If it's vital that your cards stay in order, we strongly recommend that you stripe your cards. This was a standard technique in the days of punch cards.
How to do it: Using a pen and a straightedge, draw a diagonal line across the top or end of the deck. This ensures that the cards won't get hopelessly out of order if they are dropped during shipping. The diagonal line will help us put the cards back in order if they get dropped or shuffled during shipping or handling.
→ For striping a whole box of cards, a better technique would have 2 lines of differing slopes: draw one long unbroken diagonal line from front to back of the deck/box, and then break up the box into decks about 2 inches thick, and give each deck a separate diagonal line; do not cross the lines. Reason for doing this: Diagonals of low slope can make it very difficult to figure out which cards go in which order; adjacent cards will get marked in very nearly the same place. So, lines of low slope mark only the rough location of each card. The lines with higher slope provide much better precision.
Tips:
- Use a ballpoint pen with the finest point you can get. Do not use pencil (it smears over time); do not use felt-tip pens (ink will bleed out sideways, from card to card); do not work without a ruler. If your stripes are jagged or wavy or fuzzy, that's practically as bad as not striping the cards at all.
- To straighten the deck before marking: Feather/fan the cards to get air into the deck, so the cards don't stick together. Rap the deck sharply against either (a) a concrete pillar or floor or (b) a sturdy table, at the corner over the table leg. Rap the deck once on the bottom and once on the left end where you will draw the stripe; both surfaces should feel completely smooth, with no cards out of line. Lay the deck on its back, with the left end at the table's edge. Hold the deck down firmly with one hand, hold a lightweight straightedge against the left end with your thumb, and ink the line using your other hand. Check that you inked all the cards -- the front and back ones sometimes get missed. Let ink dry.
- Problems with this technique: Once you grip the deck from the back and front, you squeeze the air out, which makes it harder to straighten the cards. You might try splitting large decks into sections one inch thick: Stripe the sections separately, and use colored markers to mark each section a unique color, using color and/or position to distinguish the sections from one another.
Legalese: While we make every effort not to be careless, we are not responsible for maintaining the ordering of unstriped or improperly striped cards.