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New smaller USPCC faces?

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New smaller USPCC faces?
« on: October 15, 2017, 10:15:35 PM »
 

abugsabunny

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It's been a good long while since I've bought a new deck of playing cards, but this abomination just might scare me away from the market forever:
http://www.playingcardsandmore.com/images/products/display/Aviator2DeckStandard.gif

The faces are noticeably smaller, presumably to save ink.  The indices appear to be substantially farther away from the corners.  Besides looking awful to my eyes, that presents an actual problem for poker, blackjack and any other game where you need to "peek" at face-down cards.  When did USPCC start doing this?  Are all brands affected, or is just Aviator, or somewhere in between?

Vintage Ebay sellers, now's the time to jack up your prices...I'm going shopping!
 

Re: New smaller USPCC faces?
« Reply #1 on: October 24, 2017, 06:20:38 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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It's been a good long while since I've bought a new deck of playing cards, but this abomination just might scare me away from the market forever:
http://www.playingcardsandmore.com/images/products/display/Aviator2DeckStandard.gif

The faces are noticeably smaller, presumably to save ink.  The indices appear to be substantially farther away from the corners.  Besides looking awful to my eyes, that presents an actual problem for poker, blackjack and any other game where you need to "peek" at face-down cards.  When did USPCC start doing this?  Are all brands affected, or is just Aviator, or somewhere in between?

Vintage Ebay sellers, now's the time to jack up your prices...I'm going shopping!

You really can't judge a product by a tiny little GIF image like that.  It's not even a photograph!

As far as I know, the USPC standard faces haven't changed since they did away with "Perfect Pips" a handful of years ago.  Those were a bomb, very unpopular, and for the most part they had smaller pip shapes.

They certainly aren't making pips smaller to save ink, because the amount of ink saved would be negligible, even on a large print run, unless you went REALLY tiny with them.  Nor is there any ink savings by moving indices further from the corners.  Ink is one of the least expensive components to making a deck these days, especially since they eliminated petrochemicals from them and started using vegetable-based dyes.  Oil and gas go up in price, but USPC's inks stay pretty much the same - only the shipping cost would change, and that's just a temporary blip caused by the hurricane in Houston.

So the answer to "When did USPCC start doing this?" is "Never."  I was at the factory nearly two weeks ago - it's all the same from there.
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