Picked up two decks of Caravan cards on ebay. Hadn't realized they were still sealed. When taking them out of the box, I noticed they are aviator cards but with gilt edges. Seems a bit much for a generic brand like Caravan, but maybe Caravan was high end generic? Hard to see the gilt edges in the pics, but you can see how the box reflects off the sides of the cards.
The gilded Aviators may have been a closeout or even a test run. Another possibility was that someone made a private order for gilded Aviators and USPC made far too many. The latter is unlikely but possible; the former is the better choice.
Caravan was one of a handful of brands, such as Mohawk and Torpedo, that USPC used to get rid of leftover stock lying around at a discount when a brand was discontinued or if a print run ran short of boxes or there was an large overrun, hence the lower price at retail. Technically, you can't really call them generic - at least not in the traditional retail sense, where generic refers to an unbranded or store-branded version of a product, usually made less expensively and sold at a lower price but manufactured at the outset with the intent to be sold as such. You could think of them as being almost like seconds of other brands, but without the defects. A better term would be "grab bag" - in comic book stores, sometimes a retailer will get rid of some low-demand comics they have in excess by slipping a few of them at a time into plain brown bags, taping them shut and offering the package sight-unseen at a price lower than regular retail just to get rid of them in bulk. Same principle, but the "in bulk" part applied to store owners, who sold off the decks cheaper to customers because they obtained them cheaper from USPC.
I've only ever seen them packed with Aviators, but that's because toward the end of the sales run of these off-brand decks, USPC had streamlined the number of deck brands they were selling and Aviator was probably the cheapest deck left in their inventory. USPC does have cheaper or equally-as-cheap brands, such as Streamline and Maverick, but they weren't always made in the US and the brands were still part of Arrco until USPC bought them in 1987 - in other words, they might not necessarily have been on the factory floor, having been made elsewhere. To this day, Maverick is being made in China by third-party contracted printers, the last of a handful of brands USPC experimented with in this way at around the turn of this century - other brands included in this experiment at various times were Hoyle (acquired in 2001), Aviator and Streamline. Streamline was even at one point being made in Spain, likely by Fournier shortly after USPC acquired them in 1986.
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