Arancio DMC Private Signatures + Lagoon V5 ELITES

[Sovereign]

We're really pleased to announce that the preorder for two new DMC decks is starting tomorrow (Friday 15th April) at 12 noon UK/BST. The decks are a beautiful hypercar orange Arancio Private Signature deck, which is our new $1000 competition deck, limited to just 1000 numbered decks, and an aqua turquoise Lagoon edition of the DMC ELITES V5 deck. Both decks are beautifully finished in our minimalist foiled and embossed tuck boxes and the Arancio deck also has a really nice silver edge gilding. I've had a couple of these decks on my desk for a few weeks now and I think people are really going to like them.

If you want to be notified of the preorder going live, we have got a form on the site you can fill in:
https://store.dmcmagic.com

and if you want to have a look at the cards themselves:
https://imgur.com/gallery/iZZCPHZ

Phill

[Harvonsgard]

$1000 competition deck

What's that?

And same printer as the Blue DMC Elites?

[Sovereign]

Hi Harvonsgard, the printer is the same as the Blue and Amethyst decks, the stock is the same Phantom Finish.

The competition deck is something we have run a couple of times now, basically the Private Signature deck is a bigger print run replica / remix of decks that we have done tiny runs for before for DMC exclusively to use in his private gigs. They are really personal projects and we decided it would be fun to run a competition based on the limited numbering of the decks - a month after we ship Drummond will pick a number at random and whoever has the deck with that number wins $1000. It's just a bit of fun really, it's not Lamborghini money - we'll get there one day though hopefully, lol.

Phill

[Harvonsgard]

The amount doesn't matter. It's awesome to give back something to the community. Thanks for explaining.

[Eric Lee]

Oh this is cool. The passport guides on how to do some tricks the V4 and V5 decks along with the gaff and Alpha decks are now free!

Great for those who want to start doing tricks with marked decks. Pity I've already bought them....

[hsbc]

[Eric Lee]

Don't you wish those were actually your decks that you were sharing?

[hsbc]

Don't you wish those were actually your decks that you were sharing?

I'm not wild about this series in general, but I do like the look of the orange deck

[Sovereign]

I'm not wild about this series in general, but I do like the look of the orange deck

I kind of get this, the decks have come about and look the way they look for a very specific reason, to be as good for magic as we can make them, and we've refined them down over several production generations. It's tricky balancing looking cool / interesting and being low-key enough that the deck doesn't draw loads of focus in performance, especially since the actual look of the cards is so heavily dictated by their functionality. The Private Signatures is kind of an attempt to steer a bit more towards the 'looks funky' direction whilst still keeping the actual ELITES decks more minimal / functional. If I was just after a cool af deck I'd be tempted to go with the more complex decks. I'm still a sucker for the T11 look (kind of jazzed when they teased the Dune deck the other day because I LOVE Dune) but it just wouldn't work with this range.

Phill

[Sovereign]

Oh this is cool. The passport guides on how to do some tricks the V4 and V5 decks along with the gaff and Alpha decks are now free!

Great for those who want to start doing tricks with marked decks. Pity I've already bought them....

We were always torn about making them free because obviously it's better for buyers from this point on but I don't want to upset people who have *paid* for the Passports in the past. All I can do is hope that you feel that you got your money's worth between buying them and now, and that of course there is some value in having the actual printed book. If anyone reading this bought the Passports and feels cheesed off that they paid for something that is now free, PM me and I can give you a discount code for future orders... but not today because I'm already kind of snowed under sorting this launch in 2hrs

[Harvonsgard]

Bought the first Phantom Finish Blue DMCs and the passport as well. I would never be upset if future buyers get stuff free. Quite the opposite, I'd say it's a questionable character trade if you envy others for getting stuff for free. If you can give back to the community then again, good thing to do. If my purchase from the past made that possible, even better.

[Sovereign]

Just pressed go on the preorders so if you want to snag some of these decks you can have a look over at:
https://store.dmcmagic.com

All the best,

Phill

[Harvonsgard]

Snagged one just to see how they handle with the gilding. Make sure that Drummond pulls my number, haha.
Were do you guys annouce that btw? Instagram?

[rousselle]

I bought one of the earlier passports, and I'm fine with them being given as a free gift now. And, I hadn't planned on grabbing these, but... yeah, that orange is kinda singing to me. Love the marking system. Hate the cost of shipping to the US, but as our friends overseas have been feeling that pain for a while, I guess I'll just have to suck it up from time to time. Looking forward to getting these in my hands!

[Harvonsgard]

I can tell you shipping to continental Europe ain't that better .

[Sovereign]

The shipping IS expensive and I wish it wasn't. We have had so much problems before with shipping and decks getting dinged so we switched from envelopes (which were 95% fine) to thin boxes with packing puffs in which seem to be 99.5% fine, but that bumps the shipment to a pricier bracket.

