No amateur or professional can doubt that Ondrej Psenicka is one of the most promising and successful card magicians on the international stage. His career and his charming performance has allowed him to go really far. But talking about Ondrej is also talking about Butterfly, the deck which revolutionized in 2016 the concept of card marking. Now, after 3 years and a production of almost 35,000 decks in several editions, he has just launched the new series of BUTTERFLY BLACK…
Following the successful Pride of Peacocks decks, Arcadia Playing Cards remain true to their elegant style that combines an atmosphere of mystery with beautiful illustrations. Thus, they have just released THE CONJURER. The Conjurer is inspired by classical, almost ancestral, magic in which magicians were a kind of sorcerers with supernatural powers in the spectator’s eyes. This inspiration has covered the deck with magical objects, animals and characters. One of the most careful aspects of the cards is…
This is one of those occasions when Max Playing Cards recovers the essence of its creation many years ago. The passion for playing cards collection finds a special sense in those decks that have been created by the pure pleasure to create, outside of the market and the satisfaction of a growing and worrying escalation of speculation to which many (and almost always the “most important” ones) creators have ended up succumbing. There are people in the world whose talent…
Arcadia Playing Cards, a new and young company, was born out of a passion for playing cards and design. Their new work combines elegance and refinement in the first deck of the series: ARCADIA PRIDE OF PEACOCKS. The inspiration comes from the Peacock, majestic bird symbol of royalty and immortality. Its symbolic meaning has been linked to great civilizations such as the Persian culture, the one that gives the designs a special charm through elaborate patterns and elegant shapes. In…
Art Of Play was created in 2013 by the popular magicians Dan&Dave with the aim of offering a carefully selected collection of designer playing cards. Although they have expanded their business to other items such as puzzles and games, playing cards are still the flagship product. With all these items they have built an image that mixes beauty and elegance with mystery and, of course, magic. Among their activities, Art Of Play also produces their own line of decks teaming…
After successfully funding his first deck Hypnotik on Kickstarter, Sven Philipp (Spielkartenshop.com) has teamed up again with Sam Hayles (DOSEprod) to offer a new and interesting deck: VOODOO. Sam is especially known for his disturbing designs in which skeletons and skulls are protagonists. This dark and mysterious aesthetic perfectly matches the inspiring source source of this deck, voodoo, an ancestral belief considered one of the oldest religions in the world. The illustrations are extremely striking and fundamentally monochromatic, except for the…
He has been showing and creating a huge expectation with teasers and mockups about his new deck. Finally, Lorenzo Gaggiotti (Stockholm 17 Playing Cards) launches his latest creation: THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SPADE. When a designer with the talent and imagination of Lorenzo creates a new deck, inspiration usually comes from many sources, and that makes you to discover something new every time you contemplate the designs. In THE HOUSE OF THE RISING SPADE the artist has taken…
Apart from their well-known LUXX series, JP Playing Cards (JP Games) don’t stop working on other own produced decks. The most recent one is COBRA. For COBRA, JP has counted again on the talent of Rick Davidson. With an idea based on versatility, JP’ head, Paul Middleton, was looking for a reference to some of his favorite decks (such as DCM’s Elites or T11’s Monarchs) that would be interesting for any kind of customer. The design of the faces basically follows…
Crowfunding has not only served to make new creators convert their designs in real cards, but also many consolidated companies traditionally dedicated to the playing cards market have found the opportunity to launch cards with their own label. This is the case of Sven Philipp (Spielkartenshop.com), an online store with one of the largest playing card catalogs in Europe. They have just started their new crowdfunding adventure the HYPNOTIK deck. For this first campaign, Sven offers a deck…
This is not the first time we have seen a modern restoration of an old deck but I think this is the most beautiful restoration I have seen lately: DONDORF HUNDERTJAHKARTE. Bernhard Dondorf was a long-lived German card maker born and based in Frankfurt who created a lithograph company and who always worked with innovative techniques. The most notable of these techniques was the chromolithography, patented in the mid-nineteenth century and which Dondorf elevated to the category of graphic art…