I friends with a few bricks. He said he bought them during 2007-8.
I just would like to know if it's anything like the blue seal deck, Price wise and 'feel'
[img]http://imgur.com/A6IDSYZ/[img]
I cross reference from this site it's either 1990 or 2010:
http://www.leeasher.com/playground/articles/how_to_date_a_deck_of_cards.html
I am not sure if Canadian have a different system
USPC owns IPCC, always has. Until 1991, they made cards in Canada - since then, they're all made in the US by USPC. If your friend is correct in that he bought them in '07 or '08, they would have been made in Cincinnati in 1990, just like any other blue-seal Bicycle deck you'd buy in the US, with the only differences being the tuck box art and the wording of the Guarantee Joker and the Ace of Spades. Same standard faces, same ink, same paper, same everything else.
BUT...there's a problem.
Your friend WASN'T accurate in telling you when he bought his deck. I downloaded your photo - you really should upload photos instead of linking to them, because links have a bad habit of breaking over time!
Notice that the date code doesn't just have a letter followed by four digits - it has additional digits before the letter, with a dash in-between. This is the new AoS date code system USPC employed starting with the move to Erlanger in 2009. It's better and easier than the letter codes because you don't need a chart and it's more precise on the dating. The first two digits are the week of the year the deck was printed, the next two digits are the last two digits of the year. The Ace in the photo was printed on the 34th week of 2010, which would have been between Monday, August 16 and Friday, August 20.
That means it was made after the move to Erlanger and is no different than any of the "black seal" decks you see today, other than the minor design differences I mentioned - quality-wise, it's identical to whatever Bike decks you can buy right now in the US from any major retailer with recent stock.
It also means there's no way your friend bought those bricks in '07 or '08 unless he borrowed Doc Brown's DeLorean and drove it over 88 miles per hour with a fully-charged flux capacitor firing away...
(Read 823 times)
