Don,
Thanks a lot for the reply.
About this gaff King of Hearts...accroding to USPCC:
the King of Hearts design infringed their copyrights policy, as they do not allow the alternation on card back design anymore(but you can do whatever you like with the card face).
You can change the color scheme of Diamond Back and get it printed, but not to the extent like we made with the KH gaff.
In this case, the KH gaff design changed their Bee diamond back pattern. USPCC said this kind of alternation will always be evaluted on a case by case basis, but even that, it's not suggested.
What I don't understand is that why not they inform us during the process of evalution, instead of 2 days before the manufacture.
So, the 5200 decks of Coterie Bee is just one color, the gold version. With Bee the minimum quantity to print is 5000 instead of 2500.
Anyway, despite the limited quantity and a KH gaff that will never be able to print again, Coterie Bee playing cards will be available at a reasonable price of $8USD a deck.
All the decks will be ship out from Hong Kong, Coterie have made custom mailling box and packing bag, so everything will be packed in Hong Kong for shipment.
Though, aside from the custom packing and the incident with KH gaff, initially we do wanted to work with distributors from other countries for ths release, except China. Almot every China playing cards distributors undercut the price of each other, we have seen many new decks made available in China at the wholesale price during their price war, and we don't want to see the same with our deks, so for the chinese market we will do the retail on our own. I believe C will work more closely with overseas distributors on future releases.
We will be offering Uncut sheets, and here is yet another legendary story about the Coterie Bee uncut sheets:
We ordered 54 uncut sheets, 52 of these uncut sheets will be available, however, USPCC forgot to pull the sheets out from the machine before cutting them. So, they suggested to replace the uncut sheets and sending us some set box instead, of course we cannot accept the replacement, especially, knowing that the KH gaff will not be printed again.
USPCC had to make another run on the printing machine, and everytime they start the machine, at least 2500 sheets will be printed, that's why they have the minimum quantity of 2500 decks requirement for custom deck, accroding to them, they stop the machine prematurely, so that a little more than 1000 uncut sheets were printed, but we really don't intend to make more than 52 uncuts available,so they scraped all the remaining uncut sheets and ship us the 54.
Because of this situation, the uncut sheets were not shipped to us with the decks, it's still no the way and won't arrive Hong Kong until 10th Nov., so we can only expect to make the uncut sheets available by the end of next month.
The full name of Coterie is "Coterie of Prestidigitation Artists", a registered organization that promotes the art of magic (card manipulation and cardistry as well), you can see it as a magic society at this point, I think we will show a clear idea of what it is by the events we will organize in the futue.
Coterie1902.com is the store/brand name of this society, in which CPA members creations will be released and published.
Hope this helps,
Zenneth
