Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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Last one for now. :) This deck is based on several Swiss decks from the 15th Century. They used a different suit system: bells, acorns, flowers, and shields . The actual historical deck also would not have had a 1/Ace. The ten/banner of each suit served the same function as the ace in a modern deck. I added an ace card for each suit so that people could use these cards to play modern games that require a 52-card deck. Rather than a queen and jack these cards have the over and under. The over is indicated by the suit symbol being in an upper corner and the under by the suit symbol being in a lower corner. These cards are almost exactly mini-size so that's the size I made the deck. The color scheme is very close to the original but I made sure each court had their own color combination. Although the specific decks these cards are based on had blank backs, other Swiss/German sets of the time had patterned backs. I recreated two of the documented backs. I find I prefer the flowers in diamonds to the other.

Piatnik and Cartamundi both manufacture versions of this deck but I don't like some of their stylistic choices and, again, the decks are hard to find and expensive. In addition to being printed on modern cardstock these cards are destined to be woodblock printed and stencil painted sometime this summer.

https://scontent-a.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-prn1/t1.0-9/1975166_10201377727225141_702602353_n.jpg
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

Unread post by dazzleguts »

So your going to pull a Simon Wintle? Very cool.
Perhaps you could talk to him about how he made his woodblock and stencil decks.

I've thought about doing a relief print deck, but I would probably go the lazy way and use a softer material than wood. It's easier on the tools too.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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Simon was my first inspiration, but I've since met and corresponded with several people who have done this. And I'm totally cheating. Hand-carving is way too much work for me (and beyond my current artistic skills). I'm using a laser to create the printing blocks and stencils.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

Unread post by dazzleguts »

These remind me of a Jass deck I have. It's a 36 card deck with these aces:
Jass aces.jpg
Isn't laser-cut expensive?
I liked the look of the Calaveras laser cut prints that were done in scratch board first. Yours will probably have a more modern smooth look, but that could be just as attractive in it's own way. Hand printing always looks interesting, and each one hand printed will be unique. I look forward to seeing how it goes.

Will you use an off-white paper to refer to the antique origins?
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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dazzleguts wrote: Isn't laser-cut expensive?
Yes and no. When you compare the cost of having a wood block and stencils laser cut versus the labor cost of doing it by hand, the laser tends to come off pretty well in comparison. I have the advantage of belonging to a makerspace so I can run the laser myself.
dazzleguts wrote:I liked the look of the Calaveras laser cut prints that were done in scratch board first. Yours will probably have a more modern smooth look, but that could be just as attractive in it's own way. Hand printing always looks interesting, and each one hand printed will be unique. I look forward to seeing how it goes.

Will you use an off-white paper to refer to the antique origins?
This is an interesting point. Actual medieval paper was actually very high quality. Run of the mill paper was actually of higher quality than we commonly see today. That's because medieval paper was 100% linen (not linen-feel or linen-look, but actual linen fibers). So it was really quite smooth and pretty bright. BUT... most people don't know that and they expect historical cards to look 'old-timey'. I showed people two different images, one was a picture of the actual ace of coins from the Moorish/Barcelona/Wintle deck. The other was this image that I made from scratch.
https://scontent-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-frc3/t1.0-9/1487266_10201338746450646_890672000_n.jpg
I asked them which was the actual image or which one looked more authentic and they all picked my scratched up image over the original.

So my preference is to do this with an ivory, cream, or eggshell paper (probably a 100% cotton face glued over a cardstock center) BUT I might need to go with a parchment or antique look paper to appeal to modern sensibilities. Ultimately hand-printed decks of cards are a mugs game. You just can't make any significant amount of money with them. Everyone I've talked to who has done this has done it as an experiment or a work of art. Just managing to break even is considered a good outcome. I'm going to hand print some decks just for the experience but I don't see selling more than ten decks. The modern cardstock prints will probably sell a few more but, realistically, it's a small market.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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dazzleguts wrote:These remind me of a Jass deck I have. It's a 36 card deck with these aces:
Jass aces.jpg
The Swiss deck is interesting. The acorns, flowers, and bells are pretty constant. The fourth suit gets changed a lot. Sometimes it's shields, sometimes it's leaves, I've even seen a deck where they put in hawks. Probably a nod to the German/Flemish decks with hunting suits.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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I got my test print for this deck back and it was mixed results. I messed up the back because I failed to extend the design to the edge of the card to get full bleed. Easily fixed. The colors came out right so yay for that. My courts rot. They're way too sloppy and the smaller size does nothing to compensate for this. So I have to re-do those and just do a better job. I'm taking the opportunity to do a little frog-DNA splicing and replace the duplicate Ober of shields with an Ober figure from a different deck. I've also added two suits (hawks and crowns) so now customers can pick the four suits they want to have and this deck can become more German than Swiss if so desired. Print on demand doesn't have a lot going for it price-wise, but the flexibility it offers is pretty darn cool. I added a copyright card to cover my original work, a joker card to indicate the deck is my work and add some flexibility to the deck (like adding aces to the deck), and a couple of information cards which talk about the additional aces and so on.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

