Update on Singularity Deck 3 Card Back Issue

Hi all of you wonderful people,

I wanted to give a quick update on the status of the Singularity Deck and why there has been such a delay.

The TLDR is that after a month of back and forth experimentation with Drive Thru Cards, it appears that their printers just can't reliably print shades of magenta with consistency. As a result, I've need to change the color of the back, which will require another round of proofs. I don't want to promise a specific timeline for when things will be live, because every time I think it's about to go over the finish line, it gets pushed back. That said, I'm confident this will all get resolved, it will just take time.

Long version:

If you read my last update on this you saw the issue with the variation in the card backs that I received:

I was pretty dismayed when I saw this as the color difference made the deck unplayable. I had hoped it was a bit of a printing fluke at first so I reached out to Drive Thru Cards. They were very apologetic and I worked with them for over a month trying to figure out where the color variation was coming from. We thought there was an issue with the image files, and then their website deck creation tool, followed by the exported pdf. They printed new copies and watched them as they were printed. All of this back and forth took a month and the final conclusion was that their printers are not capable of printing colors around magenta reliably, which led to the significant variation. Apparently even in commercial printers purples can be tough to print consistently.

Consistency is of course crucial for the back of a playing card, which is why I've needed to update the color of the back to shift it to be more blue. This means another round of proofs, and each time I order proofs it takes 2-3 weeks to receive.

For those curious, here is a pic of all of just some of the proofs ordered so far:

And here is the new bluer back (which should hopefully be the final version):

I put in the new proof order a week ago, so I should receive the proofs in a week or so. Rather than ordering all of the cards at once, I'm ordering the proofs in batches so I can test consistency both within and across prints. I'm certainly a bit frustrated this has taken so long. I really wanted to have the deck in folks hands months ago. In the end, it's better to make sure that the design facilitates consistency both within a printed deck and when you order additional suits months or years later.

When the new card back is 100% good to go, I'll need to update all of the print and play PDFs. Some good news is that while waiting for the new proofs to show up, I have had some time to finish up a few other projects that I'm excited to share with you all.