Twenty years ago I sometimes played cards with a deck of six suits: the extras (both blue) were boat-wheels and pairs of tennis racquets. Recently I thought, if I were designing a deck with new suits, they’d be heraldic favorites – crescents, stars, fleurs-de-lis – to go with the lozenges, trefoils and hearts that also appear often in armory: all more recognizable than those blue thingies.
And that in turn reminded me of Saturday morning advertisements for Lucky Charms breakfast cereal: “pink hearts, yellow moons, orange stars, green clovers.” Today at the grocery barn I looked for a box of Lucky Charms to check my memory, and found the stars and shamrocks replaced by rainbows and – oh come now – green leprechaun hats. How long has this been going on?!
In a magic shop, you can buy a deck of cards in reversed colours, that is “red as the ace of spades”.
You can get matching ordinary decks too. So you can do crazy things like play canasta with the two decks combined. Also, you can have a complete red deck. You can try out eight suites.
But my favourite is the 500 deck, which makes suites of 15 cards, or 60 in total.
Someone could make a buck selling playing cards for programmers, numbered
0throughF.