2021 - The Launch of Good Pals (Apparel)!

 

Good Pals originated in summer of 2021 and officially launched on November 12, 2021.

Ironically, I (James) was searching for logo inspiration for a deck project (that hasn't been released) on my Instagram Discover feed and I kept seeing really cool artwork of skeletons and skulls.

This distracted me from the original project, and as I browsed further I came across the work of Dewo, know as @47kills on Instagram. I marvelled at his brilliant art and really liked the work he did with skeletal characters. I looked at these characters and thought that they would look so good on a deck of cards!

That was to come later, as originally Good Pals opened as an apparel store. We started off with 3 x designs that were simple pocket print t-shirts before launching hoodies in early 2022 and 3 x new shirt designs in spring 2022.

 

 

One of the key inspirations behind launching Good Pals was that I wanted to create a brand that had some meaning to it. You can read more about the symbolism of Good Pals here.

In short, whilst this was a good experiment, we printed FAR too many shirts! We ended up with 250 in the end split across 5 designs, and whilst the shirts were popular and the quality of the garment + print was very high, we just didn't reach enough customers to make ends meet. 

We therefore decided to focus on playing cards, whilst offering the occasional limited drop of merchandise.

 

 

2022 - Good Pals' First Decks!

Work for our first deck began in early 2022. For our t-shirts, Dewo had created this really cool hand flying through a crown image with the quote by Randy Pausch: "It's not the cards you're dealt, but how you play the hand".

 

 

As mentioned previously, I wanted Good Pals to have some meaning behind it, and this graphic / quote inspired the Chancers Playing Cards. Chancers is a deck whose theme is built on risk taking and rising against the odds. 

We released this deck on Kickstarter in September / October 2022. It was available in red + black + 2 gilded editions. As of April 2025 these decks are all sold out except Black Chancers which have less than 10 units remaining.

Overall, this was a solid first release from us and a good start to producing our own decks. We learnt a lot from this project.

Click here to view Good Pals' entire production history.

 

 

2023 - Good Pals Halloween Tales

 

Having finished the Chancers Kickstarter campaign around about October 2022, I began to notice people's excitement + desire for Halloween decks. I noticed that there were not many on the market at all, and knowing the artistic talent of Dewo, I knew that together we could create something brilliant.

Work therefore began on Good Pals Halloween Tales playing cards in November 2023 and I'm glad we did because it has been our most popular cards we've ever released! The 2 x Halloween Tales Kickstarter campaigns we have launched are our only Kickstarters to receive over £10,000 in funding as of April 2025.

 

 

We went all out for this deck... custom aces, custom courts, back design, tuck, advert cards and jokers. We gave every single card a Halloween theme and I'm very proud of what we were able to create. As always, Dewo absolutely crushed the project by creating a brilliant back design and fascinating Halloween characters on the court cards.

This wasn't the end of Halloween Tales however, as we launched Volume 2 in 2024...

 

2024 - The last Chancers decks + Halloween Tales Volume 2:

 

In 2024 we went from 1 project a year to three! We switched from printing with USPCC who were taking increasingly long to finish projects and continuously printing uneven borders to a new printer called WJPC.

WJPC are able to print on a faster timeline with better borders, and so we managed to fit in 3 projects in 2024:

• Chancers V3 Marked - USPCC
• Chancers Limited Edition Series - V4 Magneta, V5 Pink & V6 Gold - WJPC
• Halloween Tales Volume 2

Chancers V3 was a unique project because it was our first and only marked deck! If you take a close look in the corners, you might be able to spot the marking system.

 

 

Pictured above is the Chancers Limited Edition Series which was released in July 2024. In some ways we wish we didn't make 6 colour variants of this deck, but the difference between this campaign and previous Chancers decks was that these were supposed to be limited runs. Previous Chancers decks were print runs of 1000 or more, however the limited edition series had runs of 350-500 per deck.

Printing a few extra variants allowed us to test out our new printer, WJPC, and see if we liked their production quality. Overall we are happy with them and will continue to print our decks with them.

Halloween Tales V2 generated over £16,000 in sales on our Kickstarter campaign, making it our most successful campaign of all time! However, this year helped us shift our perspective. Going forward, we are looking to reduce the total amount of variants we make available on all our campaigns.

 

 

For instance, Chancers had 6 colour ways, and each colourway had at least 1 gilded variant. It is very unlikely we will continue this model. Sure, some minimal style decks (such as Good Pals Logo Playing Cards) will have several colourways due to their minimal design, however various future projects will look to have 1-3 colourways, and not every colourway will have a gilded variant.

 

 

We are wanting to focus on quality, not quantity. We are also looking to make as many of our variants somewhat unique in comparison to others on the campaign.

This brings us on nicely to our first release of 2025, Good Pals Logo Decks...

 

2025 - Good Pals Logo Playing Cards + Christmas Deck

 

 

Upon reflection, there are various elements of our first decks, Chancers + Halloween Tales, that were designed with our customer in mind. For instance, personally I have no attachment to Halloween.

Whereas with Chancers, we only created a black deck because based on feedback a black & white deck seemed very popular, and casino themed decks were quite popular at the time which influenced the design choice.

Whilst I like both decks, neither of them quite felt like decks that I personally would buy had I seen them in a shop. That changed with the Good Pals Logo Decks, it felt like a deck of cards I had designed just for myself, and it really felt like a Good Pals deck from start to finish.

Whilst the cards are custom, they have recognisable faces that are suited to game play and magic. However, as previously mentioned with new deck variants, we worked on ways to make these collectible items too.

 

 

For instance, we have our Red Logo deck, followed by the King Logo deck. Rather than just taking the red logo deck and maybe a black version with the same tuck and back, we actually created a new back design and tuck case and titled it: King Logo Playing Cards.

Then, we recoloured the red deck, except this time with a gold foiled back design which also featured gold foil on the card faces and even the tuck case. The Red Logo deck acts as a worker deck, whereas our Gold Foiled Private Reserve is a collectors treasure that features a gold foiled number seal from 001-300.

 

 

At the time of writing (April 30th, 2025), the Good Pals Logo decks have almost finished production. What's next though? We have been working hard on our Christmas deck, and I can say with confidence that alot of our supporters are really going to like this one.

We've put a LOT of time into this one, trying to perfect it, and we really believe we have brought to life the spirit of Christmas with these two decks.

For now, here is a sneak peek. If you would like to see 25+ posts containing artwork of this deck, consider checking out our Patreon Membership.