showing off my playing card collection
Posted 9/20/2024
I want to test image hosting on my website, so there's my excuse to show off my playing card collection!
I have a collection of a bunch of different types of playing cards that i've been slowly gathering as gifts or purchases since i left college. If I collected every single French playing card deck I came across it would be wildly out of control, so I have a few rules as to what can be in my collection:
- The deck should have a unique game that can be played with it, however a broader application or more than one game is prefferable. (this is why I don't just have a bunch of "board games" that are card based or tcgs/ccgs since they're highly specific)
- If the deck is based on French playing cards, the design of the cards should be exceptional in some sort of way. this can be like unique art, design, function, etc.
- Gifts are always accepted.
My collection can neatly fit on my desk as of now, but in it I have 19 decks in it currently! (i technically have another french playing card deck somewhere but I can't find it and might've left it at my parent's house so I can't count it right now.) The breakdown is as follows: 8 French style, 2 Italian style, 3 Hanafuda style, 4 tarot style, and 2 Dnd related decks.
French Playing Cards
The first group and the largest are my French style playing cards. these are styled like the "typical" playing cards, 4 suits, 13 cards in each suit, jack, queen, king, 2 jokers usually. two in the bunch have some particular standout qualities but I'll talk about them when we get there.
first are my "German Playing Cards" which are in a simple paper card box that I made myself. These I got at ren fest a few years ago, and they're so cool I don't usually break these out unless to show them off.
These are all woodcut illustrations by Jost Amman, a significant artist of the German Renissance in the 16th century. The suits are Books, Jars, Printers Ink Pads, and Cups. There's no card back, they're just printed on yellow cardstock. These are so incredibly stylish and inspiring. They're much alike to the imagery on tarot cards, there's a unique illustration for each card and sometimes the suit and number signifier is incorporated into the scene or used as a framing device.
Next are the Cherry Republic playing cards. Each card depicts a bear getting into situations or causing a rukus. They're just a bit silly and charming and the card backs being a full illustration is neat! Cherry Republic is a cherry-based business based out of Glen Arbor, Michigan, USA. They make candy, sauces, and all sorts of food stuffs. This deck was a gift.
This is a real simple one, it's just a deck where a unique piece of "classical" fine art is printed on it. Not really much to say about it, but this is one of the decks I carry in my backpack when I go places just in case I ever need to break out a deck of cards. This one was also a gift.
I got this deck at Target a few years ago when they were having a camping-focused front section of the store where stuff is like $1-5. I was attracted to the really simple graphic design of these, the card backs are really nice, also the funny little "Camping Hacks" for this deck of cards. There's no jokers in this deck too.
Technically a French playing card deck, these are Pentiment the game branded playing cards. In the game Pentiment there's a bit of a gamling game you can play called Lansquenet, so a playing card merch item is a natural solution. I really love Pentiment and immediately bought these when I saw them in the Xbox store. In this, the suits are hearts, leaves, acorns, and bells. Additionally, it says that the deck comes with rules for "Samuel's Lansquenet" however the deck misprinted (and as far as I'm aware all of them produced are) so there's only rules on one side of the card. The rules for Lansquenet can instead be found on the Pentiment Wikia lol. You can play this game with regular playing cards too, but the Pentiment art is absolutely to die for.
Another standard deck, save for the playful rudeness of them. I forgot to take a picture of the card backs for these, but it's the same as the box, just shrunk down to the card size. I like the "night mode" approach to them with the cards having black backgrounds rather than the standard white. This one was a gift.
My newest and most exciting deck is this one by Forteller: The Deck of Many Dice. My friend got one of the decks at Gen Con this year and I was so interested I had to get one of my own when it was available. The fun thing about these cards is that on top of the standard French playing card suits, there's also the numbers related to each of the seven polyhedral dice on them, which are often used for TTRPGs these days. The idea is rather than having to break out your dice sets every time, just pull a random card from the deck, look for the die you're trying to roll, and there's your result! It's sooooo interesting and I'm really curious about how they determined the probability values with having 52 cards to spread the dice values across. I've yet to break them out for a session of DnD but I think it'd be fun to try them out!
The last of my French playing cards is the deck made for the TTRPG Necrobiotic. I was a kickstarter backer for it and opted to upgrade to get the playing cards as well. All of the face cards have really cool illustrations, even the standard suits are incredibly interesting, and the edges have gold foil on them. There was a bit of discourse and drama surrounding the book when it fully released, and I no longer have my physical copy of the book, but I kept the cards since they're very cool. (If I had any personal complaints about the TTRPG, it felt like 80% Lore rather than mechanics to sink my teeth into, leaving me feeling weird about how to write scenarios or run games with it.)
Italian Playing Cards
Next are my Italian playing cards! I have two decks of Italian cards, and you'll notice that the art styles and even the sizes of the cards are very different! That's because different regions of Italy produce differently styled cards, usually depending upon the influences in the area. The Napoletane card suits are cups, clubs, swords and coins, while the Triestine card suits are cups, coins, swords, and batons. Italian playing cards are unique since they only have 40 cards in them, with 10 in each suit. Their face cards are Knave, Knight, King and are numerically 8, 9, and 10 respectively.
