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As many of you know, I’ve been doing history cards for several years. Most of which I don’t advertise here or seek funds on Kickstarter. I know most collectors aren’t as keen on these.
With that said, I am going to launch a Kickstarter for a new subscription service. With this service, subscribers will get a new deck of history playing cards each month. Check out the preview Kickstarter page and let me know what you think.

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/12 ... n=e1bd5928" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;" onclick="window.open(this.href);return false;

Looks good RJ.

Quick one...Any chance if you can share your insights around the factory tour you undertook a few months back. I heard about it in another post I think but could not find the info.

I am a curious person and really interested in knowing how your tour go wrt the visit and what are the insights, positives and negatives that you see.

You can even share it through a PM if you'd like.

I visited three different factories while I was there in China. The first one primarily focuses on tarot cards. Unfortunately they didn’t show me the production floor. We only met for dinner and discussion. The second factory was very affordable. They were a small operation, what I was expecting to see. The third factory, the one I’ve used for many years, completely surprised me. Their facility was a lot bigger and more modern than I expected. In fact, it rivals in size to USPCC. This is a brand new facility that they moved into last fall. I’m not sure what the previous facility looked like. The workers seemed happy and very knowledgeable. I was surprised to learn that many live there in dormitories. I’m not sure if they live there all the time or if they just stay there some of the time. Feel free to ask me any questions. By the way, WJ has improved greatly in quality. Still not Bicycle level but definitely a lot closer than they used to be.

rjtomlinson1977 wrote:I visited three different factories while I was there in China. The first one primarily focuses on tarot cards. Unfortunately they didn’t show me the production floor. We only met for dinner and discussion. The second factory was very affordable. They were a small operation, what I was expecting to see. The third factory, the one I’ve used for many years, completely surprised me. Their facility was a lot bigger and more modern than I expected. In fact, it rivals in size to USPCC. This is a brand new facility that they moved into last fall. I’m not sure what the previous facility looked like. The workers seemed happy and very knowledgeable. I was surprised to learn that many live there in dormitories. I’m not sure if they live there all the time or if they just stay there some of the time. Feel free to ask me any questions. By the way, WJ has improved greatly in quality. Still not Bicycle level but definitely a lot closer than they used to be.

Love it, thanks for sharing. Any chance if you have some pics etc. to share.

Here's some photos of their facility. It was six full floors of playing card manufacturing. The sixth floor was mainly storage but the other floors were various stages of production. With USPCC, they're factory is all on one level but with WJ they use large freight elevators to travel between the floors.

Great idea, Not really my thing, especially because it will be only U.S. history decks, but as a suggestion, for international backers, would you consider an alternative plan? like waiting 3 months and ship all 3 decks at once to avoid high shipping rates? Actually not sure if this will have a lot of international backers, for the same reason (there's also the problem with waiting 2 to 3 months to get international packages these days.
But the cards look great, good job!

I feel much the same way, too much American history and not enough world history for my liking.

Many of the decks are tailored for the Smithsonian museums... however, there's still a lot of international history. For example, the Russian Revolution has no American history. The History of Aviation has a lot of international history. The French played a major role in early aviation and the Russians played a vital role in the development of space travel. Then of course the history of the Space Race is equally devoted to both America and Russia.
If the series continues next year, I'll be sure to include more international history.

I got the color proofs back from the printer already and it should be going to print this upcoming week.

Update on printing. Here's the back designs for the various decks.