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Afrocentric Playing Cards

An accidental click on one of my defunct Detroit blogs made me rue the fact that I once owned this deck of Afrocentric playing cards that I bought cheaply at a thrift store some years back and subsequently sold them for pretty good money on eBay. 

At the time I had no real interest in playing cards even though I had collected several decks for the artwork alone. Since these are still going for about $30-50 my best bet is to find another deck at an estate sale or thrift. Since they were produced and sold here in the Detroit area I probably have a better chance of finding some on the cheap here than any place else. 

My notes on the pack were that the commons and Aces didn't differ from a standard deck, that I paid 69 cents for them back in 2018 and that they were released in 1991. 

According to a blurb in the June 16, 1991 Detroit Free Press the Afrocentric playing deck was the brainchild of two Detroit lawyers, James Foster and H. Russell Smith, who joked about the idea during a card game. Under their company Blacks Factor they started producing the cards and selling them via mail order for $4.50 a pack.



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