Deck review: David Blaine Split Spades 1st Edition

From what I'd seen I already liked this deck before I ordered it: it oozes class, great design and a well-struck balance between modern relevance and traditional style. It came with a double-backer and a "test your powers of deduction" card with a few brain-buster type questions on. A nice touch I guess! I was a bit sore that the deck was inverted, cos I tend to hate that, but the artwork on the deck is so sweet it has kinda grown on me even though I was really looking forward to receving the regular deck :-/

Box:

Love it. Heavy use of flourishy olde-worlde tattoo style scrolls, nice typography, and as with the rest of the deck: a perfect balance between new and old. This box is a winner.

Backs:

Apart from the fact they're inverted and inverted backs never look better than the originals, these backs are incredibly well designed and executed. They look great from a distance, look awesome in a packet fan, and are very fine and traditional in their style, striking an unlikely balance between that all-important boldness that makes the tally hos such a success, and that real fine style that makes a deck nice to just look at for ages.

What's really going on with that artwork?

Where to start? This deck has a lot going on! The split spades of the name are in the middle of the deck, and spell David's initials db (quite clever I suppose), there is an angel thrusting a sword through the spade, a serpent inside the spade being attacked by the sword (very biblical themes going on here people!), a bird in the middle, some lions, a crescent moon and a bunch of flourishy heraldry style stuff! In fact, if I didn't know better I'd say this back design was a lot heavier than Theory 11's Sentinels, and much quieter about it too, but that's just me! Phew... 

Fronts:

The joker is an optical illusion containing an image of David "forcing the devil", using what looks like some sort of variation on Vernon's 5-card force on a 3-card monte table (what a geek I really am! or perhaps i just made that up...), which when viewed from a distance looks like a jester. The devil probably being reference to "The Devil's Picturebook", an old expression for a pack of playing cards. The Ace design is a variation on the theme of the naked Venus chick (always a winner I guess), with some nice Split Spades typography that kind of reads a different word backwards if you're creative enough. Some of the picture cards have portraits of people instead of the regular faces (don't know who they are though), David is the King of Spades...

Overall verdict:

A lot of thought went into this deck, it has a lot of meaning behind the fine artwork, and the artwork is fine! Possibly my favourite of all the decks I have just reviewed, it handles great and looks great! I'm a big fan of this deck and will probably make the effort to pick a couple of regular non-inverted packs up in the future. If I have learned one lesson to take with me from the David Blaine Split Spades deck: make the artwork on my deck as fine and detailed as I can!