Introduced in 1893. Said to have been discontinued in 1907, although I am very skeptical. I have only seen this deck in US8, which would put the end date much earlier. This deck is extremely rare in any color. The only deck I have is a brown one, shown below. Steve Bowling has a green deck (also US8), and I know of one other collector who has a red deck. Let me know if you are aware of any others! I have a blue single, but I have never seen a red one.
Margin Star No. 1 was recently reissued by USPCC as “Star,” but only in red. See the red card, above, and the second image, below. Note that the border is much narrower on the reproduction card.
A final note about Margin Star No. 1: this back design is easily confused with an almost identical back used in one version of the original Russell and Morgan Printing Company’s No. 45 Texan decks. The only difference is that the Texan decks were full bleed – they had no border (see the final two images, below). Philip Morris offered a rather good reproduction of the Texan cards in a 2-deck boxed set in 1984, called “Marlboro Texan No. 45 Poker Cards.” These are frequently for sale on eBay and are great sets for home poker games when you want that old time feeling in the cards.
SALES DATA
A green Margin Star No. 1 joker, pictured below, sold on eBay for $297 on May 24, 2016, and that was probably a fair price for such a rare card.
Another green Margin Star No. 1 single (not a joker) sold for $137 on June 30, 2016. This trend of single cards fetching such high prices (also see the Bird joker that sold for a record price in 2016) may begin to highlight the inherent tension between deck collectors and singles collectors. There is no doubt that some very rare decks have been “parted-out” for singles over the years. One example is Big Gun. Original red Big Gun singles are seen fairly often on eBay, and I purchased an empty red box from the War Series deck a few years ago. Not hard to figure out what happened there. Was Aristotle right when he said, “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts”? I suppose the playing card collecting community will ultimately decide.
A green Margin Star No. 1 single sold on eBay for $205 on September 13, 2025. Do you notice a pattern here? The only Margin Star No. 1 singles that come up for sale are green. They have also been fetching a consistently high price over the years.
