Introducing, The Jerx Deck

[This is not an advertisement. All the decks are spoken for, other than a few that will be going in The Vault as part of my retirement plan.]

Starting next week, the physical reward for those who supported the Jerx, Season Two will start shipping: the first Jerx Deck.

For this deck, I wanted to stick pretty close to the esthetic of the blog so the design and illustration is based upon the work Stasia Burrington has done for this site and The Jerx, Volume 1. Which, in turn, is obviously based on the masthead for Annemann's, The Jinx which was done by Chris Carven. (Thanks to Max Maven for tracking down that illustration credit for me.)

I also owe a big thanks to Bill Kalush and The Expert Playing Card Company, both for lowering their minimum order, dealing with the incompetence of myself and the people helping me out who had never worked on this type of project before, and for pushing the deck through the process quickly so I could have it out around the new year.

Here it is, The Jerx Deck #1.

The deck is black and white with a classic finish on the cards, housed in a beautiful uncoated matte paper tuck box. I'm not sure what all that means either.

I know what you're thinking. "Oh, Andy, is this one of those decks you have to liberally butter in order to be able to do your moves?"

Not at all. These babies will glide right out of the box, first time, every time. (If you need to do a sleight other than the glide, then I suggest you use another deck of cards, hot-shot.)

While the faces are standard, the deck does feature custom jokers as well as the ace of spades.

I also did that self-indulgent, narcissistic thing where I put my own face on one of the court cards. Here's me...

That might look like a normal card face, but that's actually what I look like in real life. I'm a dainty little fop with pale skin and dull lifeless hair that hangs to my shoulders and I constantly have the 500-stare of a Vietnam vet.

Finally, we all know a big problem in the premium card industry is people going out and creating their own bootleg playing cards with an office copy machine. We've all had it happen to us where we open a deck of cards that we've paid big money for, we start dealing through them and then realize, "Wait... I think this deck may have be printed on regular copy paper and then cut with a pair of scissors." To combat deck piracy, each case has this admonishment, inspired by the words in Harry Lorayne's Apocalypse magazine...