We also had a lot of people claiming their parcels "disappeared" so we switched to tracked. It's not a great solution either way and the prices just went up in April. It's infuriating. We have got some weirdly aggressive emails and messages from telling me off for charging so much, like we are secretly becoming rich from the shipping, but if you want to check the prices, we use Royal Mail and their postage prices are on their website.

If I could drive round to your house, knock on the door and hand the decks to you I would. And don't get me started on shipping to EU, a great club we used to be a member of!

I'll definitely do another review after we've shipped this run and see if there's anything we can do about the shipping next time.

Phill

[Eric Lee]

We were always torn about making them free because obviously it's better for buyers from this point on but I don't want to upset people who have *paid* for the Passports in the past. All I can do is hope that you feel that you got your money's worth between buying them and now, and that of course there is some value in having the actual printed book. If anyone reading this bought the Passports and feels cheesed off that they paid for something that is now free, PM me and I can give you a discount code for future orders... but not today because I'm already kind of snowed under sorting this launch in 2hrs

No worries! I'm happy you're making them free. It makes it easier for people to learn how to do tricks with the decks and hopefully, it'll be their gateway trick into magic

[Harvonsgard]

Got my Aranchio today. Silver gilding and orange is a very nice combo.
Handling out of the box is great. I wonder why recent gilded decks (Eye of the Ocean and these) don't come in a block, like gilded decks came in the past? They are ready from the get go. No breaking in needed, faro perfectly. I kinda miss breaking in a gilded deck though, haha. Last one I needed to break in was Culturæ Animalis.
The gilding of the Arancio has a bit of a chemical smell to it. Not on the obnoxious side of things but recognisable.
Definitely an interesting deck that unfortunately comes with a price tag that makes it not really an EDC option.

[Harvonsgard]

Little update. I saw similar on the blue DMC Elites from this printer; when handling the decks colour rubs off.
Photos are after two days of handling.

[Eric Lee]

Man, that's pretty bad after just 2 days.

[hsbc]

Are these manufactured at a "secret" printer?

[Harvonsgard]

Yup. They are the Phantom Finish, which DMC introduced with the blue edition.

[EndersGame]

Steven Faulkner covered both of these decks in a video review here:



They do look super classy, and the twin case has a lovely magnetic closure, and adds a nice touch for storage and presentation.

And as far as marked decks go, the marking system is one of the very best. If you exclude factory printed Bicycle decks, I don't think it gets better than these (see my article The best marked decks that aren't factory printed Bicycle decks).

I also love the fact that they've made their passports available as free downloads (link). I bought one of these along with the very first Elites deck that I purchased, and it is fantastic. Making these more readily available for everyone is a good thing IMHO.

Harvonsgard, regarding your photo of the orange deck with the colour rubbing off - is this the deck which had gilded edges?

[Harvonsgard]

Yes, it is the gilded one. However, I had the same experience with the first Phantom Finish Cobalt Blue edition as well.

Positive is that I did message DMC about it and they offered a full refund if I send back the decks.

[EndersGame]

Little update. I saw similar on the blue DMC Elites from this printer; when handling the decks colour rubs off.
Photos are after two days of handling.

I've got an Arancio deck and a Lagoon V5 deck.

I haven't opened the Arancio deck yet, but I've been using the Lagoon deck for the last couple of weeks. The colour is gorgeous. I haven't had any issues with the colour rubbing off with the Lagoon deck at all so far.

This was my first experience with the Phantom finish, and I'm quite impressed with it so far. It handles smoothly and consistently, and faro shuffles work fine straight out of the box.

[Harvonsgard]

Good to here it's not an across the board issue.

[EndersGame]

In case anyone else is interested, I've written up some detailed impressions of the Phantom finish based on giving my Lagoon V5 deck a good workout:

Impressions of the Phantom finish used by DMC Elites

Further discussion about how the Phantom finish handles is invited in that thread. The Phantom finish reminds me quite a bit of LPCC's recent pre-crushed Classic Finish produced in China: snappy, and occasionally some slight stickiness of the cards, but less clumpy than many of the Taiwan-produced decks.

[joeblow]

Has anyone found any of these 2 DMC decks at retailers? Shipping from DMC quite high. Penguin Magic has had some DMC decks in the past but not these.

[Eric Lee]

Has anyone found any of these 2 DMC decks at retailers? Shipping from DMC quite high. Penguin Magic has had some DMC decks in the past but not these.

I've been looking for these from retailers as well for the same reason. No luck. Only ones I can see are the Crimson decks. Probably will have to wait for another sale to justify getting them. They did a summer sale with 20% off in June.

[GandalfPC]

Lagoons on sale for 9.99 British pounds - there is a 40% off sale with code MAGICLIVE40 - which will help absorb that UK shipping cost if you are on my side of the pond. 6 pack will cost you under 14 bucks a deck.


https://www.dmcmagic.com/thevault/

I grabbed 6, as I love the markings but find the decks pricey for every day use, also picked up an alphas at same price - 7 decks total - just $11.42 a deck after shipping to US.


They have the vault behind a password, which unfortunately I cannot share, but it is a password familiar to all magicians, and the vault is magicians only.