Lenticular Star Wars Playing Cards by Cartamundi

I stumbled on these lenticular playing cards at Target and thought they looked cool enough to buy even though I don’t play cards. The package uses the word “3D” but in reality, none of the images even tries to be 3D. Instead they use the lenticular effect to display two different images of the same character. That’s fine, but I think it’s a little misleading to say that they’re some sort of 3D.

There are 54 cards in the deck (as it includes two Joker cards), but they actually only use 27 different characters. They divided up the suits into “light side” (hearts and diamonds) and “dark side” (spades and clubs) and only used characters that would be appropriate for a particular side. It’s not as if there’s any shortage of Star Wars characters, so it’s a little disappointing that they chose to just repeat them twice. I would’ve preferred that they do one “light” and one “dark” set from the prequels and the original trilogy, rather than repeating the same characters.

Still, they’re attractively done. The lenticular effect seems slightly harder to see than I’m used to (by which I mean that you have to hold them at just the right angle if you only want to see one image and not two images blending together), but my guess is that it’s a side effect of their thinness.

Indeed, I was impressed by how thin these cards are. I usually think of lenticular things as being on stiff board-like materials, but these are even thinner than most normal playing cards. But they’re made of plastic so I think they should be pretty durable (if slippery). They come in a metal case which is kind of nice, but also fairly flimsy and easily dented.

Jabba is on the dark side Jack card, which seems appropriate enough (“J is for Jabba”). The pictures below are of the same card, just taken from different angles. It’s a little too bad that one of them was the CGI Jabba, but at least it’s not this one…)

While I was in the store, I tried searching on my iPhone quickly to see if I could find a list of the characters, but didn’t have any luck so I’m going to post one here:

Spades & Clubs
A Darth Sidious
2 Battle Droid
3 Tusken Raider
4 Jango Fett
5 Darth Maul
6 General Grievous
7 Count Dooku
8 Clone Trooper
9 Greedo
10 Boba Fett
J Jabba
Q Stormtrooper
K Darth Vader

Hearts & Diamonds
A Yoda
2 R2-D2 & C-3PO
3 Chewbacca
4 Lando Calrissian
5 Han Solo
6 Princess Leia Organa
7 Luke Skywalker
8 Clone Trooper
9 Mace Windu
10 Qui-Gon Jinn
J Obi-Wan Kenobi (Young)
Q Padme Amidala
K Anakin Skywalker

Joker x2: Jar-Jar Binks