The Beauty Of Playing Cards: Changing Through The Ages

We’re going to start with an important admission: the history of playing card designs is often up for debate, and nobody knows exactly what was established and when. In the decades before mass-printing and easy trade, playing cards likely looked very different from place to place, with few (if any) standardized designs appearing internationally.

That might feel surprising when you consider the very standard deck that we have today. Of course, you still see varied designs, with all kinds of themes appearing – just look at the above image – but the basic deck is recognized the world over. Hearts, spades, clubs, diamonds, with the face cards and the numbered cards. We all know them, we all expect them, and it can be easy to forget just how beautiful they are.

How, though, did we reach these standards?

Much Of The Development Has Been Lost

It’s not really surprising that the history of playing cards is somewhat murky. After all, cards are very transient things; made of paper and designed for heavy use, decks weren’t meant to survive. They were meant to be used and enjoyed, and traveling in pockets, being placed on sticky pub tables, and being constantly shuffled and dealt would have certainly destroyed countless sets.

Add in the deliberate destruction of packs by the Puritan regime in Britain, and many other calamities that would have befallen these rather delicate items, and it’s not surprising that much of the earliest history is lost. However, that doesn’t mean we know nothing about how these cards came to their current form!

To briefly recap, it’s likely that cards were first invented sometime in the 9th century, and many sources place them as appearing in China, in the Tang dynasty. They wouldn’t have looked much like modern cards, though, especially given that they were likely made of wooden blocks! Many other societies would have produced their own versions of cards, with radical transformations in the approach and design across the ages.

How Today’s Cards Evolved

The cards we recognize today are thought to be a mix of many different cultures and countries, with trade and traveling soldiers spreading ideas across the globe. It’s France that we can attribute quite a lot of today’s deck to, though: this country came up with the icons of today’s four suits – coeurs, piques, carreaux, and refles (hearts, spades, diamonds, and clubs). They also gave us kings, queens, and knaves, and perhaps even more importantly, they split the four suits into two red, two black, with much clearer, simpler symbols.

The simplification meant that cards could be produced using stencils – and if you look at cards on a modern casino site, you’ll quickly see just how iconic this design became. Browse through any of the games at mbitcasino.io; you’ll quickly see how those beautiful, simplified versions make it easy to recognize the denomination in a split second. And indeed, that perhaps matters even more to the digitization of cards than it ever did in the past; suddenly, players are looking at whole hands of cards on tiny mobile screens and need to be able to tell at a glance what they are holding.

There’s something particularly beautiful about the simplicity of a modern deck, the clean lines, crisp colors, and distinct numbers allowing all the focus to stay with the game. You don’t get distracted by wondering if you’re holding a 3 or an 8, nor by confusing one face card for another. There’s no mixing up diamonds and hearts, or clubs and spades. Without being complicated, these designs are immediately recognizable and distinguishable, and therein lies their real artistic beauty.

Variety Is Still Valued

Of course, many decks today do have variations; you can purchase cards themed for almost any imaginable topic. From Greek myths to Chocobo cards dedicated to the Final Fantasy franchise to cards showcasing birds or animals or famous figures or royalty – the options are limitless.

And yet you will note that even the fanciest cards follow the same rule: the card’s denomination must be crystal clear, displayed in every corner of the card. Here, artistry is bowing to practicality; for modern players to use the cards, whether it’s for poker, blackjack, baccarat, solitaire, or any other common card game, they need to be able to see at a glance exactly what card they are holding. Any confusion, no matter how artistic, takes away from the fun of the game.

Perhaps, then, we have reached a sweet spot in the development of playing cards; we’ve got to a point where they can assume as many different forms and designs as artists desire, but their functionality is not lost because we have standardized the values so thoroughly. A capital “A” in the corner of a card means the same thing regardless of the deck’s styling, and that means we’ve created a universal language to use around the globe.