Border vs. borderless cards

Hi all,

A patron reached out to me to let me know the Singularity Deck Third Edition cards they received from Drive Thru Cards had some inconsistent printing results, causing a noticeable border variation across the cards. Drive Thru Cards tends to be good about replacing anything that's printed a bit wonky. However, it has made me consider a few options for possibly improving the design long-term and I wanted to get everyone's feedback before we commit to any changes.

First of all, what is the potential problem exactly?: 

The beauty of print on demand services such as Drive Thru Cards, is that they allow small time designers to produce things in small batches. The disadvantage is they often wont have the quality or consistency of something printed in huge print runs. This variation can be particularly more prominent in terms of printing and die alignment (The die is the thing that cuts the cards from a giant printed sheet).

Here is a particularly egregious example. Notice how shifted the card back image is:

While the above example is pretty irredeemable, even a well-cut deck will have a few degrees of variation. This variation can be more noticeable if the design has a slime margin between the edges of the card.

Drive Thru Cards has specifications for the size of margins they require precisely to avoid this issue. The third edition of the deck is within these tolerances, but some variation is still noticeable. If you look at the omega card below you can see the white border is larger on the left side than the right. 

Overall, the proof cards I received came out pretty great considering this was one of the worst examples I could find from the cards I received. Its well within the range I would consider acceptable. That said, it sounds like the copy that the patron received was much more noticeable than this. Hopefully it was a one time issue, but it did make me want to take a step back and consider some things. 

Getting rid of the white border:

The easiest fix is to just get rid of the white border. This improves the printing tolerances to the point where even the most eagle-eyed individuals would have a hard time noticing if a card was shifted at all.

Here is a mock-up of what that would look like:

I love the look of the edge to edge color, however there is one concern: the color could potentially be seen along the edge. Here is an example of a deck with this "issue":

In this case it's more prominent than I think it would really be in practice because the cards are stacked in order making the color transitions more obvious than I think they would be in a shuffled deck. Here is a pic of the same deck where the edge-color is less obvious.

Still, this does open up the concern that someone could potentially identify the suit of a card face down in the deck. In reality, I don't know how true this would really be. I also don't imagine these decks being used for high stakes poker games.

Make both the white-border and borderless designs:

At this moment I'm leaning towards potentially producing both options. Having both gives folks the ability to choose what they prioritize more. An added benefit is that you could actually combine the two into one deck for games like pinochle, which require multiple copies of the same card. The border vs borderless would make it easy to separate the cards out again.

The only hiccup to this approach is that the card backs would need to be shared, which would mean switching to the borderless back design for all cards regardless of whether the front of the card had a border or not. For folks that already picked up a deck, I understand that this would be frustrating.

Before I move forward with anything I wanted to get feedback. Let me know your preference in the poll and please leave a comment if you have any thoughts or concerns.

Thanks everybody!