I should probably apologize but we have been unable to resist the temptation to post some images of a short series we are releasing in the near future.
There will be 2 decks in it initially, Zen and Zen Pure.
The Zen deck is our redrawn version of an amazing old design by Samuel Murray of National Playing Card Co. from about 125 years ago. It's an art nouveau style back with our Exquisite faces. We used our sideways tuck made of solid red premium stock with black foil, foil over embossing and blind embossing.
We dubbed it Zen (Mr. Murray didn't) in an homage to one of our favorite books, Zen in the Art of Archery by Eugen Herrigel. This great book explains the thought process behind world-class archery and this same technique can be transferred to high level sleight of hand.
We really love this design and how the cards perform. On the Zen we used the same stock and coating as Exquisite and Zenith.
Zen Pure could have been called Zen V2 but we though that wasn't an interesting name.
Zen Pure is the exact back design of Zen with all the extra details removed except the two outer lines and the faces. We used the same PMS color so that magicians might have some fun doing color changes where just some of the design disappears.
Believe it or not the whole design was spawned by just fooling around with Zen and only after it was finalized and printing did we realize how similar it was to other solid color with pendant back designs that already exist. It wasnt intentially derived from Wynn or Madisons or IMPS (which we hadn't seen when this was done) or any other deck. It was just a "pure" version of the Zen we had.
We will release the Zen first in the next couple of weeks and then later in the summer we will release the Zen Pure. I'm sorry that means that some customers will double up on postage but we don't think it wise to relase them at the same time. We printed a good supply and will not call them limited so if some collectors want to wait to order both they are probably safe in that. We can't guarantee that Zen won't sell out right away, but, per our custom, we will reserve some for future variety boxes. That way the colletor who want's everything will have at least two bites at the apple.
I hope this explains things for everyone but if not I'll be happy to clarify anything fuzzy. For more images etc. we will post them form time to time and in various places. Probably our Instagram account ExpertPCC is the first place we will release images of our upcoming decks.
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