Unread post by Mike Ratledge »

variantventures wrote:I got my test print for this deck back and it was mixed results. I messed up the back because I failed to extend the design to the edge of the card to get full bleed. Easily fixed. The colors came out right so yay for that. My courts rot. They're way too sloppy and the smaller size does nothing to compensate for this. So I have to re-do those and just do a better job. I'm taking the opportunity to do a little frog-DNA splicing and replace the duplicate Ober of shields with an Ober figure from a different deck. I've also added two suits (hawks and crowns) so now customers can pick the four suits they want to have and this deck can become more German than Swiss if so desired. Print on demand doesn't have a lot going for it price-wise, but the flexibility it offers is pretty darn cool. I added a copyright card to cover my original work, a joker card to indicate the deck is my work and add some flexibility to the deck (like adding aces to the deck), and a couple of information cards which talk about the additional aces and so on.
...and I tossed you into the "Deck Artist" group as well. Enjoy!
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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What is the Jack of Shields doing? Is the shield the chamber pot? :D
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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It sure looks like he's pissing on it, doesn't it? Other Swiss decks show the Jack of Shields doing the same thing. It must have been some sort 'thing' back then.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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I like the suit concept, Acorns, Bells, Flowers and Shields.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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Just a quick update. I've now got ten suits finished. This is fun because now I can offer people the opportunity to build a deck by choosing which suits they want to include. I also expanded the number of backs they could choose from because people wanted colored backs. I think this is a really good illustration of the flexibility that print on demand services offer us.

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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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@variantventures - Very interesting. Pick a suit. Any suit. It's a build your own deck theme. I think ppl might enjoy this.

I know you probably can't and need to keep the swords separated, but usually the 3 of Swords is depicted like this:
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

Unread post by dazzleguts »

What are the suit signs in the one that's third from the bottom. Looks like a military medal?

With that colour and scale the hawks look more like ravens, but I rather like that.

I like the mix and match option, but half the courts are identical except for a colour change, #s 2, 6, 7, 8, & 9, while the other courts vary more in their figures. If you wanted to put ravens, hearts, swords and bells together you would end up with 3 court sets alike and one different, so it limits the choices.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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sprouts1115 wrote:@variantventures - Very interesting. Pick a suit. Any suit. It's a build your own deck theme. I think ppl might enjoy this.

I know you probably can't and need to keep the swords separated, but usually the 3 of Swords is depicted like this:
The swords and coins are not German/Swiss in origin and my first thought was that I would add all the Latin suits as well. I reconsidered this later, but I'd already done the swords and coins and they were in demand for a standard configuration deck nicknamed 'the power deck' in the suits of swords, shields, coins, and crowns. Not at all historical in composition but people like it. In order to retain the overall design layout of the 'pip' cards I tried to keep the swords in a German/Swiss layout. It's been an ineffective compromise, in my opinion, but people haven't really been complaining.

I'm working on an Italian deck (and a Spanish and French deck) that puts the swords in their proper arrangement. Here's the nine of swords.

Image

This is modeled after the 15th-16th Century minchiate decks. I'm working to produce deliberate 'errors' in color stenciling that would have been a natural by-product of the production process at the time.
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Re: Historical Deck - 15th Century Swiss

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dazzleguts wrote:What are the suit signs in the one that's third from the bottom. Looks like a military medal?

With that colour and scale the hawks look more like ravens, but I rather like that.

I like the mix and match option, but half the courts are identical except for a colour change, #s 2, 6, 7, 8, & 9, while the other courts vary more in their figures. If you wanted to put ravens, hearts, swords and bells together you would end up with 3 court sets alike and one different, so it limits the choices.
Crowns. There's a 16th Century German deck that uses crowns as one of the suits. This crown is taken from that deck.

The 'hawks' are very close to period representations in design and color. You might like this one better.
Image
That's the eight of hawks from a deck I did based on imagery from the Manesse Codex. They're a bit more hawklike and less abstract.

The identical courts are an issue. I'm slowly addressing that issue with the aid of a better artist. Frankly, 95% of the work I was producing for court cards was utter crap, as you can see in my earlier work on this deck.
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