The idea got sneered at in another post, but when it comes to Lady Godiva/Lady of Coventry I'm thinking of offering jewelry. (The historical Godiva reportedly donated a necklace to found a monastery, plus I think my demographic will include a lot of women.)
In your case, there's a specific reason for adding jewelry as it relates to the historical figure of the legend - that works, and rather nicely. Your deck will have an appeal that spreads farther and wider than just the community of playing card collectors. But if it's just tchochkes for tchochkes' sake, why bother? There's flea markets and gift stores for stuff like that. I saw some abstract jewelry for the Bicycle War of Currents deck - I scratched my head for a while over that one. And the guy with the failed deck project that was actually offering to give away homemade CDs of his music with his decks in his reward tiers is one that to this day still boggles my mind. Make a CD or make a deck - but make up your mind! I half-expect some project to come up offering canned foods, pairs of socks, rolls of toilet paper, electronic chopsticks that play music while you eat, Ginsu knives, "The Clapper", leather repair kits, food processors, Chia pets and (in the grand tradition of Japanese vending machines) young women's used panties.
I think that some people take the whole collecting thing a bit overboard. A t-shirt - fine, who won't wear a t-shirt or replace an old one with something different? A t-shirt by an artist beats a goofy-slogan-from-a-tourist-trap t-shirt any day.
Dice... If I get five dice for every deck I pledge, and I pledge for a lot of decks, soon I'm going to need a new home for all of those dice, too. Maybe I jaded - when I used to play paper-and-pencil RPGs, I had all kinds of different polyhedral dice, including ones made of metals and semi-precious stones and even one that had a hundred sides on it (it looked and rolled more like a golf ball filled with sand than anything else), so the colorful lumps of plastic with rounded edges and a "1" pip that's changed to a deck's icon doesn't excite me quite as much. Perhaps if there was a game involving the deck and the dice, and that the icon actually triggered something important in the game, then I'd be at least curious.
Poker chips/sets/card guards... How many do most mortals really require? They're big, they're heavy, they're costly to get and to ship, and most guys who actually play will already possess one. I thought the idea was very cool and think the chips can be gorgeous (Randy, those Ornates of yours really do rock), but you're really going to need only one good set, period.
Uncut sheets... I can understand the desire to own them. I actually have over a half-dozen right now, and I think they're lovely. Funnily enough, I never paid for any of them - they were all gifts! But there does come a point where you run out of room on your walls to hang all of them - then what? They end up sitting in cardboard tubes. Who wants to acquire a lovely collection of art only to stare at the crates it came in? Beyond a certain point, you're acquiring them simply for the sake of acquiring them. Where does the pleasure come from?
Art prints - take everything I said about uncut sheets, then factor in that art prints can be anything from a grand piece of museum-grade work on archival paper with a gorgeous frame to something Junior printed out on the old inkjet that's missing the cyan ink tank and the magenta's half dried-out.
The whole thing that makes collecting playing cards easy and fun is that unless you've got one of the world-class ginormous collections, you can probably keep all of the decks in a single corner of the house with room to spare. Even my collection, which I recently realized has grown a bit more than I thought (somewhere around 1700-1800 decks) still fits in a stack of baseball card collector boxes and two stackable plastic drawers I got from Staples. Assuming no disasters befell my collection, I think I could safely say that if I stopped buying cards now I'd never be without a deck to play with for the rest of my days. And it's because of the size of that collection that I'm cautious about collecting anything else - my wife would only tolerate so much before going crazy on me.
I kid, we love each other, but my collection does cause her some concern. Imagine if I started collecting MORE and DIFFERENT stuff...
So for me, even if it's a deck, I have to ask, "Do I really, really want this to be in my home and will I get some use and enjoyment out of it, or is it another deck of cards for the sake of having yet another deck of cards?" I'm passing on decks more and more often these days, getting very choosy about what I keep.
I was a raving collector of Star Wars memorabilia when I was younger, which expanded to comic books, RPGs, CCGs and other things considered nerdy. Then I hit a point in my life that forced some radical changes on me - some desirable, some far less so. I divorced my now-ex wife and moved from a four-bedroom, four-story home to a one-bedroom apartment. I realized very quickly that I had to leave some things behind or give them away. 90% of the nerd bait went to a niece and a nephew. They sold it off in pieces to local collectors' shops, probably for pennies on the dollar.
And I was shocked at how liberating it felt to have so much less stuff in my life. I kept my books, my DVDs and not a whole lot else. I even gave away a slammin' Sony home theater amp with a 575-watt output, a five-disc carousel player and high-end Infinity speakers (including a large sub-woofer that could break glass with bass) and replaced it all with something that people can enjoy in an apartment without pissing off the whole building. (And even that is presently in storage.) The overall simplification of my life felt unlike anything else I'd experienced. If you've never tried it before, I recommend it.
But hey, perhaps that just me, right?
Poll
(Read 654 times)
