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Culture: Game: Card Game
£52,000 Deck Of Cards   (+4, -2)  [vote for, against]
create a nightmare card game using iPhones

£52,000 Deck Of Cards is created by obtaining 52 new iPhones which cost £1,000 each, then generating as locked screen savers all of the card faces that feature in a complete deck.

Games played using the £52,000 Deck will be awkward, unwieldy and frustrating. Other features include: no slamming of the cards on the table; frequent accusations of digitally enabled cheating; cards being handled by white glove wearing players (to deter mark making on their surfaces); constant interruptions due to phone calls and text messaging on the phones.
-- xenzag, Jan 03 2021

You forgot "cards going blank because of screen savers and discharged batteries".
-- 8th of 7, Jan 03 2021


There could also be a Joker card, that keeps changing on a random basis. In this case the deck requires a £53,000 investment.
-- xenzag, Jan 03 2021


Fun![+]
-- Voice, Jan 04 2021


An autoshuffle would be trivial to program and allow for even more arguments about cheating!
-- Voice, Jan 04 2021


Do It. This will definitely work as one of those shock-art installations. For a lot of reasons: it's got enough of a comment on modern status-capitalism that it's frankly overachieving as art*. It's a simple concept that can be grasped by even the dumbest of Buzzfeed-a-like sites, also including "iPhone" so very algorithm-friendly. It's also rage-inducing enough to be sufficiently clickbait-y.

For extra points, partner with a gold-plating company and use that to inflate the cost to >$100k. Then find a way of writing off the whole "art commission" as a marketing piece, an auction house seems a good candidate. Then "sell" it for $1m to some stooge, cut a deal with the auction house to keep their commission low, and you've made ~$50k and a lot of publicity out of other wise lost tax. Oh, and you still have 53 gold iPhones. If someone *really* buys it then you're in the big bucks.

*maybe you could ham it up a bit and force people to play with the deck for 16hr days at gunpoint.
-- bs0u0155, Jan 04 2021


Let me get this straight. You start with $0. Then you buy 52 iphones and get them gold plated. You now have -$100k. Now you sell it to yourself, paying a small commission and this MAKES money?
-- Voice, Jan 04 2021


You forgot to factor in the media appearance fees and generous arts council grants. Also the licensing fees for your "exclusive" screensaver range.
-- pocmloc, Jan 04 2021


This would be an ideal way of implementing a stupidly expensive Monopoly set.

// get them gold plated //

Well, that will at least confer some actual intrinsic value on the iphoneys. You could ask microsoft to do the work- they have decades of experience in applying gold leaf to dog turds...
-- 8th of 7, Jan 04 2021


// You start with $0. Then you buy 52 iphones and get them gold plated. You now have -$100k.//

You're an auction house, Not a Sotheby's or a Christie's, but in that general conversation, you're bs0-co Auctions. Now, the world of art is largely built on hype/ ignorance/ boredom all balancing on a single pea of talent. But, as an auction house, you have a responsibility to drive as many eyes to your auctions as possible. If you can pull a stunt to drive the eyes of 10x the number of rich people to your auction, you will see a direct benefit in terms of the interest and prices at auction, along with your commission of course. Along with general brand awareness.

To do this, auction houses do marketing and advertising, you see it all the time on the web, for me it's classic cars when I'm hanging about on car websites, and occasionally watches. Anyhow, the point is, they have a marketing budget.

The marketing department, when approached by an artist might be tempted to have a $100k punt on a commission for a piece like this. For them, if it makes the news - fantastic, free marketing. Maybe Apple's marketing dept. is contacted, maybe not, maybe Apple get annoyed, even more news.

The artist acquires the iPhones, these are now assets that are losing money, but, not a huge amount. You could definitely recover money on 53 undamaged iPhones. So the auction house is offsetting risk here (remember, the auction house will own the whole piece anyway, this is a commission).

Now, there are companies that will gold plate your iPhone. It's not difficult, so the only tactic those companies have is being more well known than the others, so, you negotiate a nice bulk rate on that, and they get their name on the stands or whatever. Now you have gold iPhones as an asset, and, of course they're unboxed, they had to be plated, still unused assets however.

Now, the auction house has fronted $100k, and at a minimum has $50k in assets coming it's way. It's risking $50k that this will have any marketing benefit. So, a small business using Google can easily spend $10k/month to drive clicks to their website. A large business that runs almost entirely on driving interest, like an auction house, wouldn't sweat 100x that. We're in peanuts territory. Now, the marketing team goes to work, we throw $50k at photoshoots, interviews, ask morning TV, I'd contact casinos to see if they want in, standard clickbait stuff etc.

Ultimately, even if the auction house buys it's own piece (anonymous buyers are surprisingly common), the cost can be offset against the rest of the profits the auction house makes, and would otherwise pay tax on. Whether or not the stunt ACTUALLY worked at a profit in that scenario would need to be teased out of the numbers of the whole year. Now, if some gold-obsessed rapper or whatnot REALLY bought the piece, you're really winning.
-- bs0u0155, Jan 04 2021


Brilliant. Make it happen and I'll give you 51% of the profit! That's more than half. What could possibly go wrong?
-- xenzag, Jan 04 2021


Well, let's see ... failure of the scheme, criticism in the media, prosecution for attempted manipulation of the auction market, imprisonment, bankruptcy, ridicule, disgrace, alcoholism, homelesness, and a squalid lonely death from a commonplace preventable infection, followed by a cremation at public expense which no-one attends apart from those present in a professional capacity.

But apart from that, the general idea seems sound.
-- 8th of 7, Jan 04 2021


[xenzag] please stop
-- Voice, Jan 04 2021


Don't worry, it will stop soon enough. Always the same, the next stage is harranguing the hatstand, then standing on a street corner shouting abuse at passing seagulls, and then the nice young men in white coats come and administer a sedative...
-- 8th of 7, Jan 04 2021


Yes, definitely, in pretty much the same way jam drives away wasps ...
-- 8th of 7, Jan 04 2021


//[xenzag] please stop// As the scorpion said to his rescuing frog after he delivered the fatal sting "but it's my nature"
-- xenzag, Jan 05 2021


//how to deliver jam or soapy water at suitable pressure online//

There's a title just waiting for its subtitle and idea text...
-- pocmloc, Jan 05 2021


... from [beanangel] ...

Does Alibaba sell jam ?
-- 8th of 7, Jan 05 2021



random, halfbakery