance he's not using gaffs (assuming that none of the cards I got a three-second skim-over of were black-backed)...
It makes sense, since reds and blues can be used with either Series A or B.
Nearly forgot: regarding Garden, yes, I bought only two, despite the highway-robbery shipping prices. Even those I'm bothered over, they were so costly. This trend towards sharply-increasing prices will eventually choke the goose laying the golden eggs and destroy growth in the collectors' market.