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Official Rules - the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition

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Don Boyer

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Do you love playing cards?
Do you have an idea for a deck that's so compelling, it doesn't even let you sleep?
It's all you think about, night and day?

Well - it's time to do something about it!

Welcome to the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition!

Post your design!  Enter it in the contest!  If the board members vote your design as the best of the lot, you take the GRAND PRIZE!  Expert Playing Card Company (EPCC) will make your deck professionally for you, on high-grade paper with a custom tuck box.  But that's not all...they'll send you 36 DOZEN DECKS in your design!

Stage One (Previews) is currently in effect!
Stage Two (Formal Entries) began WED. 29 JULY 2015!
Stage Three (VOTING) begins WED. 12 AUG. 2015!

So, what are you waiting for?  Show us what your deck is made of!

Scroll down for the complete contest rules...but before you do that, take a look at last year's winning deck, on sale now at the Conjuring Arts Research Center!



COMPETITION RULES - the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition
Proudly sponsored by the Expert Playing Card Company

Official Competition Rules - Amended (most recent changes in RED):

RULE ZERO: TO ALL MEMBERS.  ONLY POST IN THE COMPETITION TOPIC IF YOU ARE SUBMITTING A COMPETITION ENTRY.  ONLY POST IN THIS TOPIC IF YOU ARE ENTERING THE COMPETITION AND HAVE ANY RULES-RELATED QUESTIONS.  ALL OTHER POSTS WILL BE DELETED.  PLEASE FEEL FREE TO COMMENT ON THE POTENTIAL COMPETITION ENTRIES ON THE DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT BOARD ("Design/Dev") TOPICS FOR EACH OF THE SAID ENTRIES.

1. ELIGIBILITY - This competition is open to all registered members in good standing of PlayingCardForum.com ("the Forum") when you submit your entry.  Entries as a team or a design company are permitted but the Forum accepts no responsibility for the dividing and distribution of the prize among the winners on a given team or in a given company.  If you are under the age of legal consent to enter into a business contract where you live, you must have a parent or guardian who can legally represent you in the event that you win and who must grant permission for you to enter the competition; failure to obtain parent/guardian permission to enter will result in disqualification of your entry.  Your work must be original and you must own all copyrights, trade marks, service marks and artwork that are incorporated into your competition entry's design; if you do not, your entry will be disqualified.  You may NOT submit work you have licensed from another party, though you may submit work that a co-entrant created as a team effort with your input or a salaried employee of your design company has created while employed with said company - you may be required to submit proof to this effect and failure to do so when requested will result in your entry being disqualified.  Limit of one entry per member; if your entry is disqualified, you are not permitted to make a new entry.  The competition's Stage One begins Wednesday, 17 June 2015 at 04:00 UTC (midnight EDT).  Stage One continues and Stage Two begins Wednesday, 29 July 2015, 04:00 UTC.  Stage One and Two end and Stage Three begins Wednesday, 12 August 2015, 04:00 UTC.  Stage Three ends Wednesday, 19 August 2015, 04:00 UTC, with a winner to be announced shortly thereafter, unless there is a tie for most votes or if the winner wins in a plurality by obtaining 50% or less of the total votes, in which case a run-off election will commence shortly after the close of Stage Three's initial election and will run until Friday, 21 August 2015, 04:00 UTC.

1a. ELIGIBILITY OF PREVIOUSLY-PRINTED DECKS.  If the deck was previously printed but in a total quantity of under 50 decks, and if the artist retained all rights to the deck and all artwork and is able to temporarily transfer printing rights to EPCC, the deck is eligible.  This would include commercial printing as well as self-printing or hand-crafted decks.  In the case of a previously-printed deck, proof will be required by the forum administrators of the total number of decks printed.

