So the pizza guy saw my decks yesterday...

[xela]

My collection is displayed on a giant shelf readily visible from our front door. Anyway, the pizza guy sees them and starts going nuts.

"Holy crap man, you have a lot of decks. Where do you get them? How old are they?" He stood there for a good 10 minutes talking with me about cards, and how he had never seen someone collect those. Apparently he has seen a lot of weird shit in people's homes while doing deliveries. Some guy had a taxidermy collection, and his whole home smelled like death and defecation.

I didn't mention I designed my own deck... usually when I do (back when I had boxes piled to the ceiling near the door) I'd give them a few decks and they just wouldn't understand what it was. "So...you design decks for the casinos here?" I wish. But seriously, card collecting is so out there to people.

The pizza guy said he never thought about collecting decks before, but that "it makes sense, I don't know why more people don't do it."

I have to agree with him. Of all the weird and whacky collectors out there, deck collectors seem to have some of the most tangible goods. I mean, you can use the decks for so many things, the decks are also art work, and often times history as well. Yet it's such a surprisingly small niche hobby. Bottlecap collectors have larger communities than we do.

[LauR]

I would've thought card collecting had quite a decent market, going from the amount of decks being released to the market and the prices of rare decks.

[John B.]

I was trading some decks with a guy and when I told the lady at UPS that it was a few decks, she inquired further (making conversation) and gave me a strange look when I explained they were normal cards with cool designs that people collect.

[Don Boyer]

What makes playing cards a tougher type of ephemera to collect is that they're made of a material, paper, that's very temporary in nature, and are generally very heavily used and abused by the majority of the people buying them.  We buy them, we play with them, they get dirty and ragged from use, then get discarded and replaced with a new pack.  It's less likely to occur to a modern custom deck, but only because most of the people buying them are aware of their collectibility in the first place and treat them with greater care.



The same was true of comic books when issues like Action Comics #1 and Detective Comics #27 were new - no one thought of them as something to collect, just something to use and discard, and the fact that they were the first comic book appearances of Superman and Batman respectively never came to mind.  Complicating matters, early and middle industrial-age papers were often made using acids that caused the paper itself to decompose more rapidly than modern ones.

I loved playing cards as a kid, but even then only thought of them as disposable, not collectible.  It wasn't until I started getting into custom and vintage decks that I took a different view of them, and thus a hobby was born.


Bottle caps, while also ephemera, were made of sturdier stuff (usually steel or aluminum, and only in the last few decades, plastic) and even more common then playing cards, so there's more of them around and there's more people engaged in collecting them.  Some paper has a half-life of about two weeks, while the plastics in modern bottle caps would last for centuries, if not longer.  Playing card paper is likely a little better protected with its laminate surface, but even so, they're quite fragile when you think about it.

[CBJ]

I think I saw a porno once that had the same name as this thread... except it had an "i" in the word "decks" instead of an "e"

haha


Some of my friends know that I collect playing cards, but they really have no idea how many decks I have.  I opened another FB profile a year or so ago so my friends wouldn't think I was nuts 


Collecting playing cards seems like an odd hobby to a lot of people, but they totally understand comic/stamp/coin collecting.  It makes no sense to me

CBJ

[xela]

I think I saw a porno once that had the same name as this thread... except it had an "i" in the word "decks" instead of an "e"

haha


Some of my friends know that I collect playing cards, but they really have no idea how many decks I have.  I opened another FB profile a year or so ago so my friends wouldn't think I was nuts 


Collecting playing cards seems like an odd hobby to a lot of people, but they totally understand comic/stamp/coin collecting.  It makes no sense to me

CBJ

I couldn't stop cracking up at that... then I realized that you didn't take out the "s" in decks... which opened up a whole new can of worms. 

I understand collecting coins and comics (I have a coin collection myself). I never understood stamps. I mean, they're stamps. Do people even use mail anymore?

But yeah back to the point, it baffles me that card collecting = wtf, despite filling every category when it comes to a good collection (in my opinion the categories are history, value, artistry, timelessness, and displayability).

I mean come on you have stamps that have history, and perhaps value. You could even argue artistry. But stamps themselves are becoming obsolete. Will people 100 years from now even know what a stamp is? Heck, they don't even go on regular envelopes very often anymore, as the USPS has prepaid envelopes.

[Don Boyer]

I understand collecting coins and comics (I have a coin collection myself). I never understood stamps. I mean, they're stamps. Do people even use mail anymore?

But yeah back to the point, it baffles me that card collecting = wtf, despite filling every category when it comes to a good collection (in my opinion the categories are history, value, artistry, timelessness, and displayability).

