The next deck by Mandrake Playing Card Company is a zombie themed deck with custom pips and royalty called Rotters. Art is done by Gregory Welter. I'm not sure if I'm going to use the black or white back, but the consensus so far is the black looks better. I'm planning to make these live on Kickstarter next month (just in time for Halloween).

I know what you are thinking. A podcast about playing cards? Why would anyone listen to that? Playing cards are so visual that a podcast wouldn't do them justice!

I think a podcast could give our hobby great exposure. There are already a lot of board game podcasts out there and they sometimes talk about card games, but rarely talk about just decks of cards. Collecting custom decks as a hobby has grown tremendously with the help of crowd funding sites like Kickstarter, and this is bringing a lot of people into our hobby and getting them interested in more than just these custom decks.

So my question is, what would you want to hear someone talk about on a podcast about playing cards?

I've been looking at how people price their decks on Kickstarter (in an attempt to make my own campaigns match up with others costs) and found some interesting data. I thought you guys might be interested in it. I took two ongoing campaigns that are both doing well (Arcana and Gettysburg) and broke down their rewards, using a base shipping cost of $6/deck + $1/extra deck per order, and assuming that all prices have US shipping included. Not including early bird rewards.

Arcana
# of decks and reward price	shipping	price of decks	price of each deck
1 - $15	6	9	9
2 - $25	6+1	18	9
3 - $36	6+2	28	9.333
4 - $47	6+3	38	9.5
12 - $135	6+11	118	9.8333

If you take the price point of the decks at each reward level and expand it, you get something like this:

1 deck	9
2 decks	18
3 decks	28
4 decks	38
5 decks	48
6 decks	58
...
12 decks	118

So you can see that he is charging $9 for the first two decks and then $10 for each deck after that. This ensures that every deck someone buys makes him more money. As of my writing this, Arcana has sold more than 4,000 decks (probably close to 5,000), basing his price on MPC's Air Linen cost that means his is paying around $2.50 per deck to have it printed. Now, lets take a look at Gettysburg.

Gettysburg
# of decks and reward price	shipping	price of decks	price of each deck
1 - $11	6	5	5
2 - $21	6+1	14	7
4 - $42	6+3	33	8.25
6 - $63	6+5	52	8.666
8 - $84	6+7	71	8.875
12 - $105	6+11	88	7.333

If you take the price point of the decks at each reward level and expand it, you get something like this:

1 deck	5
2 decks	14
3 decks	23.5
4 decks	33
5 decks	42.5
6 decks	52
7 decks	61.5
8 decks	71
9 decks	80.5
10 decks	90
11 decks	99.5
12 decks	109 88

He sells the first for $5, the second he adds $9, then starts adding $9.5 to each deck after. That is, until he gets to the full block (12 decks) where he gives his backers $22 off the price. That's 3 free decks! As of my writing, he has sold about 400 decks, at MPC's cost for their standard Linen stock, he would be paying about $4.60 a deck.

I think the Arcana pricing structure is pretty solid and it keeps the $25 range at 2 decks, which is what most people want from what I've seen (one deck to play with and one to keep wrapped up).

What are your thoughts?

I really like non-standard decks (suits, card count, graphics) and I've come across some really great ones on BGG like the Stardeck and Empire Deck. These are decks with more than 5 suits, originally so that more people could play Bridge together. I don't know if it's just because 5+-player Bridge isn't a huge draw, but it seems like these just aren't a big thing. I can't find any on eBay or Amazon and the ones that have websites are out of stock. Are 5+ suit decks just not as popular as when these decks came out (early 90s), and what do you guys think of them?

I'm really interested in international decks, the Italian playing cards really whet my appetite for different suits and styles. I have found Spanish and Chinese decks on eBay but everyone seems to think their deck is rare on there. Is there any place like dealextreme.com or another wholesaler that sells international decks? Or am I going to have to start making online friends from these countries? Haha!