I'm totolly okay with non boarder deck.
E.g. I like the v1 artifice more than v2
I understand from perspectives such as use by magicians boarders are preferred, but I’m glad to see someone with a similar opinion as me on the aesthetics. Sometimes boarders are lovely, but sometimes bleeding to the edge has great impact - as I hope my art deck currently on Kickstarter has. It was a difficult choice but I wanted them to fill the visual pallet - and also it lends to my court cards being a tryptich panorama. So, I agree that there’s a place for decks without boarders.
Not every deck has to conform to the aesthetics or requirements of a magician. Many don't, for certain. It is really simply a matter of the designer's preferences and his or her target audience. If a designer is going for a more artistic aesthetic, then there may be a desire for a borderless face and/or back design. Some collectors absolutely love borderless, some hate it, some aren't so uptight about it either way.
JBP, I wouldn't worry too much about the magician's "requirements" - you're clearly not targeting magicians. Any deck that's done as a Kickstarter limited printing is likely to have little appeal for a magician - younger magicians might like a limited run deck's cool appearance, but considering what they cost and how many decks a working magician will generally go through while performing and practicing, I've learned that many of them, especially the older ones, stick to the basics. While I was selling decks at Magic Live, the most frequently asked question at my booth was "Do you have it in Bicycle?," by which they meant specifically the Bicycle Rider Back, the "standard" deck that USPC puts out in the largest numbers. They're not collectors at all, for the most part, and simply call them "Bicycle."
It's for everything if you are doing a 5,000 deck run without much extra stuff. Keep in mind they will give you their own quote, that's just an estimate. It may be $15,000, or $7,000.
Wow, interesting quotes. You say ‘without much extra’, but what extra do you think you’d get for that? My current campaign print run quote is like $9000 for 1000 decks - though admittedly it’s got all the bells and whistles.
JBP, bear in mind that the person whom you're quoting said that EIGHT YEARS ago. Pricing likely would vary by now, and at the time USPC wasn't even offering print runs as small as 1,000 decks. 5,000 used to be the minimum - it was then lowered to 2,500 and eventually reached the 1,000 they offer today. Also, the per-deck price really shoots up on the shorter print runs - it can sometimes be more cost-effective to go for a larger print run.
When you all say border it means on the back of the card right? sorry, english is not my mother tongue lol
The border is the margin that goes around the outer edge of the card. It usually refers to the backs, and it's usually white, unless the deck has a design that's "printed into the bleed," which means that the design is printed into the area of the paper that gets cut off by the die cutter, making the design go right up to the edge of the cut. Faces can have borders as well - technically, they sort of do have borders on most decks, as there's nothing printed at the edge of the paper and for a certain distance from that edge - but most of the time, people simply refer to the backs when they're talking about bordered versus non-bordered decks.
That’s very interesting. I assumed it was both back and face when discussing boarders but assumed the magician issue was about the face side as boarderless meant different?
What they're referring to mostly when they're talking about magicians is when a deck has a face with a plain, un-inked border (white) and a back with a print-into-the-bleed design, be it a pattern or a solid (a "colored" border). The reason magicians get all uppity about such things is that there are some tricks that require the magician to flip a card over in the middle of a deck, turning it face down while all the other cards are face up or vice versa. When a card has nothing but white on the edge of the back and face, this is undetectable. When one side is white while the other is anything but plain white, this leaves a distinctive, visible line in the middle of the deck that's visible from the deck's edge, and it kind of gives the trick away.
Decks that are targeted to magicians will in most cases have either a plain white edge on the faces and backs, or they'll be matched in color somehow, as with Ellusionist's first custom deck, the Bicycle Black Tigers, which was all black on the edges of the backs and faces.
The only real issue to keep in mind with printing into the bleed is wear and tear. It's not a big deal if you're targeting a collector's market - they want pretty cards and aren't likely to use them a whole lot. But when someone does use cards, and those cards have printing into the bleed, there's a tendency for chipping to occur - tiny bits of the card's surface will flake off at the edge with repeated handling, shuffling, etc. For an all-black deck like the Black Tigers I mentioned above, this makes a super-cool looking deck gradually look pretty shabby, and if you're really sharp-eyed with a good memory, this can even function as a de facto marking system, allowing you to identify at least certain cards in the deck if not the whole deck. So if you're making a design and targeting, for example, people who play with cards as your target audience, you'll want to stick with plain white borders as much as possible.