Card Flash: Bicycle Dragonlord (White Edition) Playing Cards

Currently being fulfilled by TCC Playing Cards, Dragonlord Playing Cards is a fully custom deck designed by UK designer Sam Hayles. The base design consists of Chinese style design elements with the Dragon being the core. The Dragonlord deck is presented in a black and white colorway, a reminisce of the White Ghost deck by Ellusionist.

The deck features custom intricate hand-illustrated dragon Ace of Spades and Jokers. The card backs are the familiar bicycle rider back and face cards are standard with updated color palette with somewhat of a dated look to fit the overall theme. Beautifully done!

The team at TCC Playing Cards did an incredible job with Dragonlord. The design, color and the use of Dragon as the theme are well balanced... and they look AND feel awesome! Kudos to the team!

Available now from TCC Playing Cards.

Deck View: Malibu Playing Cards

Malibu. California. Surf.

After 7 individual release in 2017, Estonian playing card designer Toomas Pintson is back with the first release of the year, Malibu Playing Cards. The deck is inspired by Malibu, a beach city in Los Angeles County, California known for being the home of Hollywood movie stars.

The Malibu deck features a pink-turquoise-blue colorway with custom mirrored back design, Ace of Spades and Jokers with the word 'Surf's Up' incorporated into the design. The colors of the standard courts and pips have been updated to match the color palette of the deck. The colors remind me of the beautiful pink sky sunset and the blue-green colors of the Pacific ocean.

Printed by The United States Playing Card Company on high quality crushed Bee stock, the deck is not only durable but handles amazing! Available NOW from geminidecks.com

Cardistry: Cubeline Playing Cards by Bas John

We've been a fan of Bas John's (Instagram: @basjohn) mesmerizing Cardistry cinemagraph for quite some time. So when we heard that Bas is releasing Cubeline Playing Cards, we got in contact with Bas to find out more. Here's what Bas told us about the back design,

I find the idea of an optical illusion on a back design very interesting. The first time I saw this was with Stripe by Dealersgrip. Cubeline is inspired by this concept.

Crafted for cardistry, the deck features black/white/muted red colorway with an optical illusion 2-way pattern back design, standard pips and recolored semi-custom courts with cute smiley faces.

The deck is presented in a black tuck box with the Cubeline icon prominently featured on the front.

On the cardistry community, Bas told Kardify,

I have been playing with cards for over 10 years now and it’s been amazing to see the community grow from a small group of people, to a community of thousands from all over the world. Working on my own deck of cards has been so much fun, and I honestly can not wait to see these in the hands of our community. I love this art. It has allowed me to make friends from all over the world and I can not wait to see cardistry grow further in the coming years.

The decks will be printed by our friends at Cartamundi on their famous B09 finish. The pre-sale will end on 21st January and the deck will be shipped in April.

I hope to contribute to that by making my flourishes available, and releasing my very own deck of cards. So, with every brick comes 3 of my favorite flourishes that I’ve created: Trapdoorpuzzle, Triqo, and Turning Pages. 

You can find more about these flourishes and the deck on basjohn.com.

News: Apothecary 2 by Seasons Playing Cards Now LIVE on Kickstarter!

The beautiful Apothecary 2 Playing Cards are now LIVE on Kickstarter. Meticulously designed by Alex Chin of Seasons Playing Cards, both Verana Virtues, and Seronda Sentiment playing cards are based on the idea of capturing these invisible concepts like a feeling, or an idea, and then transforming them into very real items [First Look]. According to Alex,

There's nothing like holding a physical, tangible item of some concept like an Insight, or a Virtue and then giving it to someone just to see their reactions. It's probably one of my favorite decks because of this. People are caught off guard because they just don't know what it is, but the packaging makes it look so real.

Because of the subject matter and the design prompt of making something quite literally out of nothing, Alex needed to explore new venues of printmaking to create a product that really stands out as an out of this world item. The results of upgrading and adding all these print techniques into these art packs truly elevated the level of design on these decks.

We asked Alex about the design process for Verana Virtues and Seronda Sentiments,

In terms of the design process sometimes it's easier to follow up a collection because you have a basic framework of design. In this case, however (at least in terms of the back design) it ended up being more difficult than I had expected. The Verana Virtues was a pretty straightforward back design composition given that I had to implement the diamond shape into it, but because of the theme of summer, I ended up having to incorporate some sort of item that displayed a full bloom. This central flower arrangement on paper seemed easy at first, but once I realized that it needed to be a 2-way back design, it took several iterations to get it to look natural while still being legible both ways.

On the consistency of the design across all the packs, Alex said,

The Seronda Sentiments back is probably my favorite of the Apothecary line and literally took me the longest to design. Trying to come up with a unique composition that would compliment the other 3 packs in the collection was a nightmare using the heart since it resembles too much like a spade.

The iterations ended up looking too close to the other designs. Alex continued,

It was only until maybe my 100th go around that I discovered that I could split the heart to either end to get something new. I had to add a central element to it to really bind the two halves together but it worked out well. I call the design the Broken Heart.

If you like what you’ve read here and want to support the Apothecary 2 playing cards, you can find it on Kickstarter here. Pledge starts at $14 and both decks will be printed by the US Playing Card Co.