I was a Kickstarter backer of these new Jerry's reprints, and was very excited to receive my bricks.
And I have to say that I am deeply disappointed in the quality control of these reprints.
At first, these cards make a good impression. The box looks pretty close to the originals,
including the offset seal, and the cards come out of the pack silky and smooth. But, once you take
a closer look, there are some glaring quality control issues that really shouldn't be present in a
premium-priced deck.
For one, the packs I've opened are missing the promised double-backer,
which was (and still is) advertised on their site as one of the 56 included cards (there are only 55
in the deck). You still get matching jokers and a blank face card (which is curiously devoid of
color on the back as well), but no double-backer. Very disappointing.
Even more
disappointing (and frankly unforgivable) is that the card backs are not consistently centered.
Fanning through a deck, you can easily spot inconsistent border thickness (both on the long and
short ends of the card). It's bad enough that I'd be worried about getting busted during an
ambitious card routine, for instance. Now, I only opened a few decks in my bricks, but I have to
assume that since the first two decks I opened (one red and one blue) had the same issues, this is
not entirely isolated.
On the plus side, they feel nice. They're not quite as stiff as the
originals, and they're probably a little bit thicker (I don't have any originals on-hand to directly
compare). Overall, they sort of handle somewhere in the middle between Tally-Ho (my personal
favorite) and Bee, so if you're a habitual Bicycle user, you may need to take a moment to get used
to handling Jerry's.
All in all, my extreme excitement for this reissue has been dashed by
what appears to be questionable quality control. Until these issues are fixed, these cards are not
worth the premium they are asking for. I hope USPCC does right by the backers that made this
reprint possible and replaces the shoddy decks. Time will tell.
