Now the White Knuckles are a very nicely designed deck of cards. I can appreciate the huge amount of detail in each card. Now if we are to say the Clip Joint performance (handling) turned south quickly, the White Knuckles are a different story. Those were bad almost out of the box. I'm still hoping someone puts it into motion to reprint them with a standard Magic Finish and maybe add some metallics in the deck. I can only dream...
Yeah, they were part of the "transition period" decks, while USPC was still shaking down the new equipment at the Erlanger plant when it opened. The decks of that period had a spotty record - some came out fine while others had terrible handling issues - worst of all being the Stephen Rook decks with all the metallics he used. Magic Finish counters metallic ink performance problems these days, but then, man did they get bad fast.
I agree about the handling and the desire to see them reprinted, but I would disagree about adding metallic inks. They were a mighty fine set of decks design-wise, no changes needed. I think that some of the more finely-detailed handwork would be lost if painted in with metallic inks.
But yeah, Fulton's Clip Joints were an odd duck, but an interesting one. Of all the Fulton's decks, to me that was the only one worth having, and only barely so. The rest were, as I see it, attempts to milk the concept dry. I was sorely disappointed with the Chinatowns and the faces on the Ace Fulton's Casino decks were a disappointment to me - that one oddball pip concept was really poorly executed on that design in my opinion, because the odd pips looked too much like a different suit.
