So this thread has helped me out tremendously. As I was going through the decks I have so far, I noticed a ton of differences from deck to deck. Which I thought was interesting, because I never would have imagined such variances on playing cards. I'm familiar with it in the action figure realm, I collected those for years, and was a completionist. But crap, seeing the differences between just 3 decks has made me realize the completionist is going to have to take a backseat.
I noticed with the Arcane decks, a few came with no seal. Two white and two black, some have it, some don't. From what I gather, the E on the bottom signifies older prints where the eagle is present on newer ones. Did they abandon seals on the newer prints?
I told you that being a completist was a terrible idea with playing cards...
The best guess is that Ellusionist had a run where the seals were either forgotten by accident or not ready in time and the cards couldn't wait because of the demand for them. Since Arcanes have custom seals, it seems unlikely that they'd abandon them, especially since the current trend is for custom seals rather than no seal at all. You could say Ellusionist was ahead of the curve on that one! Don't know if it would be true, but you could say it!
In the last few months, Ellusionist has "split" into two companies, sort of - the second one is the Ellusionist Playing Card Company, and that's the one with the bird logo. It's bound to make spectators curious when your playing cards were made by a magic company, right?
The new logo came into being around the same time they released their Texas-sized close-up mat, which has the logo emblazoned across the center. They appear to be keeping the "E" logo for the magic gear and using the bird logo just for the playing cards and card accessories.
Pick from T11's site of the Tuck box opening from the Deck One Second Edition. It's notched and it looks like there is a roman numeral "II" on the lid.
This is the lid from the decks I received today, 1st Edition...straight lid, no notch. The box itself has a very smooth coloring and no signs of "Distress"
Most collectors picked up on those differences immediately when they were released. The Roman numeral "II" is actually the Arabic numeral "11", as in Theory11. They often find ways to fit an "11" into the designs of many of their decks, especially on the tuck boxes.
The idea for the second edition box was that people noticed that as they carried around their DeckONE decks, the metallic finish on the tuck boxes started to show wear. On most tucks this would be terrible news, but on these it made the "metal" looks aged and weathered, which a lot of people thought was pretty cool. So version two comes "pre-distressed". It's the only deck I've ever seen that effect on. But as mentioned before, the cards in the box are 100% identical between the two versions.
Thankfully, T11 appears to have stopped calling such improvements "version two" and simply calls them improvements, such as when a new print run of the Sentinels was created with an improved finish and some slight design tweaks to the box. Most collectors hated that, though there are a few who are a little more tightly wound than most - they consider even slight print run variations to be different versions, such as when the version one Guardians had a slight tweak to the T11 logo on the bottom of the box. I was trying to buy some version two decks from him, as advertised on eBay, but he was actually selling the second print run of version one. When I explained there was a wholly new version that was released, he insisted that it must be version three, regardless of what T11 was calling it, never mind that it's their deck, right?
