I'm really getting disillusioned with USPCC. Another deck with crappy registration. Got a split half brick (3x3). I don't think I'll back for multiple USPCC decks anymore and just stick to single deck tiers.
This is an ongoing problem with them, and it shouldn't be news - they can't possibly be blind to it, can they?
I say if you're planning to come to the convention, you should tap their rep on the shoulder and give them a piece of your mind. They're sponsoring one of the events.
Pledged for the same and I'm pretty unhappy with the registration as well. Things like this are becoming more and more commonplace with USPCC. Whatever the hell the issue is, I seriously hope the fix it. Royal Pulps are fun decks that really deserve better printing as are most custom decks that USPCC prints.
Please take this issue seriously USPCC.
From your mouth to their ears - but they'll never hear you from this forum! To the best of my knowledge, they don't even pop in here in any kind of official capacity. They lean heavily on their national bulk sales with Bicycles and Bees plus their casino custom business - but custom decks shouldn't be written off like this.
It's just a good thing that there are alternatives out there, viable ones that make quality products and care more about registration.
This is why I don't really back for USPCC deck now.. unless it is created by great designer..
...and that is wrong on so many levels. Not wrong that you're doing it - you're simply being a wise consumer. But wrong in terms of how poorly they treat their custom deck customers, the artists who shell out hard-earned KS funding only to end up with a disappointing mess like this. It's not that narrow a border, there's no good reason for the registration to be this far off on the die cut. Their standards for this kind of thing are not good at all - and Heaven help anyone trying to make a deck with thin borders. They stopped doing decks as thin as Paul Carpenter's original Tendril deck, the first one really to have borders that thin (at least in the present wave of custom decks).
I'm betting part of the issues to do with the volume they're doing right now. I spoke with a deck producer perhaps a year ago. At the time, he was telling me that they were churning out 75 decks a month. That's averaging three decks a day. Now, I'm no printer, but for quality, precision work, that sounds like a lot of work in a little time. Too little, judging from the results. Their QC standards are not where they really should be for the money being spent on these decks. I've also heard of people getting decks bumped or pushed off to later in the calendar, especially heading into October and November - the bigger deck companies and retailers are all putting in big orders for custom work and USPC bumps the smaller, less-profitable jobs. They make more per deck on a small job, but they make fewer decks overall and make less money on the smaller projects, while certain aspects of the process take just as long no matter the size of the print run (proofing, creating printing plates, setting up the plates on the press, etc.). So they do what any company would do - accommodate the larger customers and make the smaller customers wait. It doesn't help with their backlog, though.
If I was USPC, I'd look into expansion. They have a practically-new plant, opened only six years ago, but the Custom Department clearly isn't getting the resources it needs for the volume and level of work the card hobbyist demands. But I'm not USPC - USPC is a division of a much-larger consumer products company, Jarden, that cares more about the brand names and their nationwide sales and reputation. Jarden makes money hand over fist and card hobbyists get the short end of the stick. It would be nice to think that the extra dollars we spend per capita would be enough to make a difference to them, but apparently they're more interested in a hundred customers spending $1 on a pack a few times a year than one customer spending $50-75 a pop several times over the year. It's the complete and total opposite of a luxury-oriented business - they're clearly focused more on volume than on quality and luxury.
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