Know your deck of cards
Playing cards are the perfect companion for all trips, vacations, festive nights, night stays, and even dates. Speaking of festive nights, no Diwali night looks complete without playing cards.
Playing cards has become a ritual on Diwali for us Indians. A Diwali night with a card party feels like a night well spent.
Apart from the entertainment part, playing cards on Diwali in India is an auspicious practice.
Diwali is a festival where we worship Goddess Lakshmi, and it is believed that playing cards on Diwali bring goodwill to people by the Goddess of wealth.
With the available variations in card games, you can get enough of playing cards. Every time you play cards, we are sure your friends come up with some other games that you haven’t played in all these years. That’s the beauty of these card games that keeps you hooked.
We all have known playing cards for years now. The ones we have been seeing and using in India are the French-suited, standard 52-card pack, unlike countries like German, Italian, and Spanish that use their traditional deck of cards.
Like many other great inventions in the world, China is the country that invented Playing Cards around the 9th century AD.
It evolved from being woodblock printed to being printed on plastic-coated papers. Playing cards were all over Asia by the 11th Century.
Later by the 18th Century, playing cards were made handy that could be picked in one hand instead of two. The introduction of reversible court cards later followed this. But sadly, the French government didn’t favor the invention and stopped printing the cards with this variation.
The Mughals conquerors introduced Playing cards in India. These were brought by Persia, known as Ganjifa which had eight suits.
According to some historiographers, playing cards in India was taken from the Chess game.
A lot of you must be playing cards since childhood but still get confused about the type of cards in a deck. But we are here to solve your queries and revise your knowledge of cards.
Your deck of cards consists of the following cards
Opening a pack of cards feels so good. Isn’t it? Shuffling, distributing, and making hands in games is a great feeling we all love to experience.
A deck of cards consists of 52 cards plus the Jokers and ad cards. This deck contains 4 suits:
- Clubs
- Hearts
- Spades
- Diamonds
Are you wondering why we mentioned the suits as thumbnails with the first alphabet in bold?
No, this isn’t our style, CHSD, or Chased is the way many people, including magicians, memorize the 4 suits. Cool enough? Wish we knew this earlier.
These suits contain 13 cards each: 10 ace cards A-10 and 3 picture cards- Jack, Queen, and King.
Two suits of hearts and diamonds in red color and another two spades and clubs in black.
Black v/s Red Cards
Or a fact, both these colors are beautiful and eye catchy. This is also one way to memorize cards, especially in magic tricks, by bifurcating them in Red and Black colors.
A deck of cards has 26 Red cards and 26 Black cards. Hearts and Diamonds are red (heart for obvious reasons) with Clubs and Spades being black.
Face (or Court) vs. Number Cards
The face cards are also known as the Court cards. As the name suggests, these cards have figures printed on them.
These cards are categorized as Jacks (J), Queens (Q), and Kings (K). Each deck has 3 face cards in every suit which makes it a total of 12 face/court cards.
Number Cards- 2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9 and 10
The leftover cards in the deck are the number cards apart from the face/court cards. There are 9 number cards per suit, making it a total of 36 cards in a deck.
Aces
In a standard deck, you have 4 Aces. Aces are different from face/court cards and have no face printed.
In cards, the players need to define their Aces, the value of the Ace can be as high as 11 and as low as 1. Deciding this depends on the nature of the game.
Do you know that the Ace of Spades in a standard deck often differs from the other three Aces and has a special design? Didn’t notice? Go check it but after reading this.
Jokers
The first thing you discard from your deck are the jokers, or do you keep them in the box to use them as a substitute for any lost card in the future?
It is best to keep the jokers as they are used in card games like Rummy, Poker, Pitch, Canasta, Euchre, Mighty, War, Crazy Eights, etc.
They are these beautiful cards with colorful jokers printed on them. Jokers are also helpful in various card tricks played by magicians.
The reason behind these 52 cards in a deck
If you go back to the pages of history, there are many reasons for the presence of these 52 cards in the deck.
- The four suits represent the four seasons of the year
- The 52 cards represent the 52 weeks of the year
- 13 cards in a suit represent the 13-lunar cycles
The Arab world drew these reasons as they were good with Astronomy. Don’t know if the reasons are true or not but Playing cards is one of the best gifts from our ancestors to us.
There are 10 types of Playing card decks you should be aware of
We all have mostly played with the standard deck of cards and are unaware of the variety and types of playing cards available across the globe. Some of which can be customized.
- Standard Deck– The most used type of playing cards. These cards are easy to use and practical. The magicians prefer working with this deck of cards.
- Novelty Deck– This is a custom deck and can be heavily customized. The word novelty itself means something new and unusual.
- Game Deck– These are a kind of standard decks that are altered to play certain variations of games like Canasta.
- Gaffed Deck– Magicians mostly use this deck to play tricks. These gaffed cards are also referred to as gimmicked cards.
- Marked Deck– These cards have secret marks on the back which help magicians identify the card’s value.
- Vintage Deck– As the name suggests, these are the antique deck of cards that were used in the previous era.
- Reproduction Deck– These are decks reproduced from the past with the help of digital advancements.
- Faro Deck– It is also a kind of vintage deck and represents a particular type of deck with no indices.
- Transformation Deck– These cards showcase the pips that have been creatively and artistically made into large pictures.
- Regional Deck– These are the traditional deck of playing cards which are different in most countries across the globe.
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