Forgive me: i scrolled the forum several times and i couldn't find a place to ask, so i post here.
I've recently bought a deck of blue bee quality deck.
I want to know more about this deck, why is it good for cardistry, what kind of finish does it have, is it really a limited edition, etc...
Moreover, since i bought on ebay, i would like to know how to establish if a deck is not a fake or a reprint.
yes, i read a "1st edition" on the bottom, but i need your knowledge.
Also, i wonder what's the serial number for...
Those are newbie questions, but i got to start somewhere!
Thanks for helping
Hi, I've merged your topic and two others about the same deck. It's not a vintage deck, so it wouldn't go in A Cellar of Fine Vintages - anything under 20 years old goes here, in the Playing Card Plethora.
As you can see by looking at the older posts, we have a fair amount of info on this deck already.
All late-model custom decks from USPC have "Magic Finish" by default - the designer/producer would have to request Standard Finish if they wanted it. Standard is what's used on their mass-produced decks, while Magic Finish (alternately known as Performance Coating, as well as being sold under a few other names) is somewhat slicker. You can actually tell the difference by smell, if your nose is sensitive enough! Magic Finish has a sharper, more chemical smell to it out of the box, and the smell lingers for several weeks after, months if you rarely use the deck.
Cardistry... Well, the qualities of a good cardistry deck are as individual as the people who perform cardistry moves! Some like the slicker finishes for fans and other flourishes that involve sliding cards against each other. Some prefer a finish that's not as slick, so they can perform more precise cuts without packets trying to slide apart.
Mind you, I'm using the term "finish" incorrectly. Technically, a finish is a card's texture, and there's really only two - smooth and embossed. There's a lot of marketing, names like "Air Cushion," "Cambric," "Linoid," "Linen," etc., but in the end, those are all embossed, period. Ivory? Just another way of saying "smooth." What I've been talking about, more accurately, is the coating that goes on the paper.
Coatings were once all plastic. However, I learned not too long ago that for the past five or six years, they're no longer using plastics - in fact, any card printed in the US today doesn't have any petroleum products in it. The Federal Government mandated that printers of playing cards switch to papers with more post-consumer recycled content, inks based on vegetable dyes and coatings created from starch instead of plastic. Foreign printers are still free to use these chemicals, but it's probably only a matter of time before they switch as well - the new cards are more easily biodegraded and, because they lack petroleum, don't require petroleum imports in order to make them, making the country of origin that much less dependent on oil-producing nations.
The blue Quality deck was interesting - it was actually misprinted. If you look in the pack, you'll see that there's two Queens of Hearts, but no Queen of Diamonds. I used one of the jokers to substitute for it in my opened pack. I think that a card dealer I known mentioned that there was a second printing that corrected the mistake, but I haven't seen it myself. Mine, like yours, mentioned "1st Edition - Casino Paper - Q1 Quality" among the copyright info on the bottom of the tuck box.
There's a total of four decks in the series to date. There's the red and blue decks - I think blue was first, but the earlier posts in this topic should have that information. There's a black deck, believed to be an unreleased prototype but found "in the wild" every now and then, and there's a brown deck not Bee-branded or made by USPC - it has the "Quality" card back in brown, but uses a more generic Ace of Spades and Joker and bears no USPC markings anywhere. It has an oversized deck seal on it that mentions a web site, qualitybeedeck.com, which is no longer in operation. This is the only mention of the term "bee" anywhere on the deck.