I taught myself how to play Scopa and Briscola a few years ago and I love to teach Scopa to people since it's so easy to pick up and play, even with a deck of French playing cards (you just take out 8-10 and determine what suit will be the "coins" instead and play.
Hanafuda Cards
I fucking love Koi-koi. I wish I was playing Koi-Koi right now.
These are my two "standard" Hanafuda decks, the right/brown backed cards are actually Nintendo branded ones! They're still producing Hanafuda decks to this day. The left/black backed ones were a gift. The art for Hanafuda cards have been pretty universalized and there's nary a difference between the art on either of these two's cards which is why I'm showing them together.
But then that makes it just that makes my third Hanafuda deck that much more interesting!
I have standard playing card sized Hanafuda cards too! These were designed in Hawaii and even include rules, symbols, and Yaku guides for Hawaiian style Hanafuda. However, I tend to just play Japanese style Hanafuda (Koi-Koi) with them anyway since that's the gameplay I know and Hawaiian style is pretty unique. Speaking of unique, rather than just enlarge the standard art for Hanafuda cards, every single card has been re-illustrated to fit the new format! Here I've brought out the same cards from the standard deck and the playing card deck so you can see how they compare.
I really love my playing card Hanafuda deck and also bring this one almost everywhere I go in the hopes of teaching people how to play so they can play with me. I thought I lost this deck earlier this year and almost lost my mind but I had just put it in a secret pocket in my backpack lol.
Tarot Cards
The last group of my collection are my tarot decks. I'm not much of a tarot person, and they've certainly had a massive resurgance in popularity in the past 10 years so this part of my collection is probably a lot smaller than one would expect. Also, did you know that there are game rules for French Tarot? It's a trick-taking card game which is a style of card game that's fallen out of fashion in our modern time but I've seen people creating new games based on these style of games in recent years and I'm interested to try them out!
The easiest to talk about are my Persona themed tarot card decks. As a merch bonus for Persona Q: Shadow of the Labyrinth on 3DS, it came with a set of the major arcana cards as featured in persona 3 and 4.
The other Persona deck was produced as a part of a Persona fanzine project I participated in during college. I didn't make any of the cards but I did produce a piece for the zine and got a few art prints and this deck of cards with it for participating. The zine and these cards probably aren't available anywhere anymore.
This was the first tarot deck in my collection, it was a gift from my current housemate from around when we first started living together. All the art in it has been adapted with cute little white cats in the places of all the humanoid figures in the Rider-Waite Smith deck art. The cards are also the height of standard playing cards making they much easier to handle and transport.
A gift from my housemates this past year was the Dungeons and Dragons tarot deck. The traditional suits have been changed to strength, wisdom, intelligence, and charisma, which I think is neat. Every card is really well designed and I'm so in love with the easter eggs a Forgotten Realms nerd like me can enjoy.
In the interpretation book every card also comes with a prompt that you could use for a plothook for an adventure which is a lot of fun! Pull a card to set the scene for your next mission!
Dnd Cards
The Dnd tarot cards were technically tarot cards first, but Dungeons and Dragons have some in-universe card games that have been actually produced and now I own lol. And these decks you can technically do divination spreads with too.
I have never played the Curse of Strahd campaign so I don't know anything about it (in case I ever do play in one), but I do know that while building the campaign you literally do a Tarokka spread in order to determine certain aspects about the campaign.
The art on all of these cards are fucking fantastic and macabre, the perfect set dressing for trying to hunt a vampire in Barovia. The deck supposedly was supposed to come with rules on how to play Prophet's Gambit, a card game that is played in universe with these cards but when I got this deck it was plastic wrapped sealed and there were no rules inside lol. The rules have been posted by others online so there still is a way to play it.
I had almost forgotten about this one so it's not in the total picture of my collection, but I got a copy of the recent printing of the Deck of Many Things box and book from a friend who knows I like Dnd and cards. It comes in this really nice box with a slipcover that matches the box design.
Inside the box comes a book with how to use the cards, the cards resting nicely in some divets under the book, and a very nice goblin man that won't just obliterate your campaign by pulling a single card.
I really love the card art in this deck, the majority of the cards use monochrome with big stark splashes of color in some areas. The fun bits are when they include shimmery bits and gold effects on the cards. All the cards have a gold edge to them too making them feel really fancy. I also like since every card was illustrated by a different artist their name is included on small printing at the bottom of the card.
My favorite of the Deck of Many things is the Knight card. "A powerful knight appeared and pledged their loyalty to them. This noble combatant believed that the fates had drawn them to that place and time. This person and the drawer belonged to the same race and sex." This is how it existed in the original version of the card too. Congrats on your new gay lover. And based on the art in this new version of this card, I have a feeling the artist was in on that notion too lol.
That's it (for now)!
And that's my playing card collection! I've been slowly collecting these decks since college and I think it's pretty unique and cool. I love learning about card games and playing card games of all kinds so I'm always going to be on the look out for more. Maybe I'll get to post an update in a year or two to show how my collection has changed and expanded over time.
Anyway thanks for reading! It was fun putting this together to show off everything.