When Butterflies met Bicycles

Our Butterfly Playing Cards are known for their unique and powerful marking system. What if the classic Bicycle cards could do what the Butterflies can? We explored that with the Bicycle Vintage Back Playing Cards.

The Creation

In 2023, we first introduced the Marked Bicycle Rider Back Playing Cards through an official collaboration with Bicycle Cards. After that, our founder, Ondrej, was wondering whether more could be done with the Rider Back design. What if they could do what the Butterflies can?

After discussions with Bicycle over the design and the boundaries of their trademark, the Vintage Back design was born.

The deck was first introduced at Cardtopia 2025, a playing card convention organized by United States Playing Card Company and its Bicycle brand.

We've added a distressed-style border to the Rider Back design, inspired by old decks and the threads you can find on banknotes. It carries a unique marking system, which is a slight modification of the markings in the borderless Butterfly decks.

The Features

As we have already mentioned, the Bicycle Vintage Backs possess the powers of our borderless Butterfly Playing Cards.

This means that you can:

• Cut to any card your spectator names because you always know the position of every card in the deck.
• Name a card or multiple cards missing from the deck.
• Find a card your spectator picked and returned to the deck while you were looking away.
• Stack and deal yourself the winning poker hand without looking at the cards' faces or challenging memory work.
• And much more!

These are just some of the things that you can do with the Bicycle Vintage Backs. Again, it's the same as with Butterflies, think of them as a tool rather than just another marked deck.

Each deck comes with a tutorial explaining its marking systems. That's right, there are two! The second is the same one you can find in our Marked Bicycle Rider Backs.

If you'd like to explore all the effects you can perform with the Vintage Back, check out the Original 3rd Edition Butterfly deck. It includes a 2-hour tutorial with 12 magic tricks.

On top of the markings, the Vintage Backs have more features for magicians:

• One-way back design (actually, two!)
• One-way faces
• A blank face card in each deck

The End

We will forever be grateful to USPC and Bicycle for letting us print the first-ever edge-marked Bicycle Rider Back deck. It was a huge milestone for us.

We hope you enjoyed this article! 🦋