I pre-ordered a copy of the LS Golden Universal from Llewellyn a few weeks ago, and it arrived in the mail today (which surprised me, given that it was not supposed to be available in the U.S. until May). I've only just looked through it. I'm not particularly a fan of this version of the RWS in any of its iterations, but I thought I'd order it to see the gold gimmick in person. Here are my first impressions:
POSITIVES
- Overall, the gold effect is very striking. This deck is definitely one you'd want to use outdoors or near candle light. Only a few cards have a large area entirely stamping in the gold foil (the sun's face on both The Fool and The Sun, for example). The vast majority of cards have smaller touches of gold and the dispersed, concentric effect of gold dots you can see in the online scans. This pattern gives them a truly radiant (almost magical) feeling.
- The black borders without titles look very good against the gold foil here. I've always loathed the multilingual LS titles (nothing takes me out of a reading like all of those words!), and I'm glad to see that they're not present in this deck. I think that all future LS decks should use the number and court coding they've developed lately.
- This deck has, hands down, one of my favorite Devil cards ever. Seriously. In my opinion, the gold foil is used to its greatest effect on this card. Very subtle.
- It could be my eyes, but it looks like they've muted some illustration colors to help bring out brown/yellow tones, which look even better next to the foil.
- The card backs are very nice. They certainly compliment the regal feel of the deck.
NEGATIVES
- Of course, the gold stamping is not perfectly applied in every instance. It seems to be a bit off on the Empress's shield and most of the cups on my Nine of Cups. Not a huge deal, but noticeable if you are studying the images.
- Sometimes it is difficult to tell if the stamping has flecked/worn off in the printing process or if an absence is planned. In other words, sometimes it is clear that a part of an object is left foil-less purposefully (especially in relation to glare), but other times it looks like a mistake. A good example is the Six of Pentacles. Each pentacle has different parts uncovered by foil--bits of stars, parts of the outer circle, etc. Is this intentional? Are we to understand that the pentacles here are a bit tarnished, suggesting that this success is a plateau--that there is still the potential for physical improvement? Or did the printer just mess up? I believe that you can see something of a progression of the pentacles' condition from the 3 (*very* rough) to the 10 (nearly perfectly covered in gold), but that could just be something I want to see.
- The stamping seems a oddly distributed throughout the deck. Naturally, all cups and pentacles are stamped to varying degrees, but there is almost no gold on any of the wands cards except for the concentric background effect. Now, because they are made of wood rather than metal, I didn't expect to see lots of gold in this suit, but the absence of gold in some logical places (the metallic pieces of the victory party in the Six, for example) seems strange compared to the rest of the deck. Sometimes sword hilts are stamped, and sometimes they aren't. I don't see as much of a symbolic reason for this as I do in the pentacles.
Overall, I think of this as a kind of "showstopper" deck. I certainly won't use it all the time, but for special occasions it may be precisely the thing!
Curious to know what others think...
)) I thought so too!