Awesome Stuff: Dealer's Choice

from the grab-a-deck dept

If you haven't yet, you owe it to yourself to read Grantland's long, but fascinating, oral history of the 2003 World Series of Poker -- which more or less made Texas Hold 'Em poker super famous, and made it a major TV event, while bringing tremendous attention to online poker since an online-only player named Chris Moneymaker won the entire tournament in his first time ever playing poker at a casino. Oh, and to get enough money to actually attend, he had his friend named David Gamble back him. And that's not even close to the most interesting part of the story.

Maybe it was because I'd just read that when I started thinking about this week's awesome stuff post, but I quickly realized that there are an insane number of crowdfunding campaigns, across various platforms, of people designing their own playing cards. Rather than narrow it down to just three, I'm going to list out a bunch here (without the widgets or videos -- which would just get too long), and you can explore the wonders of crowdfunded playing cards.

• Mustache Playing Cards -- just what it says.
• E8 Garden Deck playing cards -- eat your veggies, play cards.
• Deck of Human Disaster playing cards -- why you should eat your veggies, or, conversely, why it probably doesn't matter if you eat your veggies.
• Rabbit Rabbit -- in case you want an animal to eat your veggies.
• Fairy Tale Art playing cards -- tell a story.
• Storyteller Cards -- tell a different story.
• Name of the Wind playing cards -- tell Patrick Rothfuss' story.
• Elves and Orcs playing cards -- tell an oldish story.
• Ultimate Zombie playing cards -- will eat your brains.
• Please Stay Calm: Zombie Apocalypse playing cards -- in case you need two different decks of zombie cards.
• Royal Optik playing cards -- beautiful designs for collecting.
• Pippoglyph playing cards -- because who doesn't like a good pippoglyph?
• Native Art playing cards -- inspired by indigenous people in Alaska.
• Wealth playing cards -- because to buy all of these playing cards, you'll need to be wealthy.
• Ganjifa playing cards -- because not everyone plays your western-style playing cards.
• DoubleFace 2.0 playing cars -- because magicians get special decks.

Believe it or not there are still a bunch more, but this was getting long enough. Enjoy the long Memorial Day weekend, and perhaps break out a deck of cards. Real cards. Not that stuff on your phones and tablets.

Filed Under: awesome stuff, playing cards