I mean come on you have stamps that have history, and perhaps value. You could even argue artistry. But stamps themselves are becoming obsolete. Will people 100 years from now even know what a stamp is? Heck, they don't even go on regular envelopes very often anymore, as the USPS has prepaid envelopes.

Technically, stamps DON'T exist.  They're all stickers now.


The term will carry on long after the object ceases to exist - or not.  We have many expressions involving obsolete objects.  It's been many decades since anyone used their wooden shoes (called sabot in Dutch) to break the gears in a factory machine in protest over the Industrial Age, but the term sabotage is still around and has broadened over time to cover more than the original, specific meaning.


Even the stamp received its name from an act from the days of sealing wax.  It came from the act of pressing the seal into the hot wax to seal a scroll closed or affix a sigil as a form of signature.  We still refer to car and truck engines in terms of the horsepower they generate.  Anachronisms in everyday speech are everywhere.


Forgive my cloudier-than-usual ramblings.  I'm getting over a serious infection and have only gone back to solid food today...

[Utterfool]

Some of my friends know that I collect playing cards, but they really have no idea how many decks I have.  I opened another FB profile a year or so ago so my friends wouldn't think I was nuts 


Collecting playing cards seems like an odd hobby to a lot of people, but they totally understand comic/stamp/coin collecting.  It makes no sense to me

CBJ

Really when it comes to my active collections, I think playing cards is one that people can grasp onto and say "ok I understand that"
I know it is one of the few that friends and family are willing to help me build on. I regularly have a friend come back from somewhere and bring me a souvenir deck (so they don't grasp it completely, it is the though that counts)
I actually would say playing cards ranks second or third in my collections as far as normal things to collect. Again I think when people think about it it makes sense to them. It just that playing cards have been a tool or a toy for so long and the fact that they are so easily destroyed (as Don mentioned)
Like bottle caps collecting cards is more of a modern hobby (I mean 40 to 50 years) collections before that were of things that had a definitive value and rarity (cards, art, currency). The creation of rare or limited decks is a newer phenom so the idea of collecting your standard run of the mill Bicycle deck probably didn't hit people. It is only when those decks are out of print does someones say "huh, I wish I had one of those decks I used as a kid" (again as Don as stated, it fits into the comic book mold) The forced rarity, like comic books is newer and will make decks worth something for a little while but eventually forced rare decks will go the way of forced rare comic books, and become nearly valueless ( or so history has lead me to believe)

[Don Boyer]

Some of my friends know that I collect playing cards, but they really have no idea how many decks I have.  I opened another FB profile a year or so ago so my friends wouldn't think I was nuts 


Collecting playing cards seems like an odd hobby to a lot of people, but they totally understand comic/stamp/coin collecting.  It makes no sense to me

CBJ

Really when it comes to my active collections, I think playing cards is one that people can grasp onto and say "ok I understand that"
I know it is one of the few that friends and family are willing to help me build on. I regularly have a friend come back from somewhere and bring me a souvenir deck (so they don't grasp it completely, it is the though that counts)
I actually would say playing cards ranks second or third in my collections as far as normal things to collect. Again I think when people think about it it makes sense to them. It just that playing cards have been a tool or a toy for so long and the fact that they are so easily destroyed (as Don mentioned)
Like bottle caps collecting cards is more of a modern hobby (I mean 40 to 50 years) collections before that were of things that had a definitive value and rarity (cards, art, currency). The creation of rare or limited decks is a newer phenom so the idea of collecting your standard run of the mill Bicycle deck probably didn't hit people. It is only when those decks are out of print does someones say "huh, I wish I had one of those decks I used as a kid" (again as Don as stated, it fits into the comic book mold) The forced rarity, like comic books is newer and will make decks worth something for a little while but eventually forced rare decks will go the way of forced rare comic books, and become nearly valueless ( or so history has lead me to believe)

Many good points.  Playing cards are a lot easier to understand for the ordinary adult because there's both the nostalgia factor and the "hey, these aren't the playing cards I use, they look cool" factor.  Unlike comic books, the average American continues using playing cards well into adulthood.  There's no age barrier.  If I collect Star Wars or Star Trek toys and memorabilia, I'm a sci-fi nerd.  If I collect comic books, I'm a comics geek.  If I collect playing cards, well - I just collect playing cards, period.  There's no social stigma developed against it, and the people collecting them are doing so for the beauty and design as much as for the "gotta-get-em-all" mentality and just plain general obsessiveness.