Alice in Wonderland Playing Cards
$14.99
← The effects
Collectible Playing Cards
Decks bought to be looked at rather than played with — foil, transparency, custom courts — and the overlap between collecting them and performing with them.
- Difficulty
- Beginner
- Performs
- Close-Up, Walk-Around
- Type
- Card Effect
What they see
The effect from the front
Not an effect, and worth saying so plainly: these decks are collected, traded and displayed as much as they are dealt.
What a custom deck does in performance is quieter. A deck people want to look at buys you attention before anything has happened, and a spectator who asks to see the cards is a spectator already leaning in. Performers who work close often carry one deck for method and one for conversation.
Against that, every custom deck costs you something. Unfamiliar courts and indices slow a spectator's reading of their own card, and a deck too beautiful to crease is a deck you will handle too carefully.
Provenance
Where it comes from
Playing cards have been collected since the eighteenth century, and antique decks — transformation decks, early American and European printings, tax-stamped editions — have an established market entirely separate from magic. We do not deal in those; they are bought at auction and through specialist dealers, and condition decides nearly everything about what one is worth.
The modern collectible deck is a different and much younger thing, built on crowdfunding from around 2010 onward, where print runs are deliberately limited and the tuck case is designed as carefully as the faces. Foil, embossing, edge gilding and transparent stock all belong to that period.
Learning it
What it takes
Nothing to learn, but something to decide.
If a deck is for performing, handling beats appearance every time: it has to shuffle, spread and survive being handled by strangers. If it is for a shelf, none of that matters and the tuck case matters a great deal.
Buying one deck to do both jobs is the usual mistake. Most performers who collect end up with two drawers, and they are right to.
What you need
Props for the Collectible Playing Cards
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Effects worth reading next
Card Effect
The Stripper Deck
A deck tapered down one edge so a reversed card can be found by touch — the workhorse gaff that does a dozen tricks and asks almost nothing.
Card Effect
The Svengali Deck
A spectator names a card, the deck is riffled to show every card different, and the named one is the only one there — the trick deck that has sold at fairgrounds for a century.