I'm curious to know if anyone has advice on getting fully custom decks printed (i.e. not standard playing cards, but various specialty decks for use in mentalism effects, such as customized ESP decks, or the cards used in Reminiscence)

I've found at least one on-demand printer that seems to have very good prices, but I'm not sure what the quality of non-USPC cards will be like...

http://www.printerstudio.com/unique-idea......rds.html

Does anyone have any experience with getting custom decks on a very-small-batch or one-off basis, and what I should be looking for in terms of material and finish? There are a few different choices in that regard. In general, I'm not going to be performing any particularly finnicky card sleights with these decks (or, in truth, with any decks, since that's hardly my expertise!) but there are some preparations I'd like to do with roughing spray, so an appropriate finish for that is a high priority.

Thanks in advance for any help you can offer. This is my first post in the Café, and I look forward to learning a lot from the fine folks here (and hopefully contributing too, once I think I have any original ideas of value!)

Welcome to the Café world Synesthesia! First off, it's not easy to find a company who will print you a small quantity of cards for whatever purpose for reasonable prices. HOWEVER, I have heard from several of my friends that http://www.makeplayingcards.com is a fantastic company who prints cards that are of GREAT quality. I personally plan on using them for prototypes of a new deck I'm working on. I know a LOT about playing cards in general, but unfortunately I have no experience with which finishes work best with roughing fluid; my deepest apologies. I sincerely hope that these few comments I've made can assist you in any way.

Cheers!

-Eric

Thanks Eric! It looks like the selections at MPC are essentially identical to those from PrinterStudio, so I suppose these kinds of custom decks may be fairly standard from online on-demand printers.

One follow-up: do you have any thoughts on the choice between 300gsm "smooth" and 310gsm "linen" card stock/finish? My instinct is that the higher-quality linen finish would be closer to a USPC deck, but I'm not really sure. I'm also guessing that the 100% plastic cards, while possibly useful in specialized circumstances, are probably very different in feel from standard cards...

If you want something closer to USPC and a GREAT deck, choose the linen finish; it's apparently amazing. That's what I'm going to use.

Excellent, I'm going to do the same. I'm thinking I may order one of the decks I'm designing in plastic too, since there's nothing fancy I need to do with it and it'd be nice if it lasted a long time; I may get one of the cheaper decks as well since I bet those are good for artificially aging, and I like using antique-looking props in some effects... If I do either or both I'll post anything I discover about the relative quality.

I bought 3 times from makeplaying cards, twice poker size and one tarot size. In the 2 poker size I chosen 310 tarot has one only option of 300. I am a hobbist so I use the cards with simple sleights ie elmsley, double lift things like that, not faros or passes.
For my simple sleight the cards work fine.

The shipping is fast enough, and in the 2 poker size I have few cards with some printing issues that were quickly solved and replacement sent very fast, no questions asked.

Pablo

Here's a link to some photos of makeplayingcards.com. Think that might be able to show their quality. https://plus.google.com/u/0/photos/102065644322087488676/albums/5909233582908093697. I currently use them for my projects and I'm not thinking of changing to any other printers anytime soon.

To make the above link work you have to remove the period at the end. Once you do that you can see that they seem to do nice work.

Ted

Thanks everyone! Definitely going to go with MPC. Not sure why their prices are slightly higher than the original quote I found, but since they are dedicated to playing cards, I'm going to assume the few extra dollars equal a more carefully-made product rather than just yet another item from a promo-junk printer.

I'm still curious to know if anyone as tried roughing these or other custom cards -- but either way, I'll be trying it soon!

I did not, but I am sure it will work like in a regular bicycle card.
For my poker orders I asked for the plastic card case, it is nice to keep the cards or anything else for 30c or so.
The tarot cards only came wrap.

Another thing, I did not print poker cards but rather packet tricks with tarot cards, for instance I printed several wild cards sets, the most work is to create the actual artwork for the back and the front of the cards, but after a while you get the knack to it.

I used GIMP for the edits of the cards

Yeah, I'm already working on some vector designs for card backs (I'm also not printing poker cards, but rather some custom decks for mentalism routines). I work as a graphic designer so thankfully the skills & software are already in my wheelhouse! Once I've completed and tested my back designs I plan to make them available here for others to use -- I figure a small selection of free high-resolution card backs would be a useful resource for the community.