UnitedCardists.com - The forum for Cardistry, Magic, Custom Decks and All Things Playing Cards.

Jerichoholic and 4oC inspired a question I thought might be fun to see everyone's answers to

What is the hardest you have worked, or craziest story, to get a deck of cards you have had??

Hired a Chinese Private-Eye from the suburbs of Hong-Kong to follow a Bund18 employee to their warehouse?

Gotten a passport to get up into Canada after hearing a local hobby store up there had an Unbranded Black Reserve note randomly for $20?

Or like 4.of.Clubs did you "made a deal with some blogger that posted about the store where I spotted the deck in the corner of one of his pictures." for that Ginza Itoya deck??

Paid way too much for a green Rarebit *coughmecough*

I would love to hear your story.


For me it was the Blue Logan Punk:Chaos to Couture deck, probably my favorite deck in my collection; I ended up having to track down the warehouse number of the company that sold them after they were featured at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of the Punk:Chaos to Couture show. The company listed on their website that they were sold out but after numerous calls, emails and a little social engineering, I was able to contact their warehouse directly and find out they had one that had apparently never been counted in their stock (no. 3 out of 300). The whole process took nearly 6 months of hunting, but once I was able to contact the companies warehouse I had the deck less than a week later.

Drove 50 miles to get a few. Red Flying Machines

Couple weeks later, went to a random wal--mart ' and they had 6 of them.

Maybe Should start a Topic "How Stupid did you become to get that one deck."

Justin O. wrote:Or like 4.of.Clubs did you "made a deal with some blogger that posted about the store where I spotted the deck in the corner of one of his pictures." for that Ginza Itoya deck??

When I said I made a deal it was actually a lot work to it... The whole transaction took about 6 months (from when I first contacted the blogger). After I found the blog, I looked up her facebook page (it was a public fan page) and contacted her. I guess she didn't really check facebook that often and didn't responded until 3 months after my inquiry. Anyways, we negotiated the details (took another couple months since she still didn't check facebook very often ), worked out payment as she didn't have PayPal... finally got the deck shipped when I was visiting Taiwan earlier this month!

One more deck I got in December is the Snoopy Museum deck, it's not really that hard to find but I'm happy and feel proud of the search as well. I found the deck pretty much at cost from a Taiwanese procurement service that sells Japanese snoopy merchandise (there are lots of these services in Asian). The store was also not card related as the deck was just 1 of the many snoopy merchandise they sell (and they only had 1 deck). Again, this was also from just googling the deck and going through many many search results.

I guess that's the moral of my stories is you can find some good gems from googling the deck in either the origin language or the languages of the countries around it (I searched in Chinese but had some luck in Japanese before too)! GO HUNT 'EM DECKS!

cere23 wrote:Maybe Should start a Topic "How Stupid did you become to get that one deck."

Ditto, or spend too much $$$ for a deck and 2000 of them get released 1 week later...