Some flourishers call for a smoother finish, others call for cards that will "cling" to each other better. Have you tried something like Aladdins with a smooth finish?
Honestly I haven't found that my "broken in" decks performed any better than when they were new (maybe I broke them too far in?)
This is going to sound stupid but... I opened a pack of smooth finish aladdins and was so confused by the new deck order they were in I didn't shuffle or do anything with them XD.
I meant to go and research what the order is/what it's for but I didn't come up with anything XD.
I was specifically referring to the Legends. They didn't perform as well out of the box as they do now - usually it's the opposite that's true of most decks. Certain older decks like Jerry's Nuggets and Japanese Friar's Club decks shared this characteristic, or so I'm told. Seriously, my Legends now are really, REALLY good, much better than when they were new.
The breaking-in period of any deck is really just a matter of "warming it up" a little. Pulled out of the box, the paper is usually room temperature (cooler than body temperature in most cases) and the finish is completely stiff, never having been really flexed at all. With some handling, shuffling, etc., the cards eventually warm up a little and the finish becomes a little more flexible, with the stiffness breaking down just enough to allow smooth bending of the cards, but not so much that they fail to spring back into their original shape.
Of course, once they go from "broken in" to "just plain broken," any deck will eventually take a hit in performance - this usually occurs when the edges are getting dirty and there's some dings along the edges that chip off a bit of the surface coat and expose the paper. In extreme-wear cases, you'll even start seeing a little bit of separation between the paper layers.
New deck order for a very long time had been Ace through King; Spades, Hearts, Clubs and Diamonds. In the past decade or so, it was changed to Ace through King; Spades and Diamonds; followed by King through Ace; Clubs and Hearts. The reason I was able to discover was that it had something to do with there being a certain amount of predictability of the pattern of a new deck after it's been shuffled only a few times. The new pattern is meant to make a minimally-shuffled deck less predictable. According to mathematician and magician Persi Diaconis, the minimum standard to completely randomize a 52-card deck is at least seven riffle shuffles. When I play, whether it's poker or solitaire, I usually riffle shuffle a deck between seven and ten times to insure the best chance of complete randomization, ending with a swing cut, and I sometimes toss in a few overhand, weave or faro shuffles in addition to all of that.
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