Stratosphere Star Base Playing Cards LPCC
Stratosphere Star Base Playing Cards
Continuing the Legends tradition of constant experimentation and innovation, ULTRA BLACK™ is an all-new dyed black paper for playing cards.
The edges of this deck are not white or light grey, like you have seen on nearly every high-quality deck of playing cards up to this point. Unlike black gilding or spraying each deck’s edges with black paint, which chip and fade easily, ULTRA BLACK™ does not chip, and the deck will look and feel new for much longer. We wish we could have printed with this technology on the game-changing Ellusionist Black Tigers all those years ago!
We use an ultra-thin mylar, or full foil, and laminate it to the black core paper before they are printed on or cut (we can produce these in other solid colors as well). This forms a strong bond to the paper that and makes them water resistant. Because black paper is difficult to print on and inks will be absorbed into the paper, the full foil layer allows for a smooth, nearly opaque, and reliable substrate to print the artwork (which in this case is also mostly black, but can be any color). Blank parts in the artwork are where you can see the shiny effect of the full foil under the printed inks.
Through our research, we have found that due to the black dying process, the black paper fibers wall thickness isn’t as stiff as white paper fibers (like in the rare Fontaine Characters deck), so they can be prone to slight cracking with extreme bending with lower folding endurance and bursting strength. So if you are planning on hard shuffling with bridges, or rough card handling, this isn’t the deck for you. We feel this is a small sacrifice for such a novel feature in playing card technology.
The cards feel soft and supple, they aren’t thick or bulky like other full-full foil decks. They are similar in thickness to a Classic Finish deck. The black ink printed on full foil does roughen the handling slightly out of the box, but after a little breaking in they handle very smoothly with consistent fans.
The colored inks are printed on the full foil with a 2-ton sheet-fed offset UV printing press, and cured with UV light, not an infrared heat tunnel. This yields a different feel to to the cards than our standard Classic Finish.
The card faces have no expense spared, with silver full foil, each space man / astronaut / cosmonaut feature shiny visors and accents.
