I recently bought a bunch of playing cards to make my own gimmicks for Alex Elmseley’s Dazzle. It was harder than I thought.
Some playing cards are straight up impossible to split cleanly. The printed layer is too thin and will simply rip instead of separate from the middle layer. I’ve been forced to just glue them together and suffer the extra thickness.
Some playing cards can only be split from one side. I guess they use different papers on the face and back. One side will to be easy to grab and pull and the other will just rip.
I also found out that there’s a lot of size discrepencies in older playing cards. Very few cards are made to the current standard of 2.5 inches by 3.5 inches. Many are 2.25 inches by 3.5 inches, but even then these aren’t exact. Some cards differ by less than a millimeter. Trying to cut the bigger card at these tolerances is extremely tricky and often depending on the card stock the blade will leave an ugly ridge. I decided to not bother cutting for some really close cases. Corner radius also varies but this matters even less. I won’t be performing this in a super close up environment anyways.
Anyways I now have a bunch of decks that are missing anywhere between 5 to 10 cards each and I’m not sure what to do with them.