Got my Saturn deck a few days ago. Just like the Asi Wind Chameleons (also from EPCC recently), some indices are bolder than others. It drives me crazy. I'm not talking about when they make the index on one side of the card bolder than the other side of the card to create a one way face. I'm talking about indices across the cards. The 3s are definitely bolder/thicker than any other numbers. Here are 3s and 6s to compare.
Someone on UC posted this in response to my gripe above:
Yes, this is part of EPCC's standard face cards.
Bill Kalush says that 'is a very specific system or "bonus" for magicians'. I guess most of the rest of us find it at least a little annoying.
I'm not a magician so I guess I don't appreciate whatever the advantage this provides. I wish standard would be, you know, standard and "bonuses" like this would be by special request.
He might be referring to something else.
It's common on EPCC decks for a single index of the two found on any given card to be bolder than the other one. The bonus of this for magicians is that certain tricks that one typically does with a one-way back can now be done with the faces, because they've all been made one-way. Usually, the bolder index is not always the same index - meaning that sometimes it's the "top" index and sometimes it's the "bottom" index. To explain a little better, if you looked at an uncut sheet of the deck, with all the artwork on the cards oriented "correctly," if all the bold indices were the bottom ones, you see the upside-down bottom index on every single card's face is bold. Instead to this (or the top one being the bold one on all the cards), they're mixed, some at the top, some at the bottom, so if you re-oriented all the cards and put the bold indices on one side of the deck, the images in the middle of the cards would be oriented in a mixed rather than a uniform manner. Most cards don't have a tell-tale of some kind (aside from poorly-centered registration or die cutting) to indicate orientation by face, but enough do, to the point that it might stand out if, for example, all the 7s were turned the same way, and so were the fives, the threes, etc. based on looking at the artwork of the card (in these cases, the pip orientations, where there are more pips turned one way than another).
OK, that's a little convoluted and long-winded, but hopefully you see what I'm getting at.
I think there's a simpler reason why the three on that card looked bolder. The faces used as EPCC's standard faces are based on old USPC faces, perhaps a century old. They've been cleaned and retouched, but the original images were scans. The original indices were probably also smaller - it was common in early indexed decks for them to have a small index, something that would make a person squint if they had less-than-perfect eyesight. Between blow-ups, retouches, etc. and the vagaries of what printing was like a hundred years ago (not perfectly precise), it's possible that either the original had a bold three and now the copies do, or that in the scanning process, the angular nature of the three caused the scanner to reproduce the lines and curves of that numeral a little more thick than the original. He is, in essence, reproducing some of the imperfection of the original design he scanned, I suspect.
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