I liked seeing how the card bases were made, by hand, and then painted with skills passed down through the family line. Reminds me of pottery studios I visited in Europe where families had been producing beautiful wares for generations.
Annette 
It's very similar to how early European playing cards were made - hand-crafted by artisans, usually on commission of a wealthy patron, like a member of royalty or a merchant. I've even heard of decks being made out of precious metals like silver and gold instead of paper - they were displayed in the home instead of used for play, placed where visitors could see them as a show of conspicuous consumption to indicate (or inflate) one's perceived wealth, and by extension, their status. We don't start seeing anything even close to mass production of cards until post-Gutenberg; even then, playing cards were still considered luxury items until the Industrial Age caused an explosion of mass production and an increase in high-quality print work, in roughly the latter two or three decades of the 19th century.
And yet... in 1377 the city of Paris prohibited playing cards on workdays. The implication being that playing cards were available to enough of the working class to cause problems at work places. While Gutenberg invented movable type, wood-block printing had been around Europe for at least one hundred years. While this technique is laborious when producing reading material, it lends itself readily to playing cards. Evidence is thin but it appears that playing cards were being mass manufactured by the last quarter of the 14th century, a good fifty to sixty years before Gutenberg introduces movable type printing. And playing card production was quite sophisticated by the 17th Century. There's evidence for cards being treated with a protective coating that was also intended to make the cards smoother (soap) and being polished on marble slabs, for instance.
Playing cards were firmly established in the Islamic world by the 15th Century or earlier, if the dating of the De Unger and Madina card fragments are to be believed, but playing cards do not appear to have moved from hand production to mass production despite the fact the Islamic world was using paper and woodblock printing for hundreds of years before most of Europe. There is a lot of active speculation about the reasons for this and most of them tend to boil down to culture. As an indication, the Ottomans banned the printing of books in Arabic until the early 18th Century despite the fact that Sephardic Jews from Spain had brought movable type technology at the end of the the 15th century and been actively using it in Istanbul for two hundred years.
I'm not saying common folks absolutely couldn't afford playing cards - but I am saying that they were considered a great expense, to the point that most people didn't own their own unless they were considerably well-off. Even in the 19th century, an era where cards were being printed using a printing press, they didn't come down enough in price to be cheap and easily affordable until nearly the end of the century, largely due to the improved printing technology that came about in the Industrial Age.
Playing cards were and still are a common feature of movies set in the Old West, but most don't realize that in the real Old West, the cards themselves that people played with were often the property of the saloon in which they were playing and not the players themselves. It was common practice for saloons to keep cards on hand for their patrons to use for playing or gambling, with the cards being stored in a deck press after closing time in order to preserve their condition as long as possible before requiring replacement. (Also, because of the odds of one owning a marked or otherwise gimmicked deck, people didn't trust a pack some stranger would bring to the table! In the wrong saloon, even the house cards weren't always completely on the up-and-up, plus tricks like faro shuffling could make an honest deck work in favor of the house to a greater degree than it should have.)
To you or me, the purchase of a cheap pack of cards at the corner store is not a big deal - a little expense, a cheap form of entertainment. To someone in 14th-century Europe, even a cheap deck was a far greater share of one's regular income and not a purchase to be taken lightly, just as books were rare and expensive before Gutenberg's press made good-quality printing relatively cheap and affordable.
My knowledge of the Islamic world is more limited, but there was a general ban on gambling, if I'm not mistaken, which resulted in the creation of a different playing card design used in that region than what was in common use in Europe. It's not entirely dissimilar to how the creation of the card game Rook came to be - a religious group objected to playing cards of "Western" design because of their use in gambling, so they created their own simulacra which functioned in much the same way, but was not used for gambling. Rook cards, while different in many ways from International Standard playing cards, can actually be used in much the same way - I would dare say that it's probably also the case with Islamic playing cards.
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