rwcarter
Gurrrrr WHY this deck. It's one of the weakest RWS clones out there, and such great idea. Why not something like the Radiant ....
Cause that's not a Lo Scarabeo deck....
Gurrrrr WHY this deck. It's one of the weakest RWS clones out there, and such great idea. Why not something like the Radiant ....
Cause that's not a Lo Scarabeo deck....
I do like this effect and how the empty space in the cards is filled and made more interesting.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 gold on the black borders makes the images look bigger somehow.- 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.
I agree that the Devil image looks much better with the gold foil background.- 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.
I was going to say that they lightened the brown tones in the deck. The cliff that the Fool is about to walk off is a lighter brown, the bottom of the Emperor's robe is more green than brown now, the Charioteer's chariot is a lighter brown but his armor is a darker brown, the Hermit's cloak is more greenish than brown, etc.- 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 really nice looking. It would've been wonderful(ly over the top) if they had also gold foiled different parts of different card backs. One could've then divined with the fronts and the backs.- The card backs are very nice. They certainly compliment the regal feel of the deck.
They didn't foil the top of the Venus symbol on the Empress' shield, which I think was intentional. If you look at the rest of the cups cards, most of them have incompletely foiled cups.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.
I see what you mean about the Pentacles suit. I think the answer lies in the other cards. Even the Majors aren't completely foiled. The Cups aren't uniformly foiled. The Wands aren't foiled at all. And the hilts of the Swords aren't all foiled and those that are aren't uniformly foiled. That might be a printer's mistake, but it's repeated enough that I think it's a design element. (As I say in knitting, "a mistake repeated becomes a design element....")- 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.
I still am not really fond of the art. (why is a Mennonite woman trying to tame a lion? hasn't the angel in Judgement ever heard of conditioner? why does the lion in the World look like the Cowardly Lion from the Wizard of Oz? and on and on and on.) But the foil makes the deck visually interesting enough to make me want to use it. All in all, I'm glad I bought it.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...
One negative you didn't list is the Hanged Man. They didn't foil the whole aura (I know that's not the word for it) around his head, leaving a strip of yellow behind his head and to his right (the left of the card). That yellow for me becomes rather jarring against the rest of the background.
Not sure about wallpapering, but you could definitely tile the bathroom with it.Now if USG would do the PCS with gold I'd wallpaper my house with it
Is this a 2nd/corrected edition of the deck just released, or something new altogether?But as I understand they (LoS) will be putting out another deck without the missing foil (or the intentional "flaws" to make a vintage look as it was explained to me)
I emailed LoS about the gold foil. The reply was that the intentional flaws didn't quite reach their expectation of achieving what they wished to, a kind of vintage look, and that they would be putting out another gold foil Golden Universal without those flaws. They advised I keep this as this will be the only edition like it. They did not give me an ETA on when that other deck might come out though. I would definitely get a deck without those intentional flaws!