I'm new to the Forum but familiar to 52 + Joker veterans ... I'm Dave but some know me as "The Bicycle Guy" ... I'm the one at conventions with a lot of new and custom Bicycle decks!
I just bought some of Bicycle's new release, the Cyclist. Today, I got a call from USPC asking if I wanted to return them because of a printing error. The 10 of diamonds has only 9 diamonds printed on it. (see photo)
What do you think? Hang onto them and sell as collectibles, or send 'em back? I bought a gross (144).
There's two schools of thought on that sort of thing. Some collectors will put a premium on weird mistakes, often things like miscut tucks, wrong deck seals, etc. But I think more collectors would actually consider it to be not worth as much - the deck in this instance becomes a little less playable. CBJ points out something important as well - there's no way to tell the difference from a sealed box, not unless USPC decides to make the new printing different somehow.
If you wanted to cater to the misprint-lover corner of the collector market, I'd say keep just a portion of the shipment, perhaps two or three bricks, unless you have a specific customer lined up to buy them and he or she wants more. Otherwise, just swap the decks for the new ones.
Consider this - remember the weathered version of the Expert Back deck that had the wrong back on it (I think it was the Old Fan Back instead)? USPC reprinted those and you can easily tell the decks apart from the packaging. Are you selling those for a premium? Are they worth a premium to you or anyone you know? In my experience, they've been selling for about the same price. A run-of-the-mill collector would probably prefer the corrected version and a non-collector finding them somewhere like Walmart wouldn't likely even realize there was a difference. Even if there is a price difference, is it enough to make it worth the space in your inventory? Because if it's only a buck or so a deck and they move slowly, that's stale inventory sitting on your shelves all that time waiting to be sold, which in itself costs money.
BTW: welcome to the forum, glad to have you here! Drop me a PM if you decide you'd like to contribute an article or take out an ad to either of the club magazines - I edit CARD CULTURE, Judy (HeartQ) runs Clear the Decks and Lee Asher handles advertising.
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