 Hey everybody, welcome back to Magic Orthodoxy. My name is David and this is a deck review. Today we're going to look at the Imperial Gold deck from Randy Butterfield and Midnight Cards. All right, so what is the inspiration behind this deck? The Imperial Gold deck is a luxurious deck of playing cards, like I said, inspired by Midnight Cards, and where Randy took his true inspiration from was the Faberge eggs and Imperial Russia. These are printed from expert playing cards and it is a limited run of 1,000 decks. The deck itself features complete custom artwork that was all created from original 3D models and then it was rendered through Photoshop. The Imperial Gold tuck case is a stunning luminescent gold paper sock. This was printed using a four-part process. You have the red foil, you have the gold foil, and then you have embossing and each individual numbered deck has a seal sticker that denotes what its number is in the run and that is also printed in a dark red pantone on gold foil material. So everything from top to bottom on this deck is luxurious and gorgeous. The front of the tuck case simply says Imperial Gold deck and then you have this beautiful like gold imperial pattern behind where you can see the metallic shining against the mat. You have this double-headed eagle right here in the center and this part is embossed and you see a little shield right there on its chest. The rest of the tuck case is really simplistic in design. There's nothing printed on these sides. The top simply has the custom tuck seal there and then the back design has an embossed Faberge egg but then the repeated pattern from the front. The bottom has a little bit of ad copy about Midnight Cards. The tongue flap has a continuation of the stripe that kind of matches up perfectly and then the inside is also a gold paper stock. That is pretty much it for the tuck case. Let's take a look at these cards. These cards are printed from the expert playing card company and they are done on their classic finish. These are a very thick card, very snappy card. In fact when I measure these out with the caliper, if I have 10 cards in the caliper and I use 10 as my standard for all my measurements, 10 cards measures out to 3.01 which is what the United States playing card company used to denote as being casino grade. Since then 301 is actually on the very thicker end there aren't many cards thicker than this and so if you're going to compare this with other cards of similar weight and thickness, you would have the crown deck or the dynasty deck or the miscellaneous good deck. The back design of the gold imperial deck features a borderless design meaning the design is pushed all the way to the edges. So it's a full bleed and it features this Russian two-headed eagle as its focal point on both the top and the bottom. The yellow bleed on the side and the red bleed on the top and bottom provide a really neat opportunity for some spectacular spreads and flourishes, well and of course fans. Tons of different cardistry techniques I think would look good with this deck. With this deck you're going to get an original joker that is a Faberge egg on a stand. One joker has the top opened and a little crown sticking out and the other one has the top closed. Each one of your aces features a different element and so if you look at the ace of spades underneath it says imperial gold and underneath the diamonds it says the cross of St. George. The ace of clubs says that it's Petrovsky palace and the ace of hearts says it's the double-headed eagle. All right so the suits what's going on with the suits in this deck. All right so the diamond eggs all have a nature, fantasy or elfish vibe. The clubs are all inspired by Greek mosaics so you're going to see that represented in their colors and their shapes. The Russian double-headed eagle is the focal point for the hearts and the black eggs and they also draw inspiration from ancient Rome. And lastly you have the spades which are inspired by Baroque and the Gothic movement and of course these all coalesce into the court cards. The court cards are simply more Faberge eggs, right? They're not people. Each one of the different courts whether they be jacks queens or kings represents something different. So the jacks are all the warrior eggs, the queens are all simple, they're all elegant, they use very light colors and the kings are the most decorative of all of the court eggs. Also if you look each one of the king eggs has a crown at the top. And if you look at the pips and indices you'll notice that they all have an original layout, original font and original pips. All right so that is my review of the Imperial gold deck from Randy Butterfield and Midnight Cards. As always I want to thank Randy for allowing me to have this deck so that I could do the review for you and if you would like to check him out you can visit him at his website and his storefront. As always recommend that you like this video just so other people can find it faster. We also recommend that you subscribe to this channel just to stay up to date on all of this in cards and card magic. If you're going to follow me on social media you can. I'm at facebook.com slash magic orthodoxy twitter.com slash magic orthodoxy instagram.com slash magic underscore orthodoxy and if you need more content you can always find it at magicorthodoxy.com. Thanks bye.