Stars of Magic Collectors Edition by Lo Scarabeo (Marked Deck)(KS)

[Rob Wright]

Stars of Magic Collectors Edition

On occasion of the 26th World Championship of Magic in 2015 (with Rimini - Italy - as the host city), Lo Scarabeo is making a celebration double deck dedicated to the history of magic and to the artists that made it: Alexander Herrmann, Giuseppe Pinetti, Robert-Houdini, Harry Kellar, Chung Ling Soo, and of course Harry Houdini among others...

The two decks come with of course a different back (BLACK and WHITE), but also with 56 cards (BLACK) and 54 (WHITE) fully illustrated and totally different (illustrations in the BLACK deck are different from the illustrations in the WHITE deck), in total 108 different illustrations.

The BLACK deck includes 2 extra cards (a "3 1/2" card for a simple and funny magic trick and a card with the front totally white).

Card backs are one-way (have subtle differences between top and bottom), useful to a variety of tricks:

[Don Boyer]

It's an art deck.  OK for what it is, I guess, but it doesn't light any fires under me.  Taking a deck filled with art that has magicians all over it and making it a marked/magic deck isn't exactly the brightest idea in all of magicdom as I see it, ranking up there with creating a coating for cards and calling it "Magic Finish"...

[Worst Bower]

Lo Scarabeo doesn't need KS money, they've been around for decades. It seems like they're using KS more for advertising than funding. It's interesting that they put USPC as their stretch goal. From what I have gathered, they've only been using European printers up to the present.

[Don Boyer]

Lo Scarabeo doesn't need KS money, they've been around for decades. It seems like they're using KS more for advertising than funding. It's interesting that they put USPC as their stretch goal. From what I have gathered, they've only been using European printers up to the present.

Many companies have been coming to Kickstarter not because they need the cash to make the project.  They do it because it provides them a limited-risk way of raising the money to pay for it AND because it's where most of the activity in the custom-deck market is these days.  They're going where the eyeballs are, in simple terms.

[Worst Bower]

Thanks Don, it seems I've severely underestimated the KS or custom cards market. Do you think we'll eventually enter peak card and have the card bubble burst? It's feeling eerily similar to the comic book bubble of the 90's. Everybody is making limited edition runs and non-vintage decks are fetching hundreds of dollars on ebay.  I'm not sure if the demand can sustain itself.

[Don Boyer]

Thanks Don, it seems I've severely underestimated the KS or custom cards market. Do you think we'll eventually enter peak card and have the card bubble burst? It's feeling eerily similar to the comic book bubble of the 90's. Everybody is making limited edition runs and non-vintage decks are fetching hundreds of dollars on ebay.  I'm not sure if the demand can sustain itself.

It's a topic that's been discussed before, both on the forum and in the pages of CARD CULTURE.  I think it's the aftermarket that runs the risk of collapse more than the retail segment.  There's a few hyper-inflated decks out there right now.

There are market forces at work on Kickstarter that weren't in play when comics were the big deal they were in the '90s.  Think about it - could anyone with adequate talent make a comic book and have it professionally printed?  Would an inadequately-popular comic never get made because there wasn't enough market interest in it before the first issue was printed, or did comic companies throw stuff out there just to see what would stick, even if it cost them money in the long run?  Was supply calculated to meet demand by using backers and their pledges to determine the size of a print run, or did comic companies simply print all the comics they wanted to sell and cross their fingers that they'd all sell, risking their own cash in the process?

There might be a bubble, but there's also a very different market dynamic at play.  The bulk of the market's activity right now is in crowdfunding, and crowdfunding has a very different set of rules from retail.