Good Pals Halloween Tales Volume 1 - 2023
Good Pals Halloween Tales Volume 1 launched on Kickstarter on June 4th, 2023 (2 years ago today!)
We began designing this deck shortly after Chancers V1 & V2 funded on Kickstarter in late 2022 after seeing quite a few Instagram posts about people's excitement for Halloween, often referencing their favourite Halloween deck for which we thought there weren't many at all.
Having googled the Halloween decks on the market, we saw an opportunity. I knew that 47kills' art style was perfectly suited to creating a fun Halloween themed deck. So that's what we did, a fully-custom Halloween themed deck from the jokers all the way to the number cards, courts and aces.
Halloween Tales V1 debuted with a standard edition of 600, an alternate tuck edition o 250, and approximately 150 gilded decks split between purple and green gilding. It was more successful than our Chancers campaign having funded over £11,000 thanks to just short of 200 backers.
We had so much fun designing this, especially the courts. 47kills takes all the credit here. I simply provided him with ideas for the types of characters I wanted - e.g a scarecrow, zombie, witch etc, then let him do the rest.
With 47kills' art style, I knew he could create some very detailed, spooky yet fun court card characters. This deck was pretty straight forward compared to Chancers, almost everything I approved on the first try! However, the alternate tuck edition was initially a rejected tuck concept, but I liked it enough to the point where I thought why not create a limited edition so that the tuck art didn't go to waste.
As of June 2025, Halloween Tales V1 is completely sold out! I do have some spare decks in my private reserve, but they're just for me (unless there is a keen Good Pals collector who would really like to get one). With the success of the campaign it made sense to turn this into a series.
Halloween Tales Volume 2 - 2024
Shortly after V1 arrived with us in December 2023, work began on Volume 2. The idea was to do an orange deck, which is a recolour of V1, but to also do a special edition where the card backs AND faces featured a black coat of ink. This style of deck provided great contrast for the orange Halloween art featured throughout this deck
Having played around with colours, 47kills showed me a back design with a blood red colour and I thought it was perfect. This would make for the third variant of the campaign, however I was actually disappointed to see the colour of the final print which I did not believe represented the colour of the digital proofs at all. Sadly when printing playing cards the colours do not always match up well.
We also made another cool change for this campaign where we introduced the Theatre Editions. The Theatre Editions were a re-brand of the 'alternate tuck' edition from Volume 1, except now they had new seal art AND gilding. The name of the deck was inspired by the tuck art which resembles a theatre poster of sorts accompanied by a cinema ticket deck seal.
We had a Theatre Edition for each standard version, with the orange version being a Kickstarter exclusive - the first time we have created an exclusive deck for a campaign. This exclusive had holographic gold edges, whereas the special edition had black gilding and the blood red edition featuring red gilding.
These gilded decks were FAR more popular than the gilded decks of HTV1 or the Chancers series. I was actually blown away, I couldn't believe it. We even had to extend the print runs from 50-75 of each gilded deck to then double them. Based on previous campaigns the gilded decks weren't overly popular, but with new tuck art and seals the appeal was higher.
Halloween Tales smashed all personal records for us, funding over £16,000 thanks to 257 backers.
Halloween Tales Volume 3?
Initially, following V2 we did plan to go straight into V3 but there were a couple of reasons why we did not.
Firstly, there was a fatigue from designing back to back Halloween decks. Whilst I am not the one designing, I am the one ideating, reviewing proofs, sending ideas, making the decisions behidn the project. After a while you can grow tired of a particular theme or deck, and if we were to do a Volume 3 it would need to be REALLY good. It just didn't make sense to go straight into a V3.
Secondly, and very crucial. We got very, very useful feedback for this deck via backer surveys on Kickstarter. Supporters were very engaged with the project and were honest. We realised from backers that having 6 variants was possibly overkill. Not just from too much choice, but also the financial strain of possibly wanting to purchase 6 decks all at once to complete the collection.
Not only this, but also the fact that besides changes to the colour scheme and extra added details, lots of the Halloween Tales art is the same throughout each deck for the face cards and backs. We therefore decided that if we are to do a Halloween Tales V3, we would re-design the decks from top to bottom, and come back with a bang.
The sad news for Halloween Tales fans is that this means a Halloween Tales V3 would at the earliest be released in mid 2027, approximately 2 years from now. Due to ongoing new projects, the earliest we would begin designing a new Halloween deck would be in 2026. Big projects such as these usually take anywhere between 4-6 months to design and send into print.
Before Halloween Tales V2, for Good Pals we have ambitions to launch Good Pals Logo Decks Volume 2, Good Pals Christmas decks & a Pirate themed deck. There's lots of decks to look forward to and lots of new themed projects! We would like to do another Halloween deck, as with more and more experience gained from releasing new decks, we know that we could make Halloween Tales even better.
Purchase Halloween Tales Playing Cards
Thanks for reading! If you would like to get your hands on some Halloween Tales Playing Cards, you can click the link here.