2. FINAL DECISION - In the event of a dispute regarding the competition rules, the ruling of the administrators of the Forum is the final, binding word.  Should any dispute be brought before a court of law or a legal arbitrator, the competition will be declared as null and void, without any winners.[/color]

3. PRE-ENTRY (STAGE ONE) - Post your design in a new topic on the Design and Development Board ("Design/Dev") of the Forum, located at http://www.playingcardforum.com/index.php?board=14.0, to work on and solicit comment from the membership of the Forum.  The topic title must bear the tag "(2DDC)" (please include the parentheses) at the beginning to specify that it is for a possible entry in the PCF Deck Design Competition, followed by the name you've chosen for your deck.  You may only post your final, completed design on the Competition topic [see Section 4, "Entry (Stage Two)"].  You may also post questions on the rules topic to the Head Administrator of the Forum regarding how they specifically apply to your work.  Refrain from using Private Messaging to reach the Head Administrator unless your question posted in the Forum remains unanswered for exactly seventy-two (72) hours after you posted it, unless there are fewer than seventy-two (72) hours remaining before the start of Stage Three.

Please be advised that participating in Stage One is entirely OPTIONAL.  However, it is strongly recommended that all entrants participate.  Remember that the voting will be done by the members of the Forum, so having your designs available for them to review in advance of the voting and to provide commentary may be to your benefit.

4. ENTRY (STAGE TWO) - You must upload your deck design's images to the topic http://www.playingcardforum.com/index.php?topic=8345.0, limit of five images per post, limit of 1000 kilobytes per image file.  You are permitted to use up to three consecutive posts to present up to a total of fifteen images.  Your images must be marked in some legally-accepted manner to show your copyright to each image.  Explanatory text is not mandatory but is highly recommended so the members of the Forum understand what is being presented to them.  An acceptable entry must conform generally to the playing card design standard known as "Anglo-American" in terms of card ranks, suits and quantity of cards and must have, at the minimum:

a) a model name, and an original brand name if applicable (trademarks and brand names of other companies, including but not limited to the United States Playing Card Company ["USPC"], the Expert Playing Card Company ["EPCC"], etc., may not be used).
b) a completed tuck box design presented in "assembled" appearance.  EPCC reserves the right to edit the box design to conform with design standards they are capable of producing without incurring financial losses.
c) a completed card back design.
d) a completed face image of the court cards, any joker or jokers included in the design, the Ace of Spades, any extra cards (including but not limited to advertisement or gaff cards) your design may have, one representative card of rank between 2 and 10 in each of the four Anglo-American suits (spades, hearts, clubs and diamonds).
e) any other design features that are unique to your design, including but not limited to features such as other unique Ace designs besides the Ace of Spades; hidden card markings, one-way marks or card reveals; unique pip arrangements on any of the cards varying from but still generally conforming to the Anglo-American standard; etc.

Please note that the EPCC standard uncut sheet creates only 54 (fifty-four) cards - take this into account when planning and creating your deck design!  Do NOT use any tuck box templates for presenting the tuck box design, even those used by EPCC; you must present your tuck box as a three-dimensional representation of the final product, were it to be produced.

You may use any medium in which to create your design that can be scanned (if applicable) and presented on a deck of poker-sized playing cards.  Your submitted entry image files may be scanned from another medium, entirely computer-generated or a combination of the two methods of image generation.  Such media would include, but not be limited to, pencil sketches, watercolors, oil-based paint, a digital art creation program, cut paper, photographs, etc.

You may use, in lieu of a fully-custom face design, any Anglo-American/International design in the public domain or offered for use by EPCC, recolored as you see fit for your entry.  (There is no guarantee that EPCC will provide standard face designs for your use.)

You are permitted to include images of the entire deck, should you choose to do so, within the limits described in the first paragraph of section 4 of the rules.  Your images submitted here should be of suitable resolution for presentation on a web page, but you are also required to have higher resolution images of all design elements for the purpose of printing.  We strongly encourage you to use vector artwork; if you must use raster art, it must be in layers, be at least 1200 dpi for anything with line art and 600 dpi for other images.  You are permitted, at your own expense, to hire an artist to execute the creation of the images in your design if you are unable to do so yourself effectively, but the design itself must be entirely of your own devising and not created by the artist or based on the artist's previous or current work.  Designs that leave out any of the required elements may be disqualified and your official entry posts may be deleted at the discretion of the Forum Administrators.

Any entry containing images considered illegal to possess or view anywhere in the United States, Canada or in the entrant's home country and local area or region will be immediately disqualified and deleted.  Said entry will be surrendered to law enforcement officers/agencies upon request.  Examples would include, but not be limited to, images representing Nazi Party iconography, displaying acts of a pornographic nature devoid of artistic merit, nude images or photography of any kind with a model who is, appears to be or is presented as below the age of consent regardless of actual age, etc.  "Artistic merit" is solely determined by the any or all of the Forum administrators' judgment.

