I have to agree with you, Paul. As a cardist the Exquisites outshine the Global Titans by quite a bit, even the Legends doesn't feel as "right" as the Exquisites do IMO.
Bill Kalush personally had the process of making the Exquisites at the Taiwan plant altered, while Lawrence Sullivan went with the plant's standard print methods. Bill himself has been commenting on how his Exquisites are just a little better than the Legends, and that's why.
He used to do this with USPC - while trying to perfect the process of making a pack of cards with the best performance, he would specify certain changes to the print process and place an order for himself, usually a stock deck like Bicycle or Bee but with his custom methods applied. As he got the cards back, he saw what performance differences the changes made and did the same process all over again, refining and improving the process. This takes a LOT of resources to accomplish, more than most designers would ever have access to without a wealthy relative passing away and leaving him or her the estate.
Remember his Bee Erdnase 216s? Some didn't like the design of the back, but none who've tried them can deny the quality of the cards and how well they handled - some such as myself stated that it was unlike anything I've ever seen come out of USPC in my card-playing lifetime. That deck's quality was about 85% as good as the Exquisites - he used the knowledge accumulated from all those test runs to make the card-making process as close to perfect as he could.
Paul: excellent points about why to not always use USPC. Many designers have felt frustrated with USPC's custom deck process and wanted something less restrictive and more controllable. The plants that Bill use are indeed capable of quality output in shorter-than-USPC-minimum runs - in some cases, of a quality that exceeds most USPC-made decks - with at least some savings over what USPC charges.
I agree that USPCC needs a big competitor. I just wish there was a US printer that could do it. Paul good luck with your project. I'm in for a few.
While computers and design software have made the design process much more democratic in that nearly anyone can afford a computer and a design program, this is not the case for the processes required to make that design into an actual deck of cards. There have been many improvements, to be sure, but the basic process itself of creating the pasteboard (or purchasing it from someone else who made it) and getting the ink on the paper with printing plates is still very much the same as it's been for well over a century. It's not the kind of hardware that most people can afford and it's way too large to use it in all but the largest of home shops/work areas.
Even if you could afford the hardware, you then need to provide the raw goods (paper, ink, tools and supplies for maintenance) and the talent to keep that press operating and to somehow eke a profit out of it. USPC has the major advantage of having a handful of common brands that people buy all over the country and in many parts of the rest of the world combined with close to 130 years of experience making playing cards, providing them a steady source of income - Joe Sixpack doesn't have that at all, and has to start literally from scratch, with no income from volume work like the Bicycle Rider Back or the Bee Diamond Back to help sustain operations while you tackle boutique print jobs for clients wanting short print runs.
It's like you're always just a few slow days away from running out of cash and folding. The Internet helps in that you can attract clients and work from practically anywhere in the world, but you're still shouting to be heard over the voice of the 800-pound gorilla in the room that is USPC.
Given enough time, however, we could reach a point where, just like computers, the hardware will shrink in size from something that could fill a warehouse to small enough to fit in a single room with space to spare - though it will never, at least in my lifetime, go portable and pocket-sized, due to the nature of what you're trying to make.
Plants overseas have a better shot at being able to do what I described above because they have one thing that USPC doesn't - labor laws that favor the manufacturer and result in a greatly-reduced cost of labor. If you compared apples to apples, making an Asian factory outside of Japan or South Korea that's identically equipped to what USPC has in Erlanger, their lower labor costs will always give them the edge.
You might have been able to argue at one time in history (and not all that long ago) that USPC's quality made them stand out above the others, but that's no longer the case, due to a) the foreign printers getting better at what they do and b) USPC being a bit less attentive to the work they're doing, resulting in needless, costly mistakes. If you run a deck design company and have made three or more decks with USPC, odds are strongly in favor of you having a horror story about something going wrong with USPC on at least one of your print jobs.
