Crown Series Poker - Why We Built A Casino-grade PVC Poker Set From Scratch

Playing cards have been part of my life for as long as I can remember. As a child I played card games with my grandparents. As a teenager I performed card magic in bars and clubs. As a young adult it was Blackjack, then Poker - long nights at my local Grosvenor Casino card-room, studying from books, running hands through odds calculators, picking specific spots from each session and going home to analyse them until the weaknesses were ironed out. I was, by most definitions, obsessed...

That background - years at the table alongside years of design and illustration - left me with a particular perspective on what a poker playing card should be: what it should look like, what it should perform like. Crown Series Poker is the result of that perspective, applied to a blank sheet of paper and a group of serious poker players in 2025. This is the story of how it came together.

Like what you see? Click HERE to shop Crown Series Poker - or read on to find out more!

Paper Cards At The Poker Table: The Problem

PVC playing cards exist in a different performance category to paper stock entirely. Where a premium paper card is optimised for handling quality, print fidelity and the feel in the hand - things that matter enormously to a collector or performer - a well-made PVC card is optimised for functionality. Spills wipe clean, cards bend and spring back,  the surface holds its texture across thousands of hands rather than hours. The major casino card brands - Copag, KEM - and the places where they are used - all favour PVC playing cards, and the reasoning carries over into serious home games and games nights. 

What Does A Serious Player Demand?

In early 2025 we consulted a dedicated group of poker players to develop what we called the perfect spec for a serious home poker set. Not what looked good. Not what would photograph well. What would perform at the table, session after session, at the level a serious player demands.

The conversations kept returning to the same features. PVC plastic stock was non-negotiable - the durability and handling properties of a good plastic card are simply in a different category to paper. Matte texture finish, for a more natural feel and better grip in the deal. A two-deck set in different colours rather than a single deck in a tuckbox - the way serious home games and card rooms actually run, with one deck in play while the other is being shuffled. Large, bold indices for clear visibility across the table without being so oversized they ruin the balance of the cards.

The index question is worth dwelling on. Standard playing card indices are compact and elegant. Jumbo indices are readable at distance but look wrong - they disrupt the visual aesthetic of the card face. What Crown Series Poker uses is known as a Blackjack Index: halfway between standard and jumbo, combining the visibility of a larger index with the refined aesthetics of the classic size. It is, as far as we are aware, the perfect fit when constructing the perfect poker set. 

Choosing A Manufacturer

Getting the spec right was one challenge. Finding a manufacturer who could execute it to the standard we needed was another. The PVC playing card market has its share of poor product - cards that feel plasticky, shuffle badly, or develop surface issues after limited use. We were not interested in competing at that end of the market - we wanted our product to compete with the best. 

After research and consultation we settled on Kuo Kao - a Taiwanese manufacturer who supplies high-end casinos across Europe and Asia and OEMs for one of the most popular PVC playing card brands on the market today. Their production standards are genuinely exceptional: the matte surface treatment on Crown Series Poker cards creates a texture that handles like a high-quality paper card while retaining all the durability advantages of plastic. The snap of the shuffle, the slide across felt, the spring-back after a riffle - everything has been dialled in by a manufacturer who knows what serious play demands. Printed on Marion Pro stock with a whole host of cost-enhancing extras, Crown Series Poker is built to compete at the highest level. 

Crown Series Poker comes in a foiled luxury gift box containing two decks - one green, one purple - plus a plastic cut card. The box is designed to look as good on the shelf as the cards perform on the table.

The Design: Familiar Enough To Function: Distinct Enough To Be Noticed

Crown Series Poker is an A. Haines product, which means the artwork is original and drawn by hand in the UK. But the design priorities for a poker card are fundamentally different to those for a collector deck. Where our collector cards reward close inspection - hand-drawn courts, elaborate aces, diptych jokers - Crown Series Poker needed to be instantly legible at a glance across a green felt table, under variable lighting, to players whose attention is divided between their hand and their opponents.

The result is bold, vibrant artwork that is familiar enough to be functional - the courts are immediately recognisable for what they are - but distinct enough that Crown Series Poker does not look like every other casino deck on the market. Everything has been designed with the table in mind rather than the display case - which, for this particular product, was exactly the right order of priorities.

To find out more about Crown Series Poker, or pick up a set (or two), click HERE