5. VOTING (STAGE THREE) - A poll will be added to the topic at http://www.playingcardforum.com/index.php?topic=8345.0 for the purpose of allowing the Forum membership to vote on the entries deemed as officially submitted.  Limit of one vote per Forum member.

The voting must be won by a clear majority (any amount greater than 50% of all votes cast).  In the event of a plurality or a tie for most votes received at the end of Stage Three, a run-off election will be held for the tied entries or the top two entries as applicable, to be started on Wednesday, 19 August 2015 between 04:00 and 10:00 UTC and concluded by Friday, 21 August 2015, 04:00 UTC or as close to said time as is technically feasible for the Forum without being before 04:00 UTC.  Should that run-off election also result in a tie for most votes, a vote will be held between the Forum's three Administrators (or an Administrator's specifically-designated representative, should they be unable to participate in the election) from among the two entries in the run-off election and announced as soon as is possible, not to be later than Monday, 24 August 2015, 04:00 UTC.

6. WINNER - Once a winner has been officially declared, said winner will submit copies of any and all required files to create the winning deck to EPCC or a designated official representative in the file formats and resolutions they designate.  Timetable for the printing and delivery of the competition prize, 432 decks of playing cards in the winning design, is entirely at the discretion of EPCC.  EPCC may require minor modifications of the design, made by either the winner or EPCC, as EPCC chooses, for technical reasons, should they be unable to print it as presented for any reason whatsoever.  In such an event, EPCC will make a good-faith effort to print the deck as close to the competition entry's representation as is possible within their limitations.

You must grant EPCC an exclusive license to print your design without royalty beyond the competition prize itself.  EPCC will print extra decks of your design for sale.  When the EPCC declares they have no further interest in printing the winning design or simply stops printing the winning design, printing rights for said design will revert back to the competition winner exactly one (1) year after the final print run is offered for sale by EPCC, or at any time prior by mutual consent.  If you are unwilling or unable to grant printing rights to EPCC or accept EPCC design modifications for any reason, your competition entry will be declared void and another winner will be chosen by the Forum Administrators - either the entry that received the next-most votes or, in the event of a run-off election, the other entry involved in said run-off election.  In the event of any legal or financial hindrance on the production of the winning deck design, as determined solely by EPCC, said design will be declared void and another winner chosen in a manner as described earlier in this section of the rules.

7. CONSENT - Posting an entry to the competition topic listed in rules covering Stage Two will act as your acceptance of the rules of the competition.  Your avatar name and avatar image may be used by either the Forum or EPCC for promotional purposes.  In the event that you win the competition, your name, photographic image, country, state/province/region and city may also be used by the Forum or EPCC for promotional purposes, but if you have specific issues regarding retaining your privacy and not revealing anything other than your avatar name or avatar image, the Forum and/or EPCC will negotiate an arrangement with the winner to address such issues.

8. DISQUALIFICATION - Any member of the Forum who submits an entry and subsequently breaks any competition rule may be declared by the Forum Administrators as ineligible to win any prize from this competition at their sole discretion.

9. RULES CHANGES - The ownership of the Forum reserves the right to change the competition rules in any way without advance notice, to disqualify an entry for any specific cause, or to declare the competition null and void, without any winner.

10. GENERAL - Competition is void where prohibited.  Estimated retail value of the prize varies based on features included in the winning deck's design.  The odds of winning the prize are based on the total number of entries, artistic ability and the voting results, and thus can not be estimated in advance.  Forum Administrators or their families are not permitted to enter or vote in the competition.  Other Forum Employees may participate in the manner of any eligible member of the Forum unless disqualified.  Any and all taxes or fees are the sole responsibility of the winner.
« Last Edit: August 18, 2015, 04:57:53 AM by Don Boyer »
Card Illusionist, NYC Area
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Re: COMPETITION RULES - the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition
« Reply #1 on: June 16, 2015, 12:24:57 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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My apologies for the delay in posting the rules - I wanted to make certain we covered all the bases.

Best of luck to you all!

