Don, In the case of his most rare deck, could you argue that his full 52 gaff deck White Lions Stealth Cards (not to be confused with the initial 37 gaff card release) is his more rare then the Purple or Create Magic? David himself has said that not only has the full 52 gaff stealth cards never been released but has only
been handed out to friends by himself, personally. Does this not make the white lions full 52 gaff deck his most rare deck to date?
well that Stealth Deck was never actually released so I don't think it can be compared to the Purple or Create Magic deck. Purple deck were released when DB was selling the AIP bottle, and Create Magic was released with the Variety Box as well as Bonus Gift from CARC when you spend $500. While the Stealth as you said, is only given to friends personally.
In terms of rarity yes the Stealth Deck is rarer, but it shouldn't be compared to the other 2. Thats my opinion only.
It's impossible to know how rare the 52-card Stealth Cards decks are. Sure, David only gave them to his friends and acquaintances - but how many did he give away? Five? Fifty? Five hundred? Five thousand? And how many were actually made but not given away, just kept and used by him? Would those count? They were all part of the very same print run - the ones he kept, the ones he gave away and the ones he stripped some cards out of and distributed with his leather-wrapped deck clips.
The sole fact that can be offered about its rarity is that it was never made available for sale, but that alone doesn't tell someone just how rare it really is. It's probably a lot less common than the White Lions releases that were more widely available (and even that is a relative term in this context, since no Blaine decks are considered even remotely common in the grand scheme of things) - but that's the most one can say about it in terms of actual numbers of decks in existence.
If I was forced to guess, I would dare to say that the purple "rainbow" decks might be the rarest ones of all of them, possibly tied with or very close in numbers to the UV blue decks. Here's my reasoning for this.
USPC has a minimum print run size. At the time, it was 5,000. Today, it's as little as 1,000 - but that's still not little, compared to the amount of some of these decks that Blaine has made available for sale.
The Stealth Cards decks had to be a special print run - and USPC probably had Blaine buy a print run of at least the size of today's minimum, which is one thousand. Anything less would have been very expensive, maybe even too expensive to a magician who's planning to use them as a disposable commodity, whether he gives them as gifts or performs with them.
The purple and UV blue cards, however, are each a special case - a SUBSET of an existing print run. How were they made? The UV blue cards are different from the standard Series A Blue only in the stock, which is a UV-reactive stock that glows under a black light. They could easily have been tacked on to the existing print run by just adding a given number of UV-sensitive sheets of stock to the top of the stack before feeding the paper through the printer. The purple cards were made by forcing red ink through the blue ink feeders that fed ink to the plates for the card backs - this was done mid-run, without stopping the run, and likely resulted in perhaps 100 or 200 distinctly purple decks (in varying shades of purple) before the transition completed from blue to red.
In each case, you're talking about only a PORTION of a print run rather than a full print run. So I'm thinking for the purples and the UV blues, there's probably not more than a few hundred of each at best that were made - and I know that some were pulled out as uncut sheets, because I saw with my own eyes a short stack of purple uncuts in Blaine's office when I met him, so the total number of decks has to be just a bit less than the total number of sheets printed. For the Stealth Cards, they had to be a totally different print run with separate plates, so at the lowest there's probably at least a thousand packs - granted, it's likely that few made it outside of his offices in hands other than his own beyond the few partial decks that were sold as sets with his deck clips, but the exact amount he gave away is unknown and it doesn't change the total number that were PRINTED, which if you get down to brass tacks is the true determination of how rare a deck really is or isn't. Even adding in the fact that some purple and UV blue decks were likely also given away, they weren't manufactured as an entirely separate print run while the Stealth Cards had to be.
My specific reasoning for the purple being more rare than the UV blue is this: while it might be possible that hundreds or even thousands of UV-sensitive sheets could have been added to the White Lions Series A print run to make the UV Blue decks, the transition between blue and red inks for printing the backs would only have taken a limited amount of time over a limited number of sheets and that it, no more - you couldn't simply "add" more purple decks to the run; once the transition was over, it was over, done with, no more. Of all the possible outcomes, there are more outcomes that result in a greater number of UV blue decks than there are that result in a greater number of purple decks.