Introduced in 1893. Said to have been discontinued in 1907, although I am skeptical. I have only seen this deck in US8, which would put the end date much earlier. 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. This is a very rare deck in any color. I have never seen a red or blue single or deck in either color. Steve Bowling has a green deck, and I have a brown deck, both US8.
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 had no margin (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 backed joker, pictured below, sold on eBay for $297 on 5/24/16, and that was probably a fair price for such a rare card.
Another green single (not a joker) sold for $137 on 6/30/16. 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.