I will now unlock this topic.  If you have a rules question, post it here.  If you have anything else to say, post it SOMEWHERE ELSE!
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Re: COMPETITION RULES - the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition
« Reply #2 on: June 26, 2015, 12:07:59 PM »
 

Don Boyer

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Rules addendum


1a. ELIGIBILITY OF PREVIOUSLY-PRINTED DECKS.  If the deck was previously printed but in a total quantity of under 50 decks, and if the artist retained all rights to the deck and all artwork and is able to temporarily transfer printing rights to EPCC, the deck is eligible.  This would include commercial printing as well as self-printing or hand-crafted decks.  In the case of a previously-printed deck, proof will be required by the forum administrators of the total number of decks printed.
Card Illusionist, NYC Area
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Re: COMPETITION RULES - the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition
« Reply #3 on: July 02, 2015, 09:46:13 PM »
 

Don Boyer

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Rules Addendum

Because we've not had a lot of potential entries just yet, Tom Dawson and I conferred and Tom feels we should extend Stage One of the contest, delaying Stages Two and Three.  I concurred.  The contest will run two additional weeks, so the new timetable is as follows:

Stage One continues and Stage Two begins Wednesday, 29 July 2015, 04:00 UTC.

Stage One and Two end and Stage Three begins Wednesday, 05 August 2015, 04:00 UTC.

Stage Three ends Wednesday, 12 August 2015, 04:00 UTC, with a winner to be announced shortly thereafter, unless there is a tie for most votes or if the winner wins in a plurality by obtaining 50% or less of the total votes, in which case a run-off election will commence shortly after the close of Stage Three's initial election and will run until Friday, 14 August 2015, 04:00 UTC.



For your reference, during the time in which the contest runs, the following are the current time zone conversions in effect.

When it is 04:00 or 4 AM in Universal Time Coordinated (UTC), a.k.a. Greenwich Mean Time (GMT), it is:

* 14:00 or 2 PM the same day in Australian Eastern Standard Time (AEST; Melbourne, Sydney)
* 13:00 or 1 PM the same day in Japan Standard Time (JST; Tokyo)
* 12:00, Noon or 12 PM the same day in China Standard Time (CST; Taipei, Beijing) as well as Hong Kong Time (HKT; Hong Kong)
* 11:00 or 11 AM the same day in Singapore Time (SGT; Singapore) and Indochina Time (ICT; Bangkok)
* 07:00 or 7 AM the same day in Eastern European Summer Time (EEST; Kyiv) and Moscow Standard Time (MSK; Moscow)
* 06:00 or 6 AM the same day in Central European Summer Time (CEST; Berlin, Paris)
* 05:00 or 5 AM the same day in British Summer Time (BST; London), Irish Standard Time (IST; Dublin) and Western European Summer Time (WEST; Lisbon)
* 00:00, Midnight or 12 AM the same day in Eastern Daylight Time (EDT; New York, Toronto)
* 23:00 or 11 PM the previous day in Central Daylight Time (CDT; Chicago, Mexico City)
* 22:00 or 10 PM the previous day in Mountain Daylight Time (MDT; Denver, Edmonton)
* 21:00 or 9 PM the previous day in Pacific Daylight Time (PDT; Los Angeles, Vancouver) and Mountain Standard Time (MST; Phoenix  [the state of Arizona does not observe Daylight Saving Time/DST])


...yes, I was bored...
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Re: Official Rules - the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition
« Reply #4 on: August 05, 2015, 09:17:08 PM »
 

Don Boyer

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As it seems we're getting some last-minute entries, I'm delaying the start of voting for seven days - Stage Three will start Wednesday 12 August a 04:00 UTC and end Wednesday 19 August at 04:00 UTC.  Any potential runoff vote will commence shortly thereafter and end Friday 21 August at 04:00 UTC.
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Re: Official Rules - the 2nd Annual PCF Deck Design Competition
« Reply #5 on: August 11, 2015, 12:57:30 AM »
 

Don Boyer

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A reminder to all prospective contest entrants - you have barely more than TWENTY-THREE HOURS REMAINING to submit your entry for the contest before the voting stage begins, at which time no more entries will be accepted!
Card Illusionist, NYC Area
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Deck Tailoring: Custom Alterations for Magicians and Card Mechanics
Services for Hire - http://thedecktailor.com/
Pre-Made Decks for Sale - http://donboyermagic.com/