Divergent Realms Playing Card Series Vol. 1 [Gottlieb Deck]
Created by Costa Pantazis
A limited edition collection of playing card decks based on pseudoscience, fringe theories, discovery models and the supernatural.
The first of the series, Divergent Realms Playing Cards' Gottlieb Deck will feature hand-crafted detailed artwork, red metallic inks and foil embossed tuck-boxes.
The Gottlieb Deck (Mind Control) - named after Sidney Gottlieb who was an American chemist and spymaster best known for his involvement with the C.I.A's mind control program, known as Project MKUltra, where he supervised experiments in mind control. He became known as the "Black Sorcerer" and the "Dirty Trickster.
Latest Updates from Our Project:
Divergent Realms Playing Card Series: Coins/Card Guards Revealed! ♠♥ ♣♦
over 3 years ago
– Mon, Oct 05, 2020 at 12:11:39 PM
Hello everyone!
Just a quick update to show you all the coins/card guards for the entire Divergent Realms playing cards series that will feature on all the upcoming campaigns. All of them are struck in black nickel with a diameter of 2.75" x 2.75" inches and includes 3D colour-fill graphics on the front. We taken things a step up and made it even bigger then the previous Primordial coins. Due to it's the larger then normal size they can also be used as a card guard you prefer. (manufactured by Coins For Anything)
Scroll on down and leave us a comment telling us which you are most looking foward to...
Gottlieb Coin
The Eye of Providence (or the all-seeing eye of God) is a symbol used in various religions (and other institutions) that depicts an eye, often enclosed by a triangle and surrounded by rays of light, or glory, meant to represent the concept of divine providence, whereby the eye of God watches over humanity.
Faraday Coin
The Planchette, from the French for "little plank", is a small, usually heart-shaped flat piece of wood equipped with two wheeled casters and a pencil-holding aperture, used to facilitate automatic writing and as a movable indicator to spell out messages during a seance.
Gaddis Coin
TheDevil's Triangle has claimed umerous ships and planes over the years which have vanished without a trace. Yet 58 years after five Navy planes disappeared there on a routine training mission, no one knows exactly what caused that and other disappearances. The triangle continues to claim ships and airplanes to this day, with many theories in play. One is the magnetic makeup of the area causes compasses to go haywire.
Sangreal Coin
The Holy Grail is traditionally thought to be the cup that Jesus Christ drank from at the Last Supper and that Joseph of Arimathea used to collect Jesus's blood at his crucifixion. From ancient legends to contemporary movies, the Holy Grail has been an object of mystery and fascination for centuries.
Leary Coin
The Psychedelic Experience (known colloquially as a trip) is a temporary altered state of consciousness induced by the consumption of psychedelic drugs like mescaline, LSD, psilocybin, and DMT. For example, the term acid trip refers to psychedelic experiences brought on by the use of LSD. Psychedelic experiences are interpreted in exploratory, learning, recreational, religious/mystical and therapeutic contexts.
Rhine Coin
The Sixth Sense, also called Extrasensory perception or ESP, also called sixth sense, includes claimed reception of information not gained through the recognized physical senses, but sensed with the mind. The term was adopted by Duke University psychologist J. B. Rhine to denote psychic abilities such as intuition, telepathy, psychometry, clairvoyance, and their trans-temporal operation as precognition or retrocognition.
Another Kickstarter exclusive, Divergent Realms engraved laser etched antique gold card. Each etching is standard 2.5" x 3.5" poker-card size. (manufactured by Coins For Anything)
Q: How do add more items to my existing reward selection?
A: Once pledged if you wish to add any other items select the option to 'Manage Your Pledge.' On the next page, simply edit the only the pledge amount to reflect the cost of your additional rewards + shipping.
Divergent Realms Playing Card Series: A taste of things to come... ♠♥ ♣♦
over 3 years ago
– Sat, Oct 03, 2020 at 04:27:02 AM
Hello everyone!
We are currently halfway through the campaign and currently sitting just above the original target amount!
I just wanted to share with you a little more about the add-ons and what you can expect from them when they are manufactured and delivered.
Gottlieb Coin & Divergent Realms Metal Cards
The Gottlieb coin is struck in black nickel with a diameter of 2.75" x 2.75" inches and includes 3D graphics on the front. We taken things a step up and made it even bigger then the previous Primordial coins. Due to it's larger then normal size It can also be used as a card guard you prefer. Every deck in the Divergent Realms series will have it's own individually themed coin avaiable as well so expect to see five more designs like the above appearing through each campaign in the coming year.
Another Kickstarter exclusive, Divergent Realms engraved laser etched antique gold card. Each etching is standard 2.5" x 3.5" poker-card size. Like our previous Primordial metal cards and the coins above the cards will also be manufatured by CoinsForAnything to ensure the highest quality. If you would like to get a feel for what the end results will actually look like take a look at the photos below for same add=ons that featured in the original Primordial Playing Cards campaign last year.
How do add more items to my existing reward selection?
Once pledged if you wish to add any other items select the option to 'Manage Your Pledge.' On the next page, simply edit the only the pledge amount to reflect the cost of your additional rewards + shipping.
Apoteosi is a deck of poker playing cards by Thirdway Industries, inspired by the genesis of the World. Designed by the Italian designer Giovanni Meroni. Click the image above to check out the campiagn!
Divergent Realms Playing Card Series: Who was Sidney Gottlieb? 🕵️🕵️🕵️
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Sep 27, 2020 at 12:14:18 AM
300 Backers So Far!
We are just about to hit 300 backers on the first Divergent Realms: Gottlieb Deck campaign! Thank you to everyone who's taken part so far! You're the best!
Exploring popular culture has never been so odd – a world filled with satanic images, occult messages, hidden symbols amoung the few, this stuff is packaged as mainstream and sold across the globe and it's what forms the basis of each of the Divergent Realms individually themed decks. The first deck focuses on the popular conspiricy theories and themes based around the infamous MK ULTRA project, a CIA code word for a real LSD-fuelled brainwashing technique developed by the US military. Popular conspiracy theory believes that MK ULTRA is still active and programmes certain pop stars as puppets of the Illuminati, a shadowy elite intent on creating a New World Order of authoritarian world government.
So a little more about the name of the deck...
Who was Sidney Gottlieb?
Sidney Gottlieb (August 3, 1918 – March 7, 1999) was an American chemist and spymaster best known for his involvement with the Central Intelligence Agency's 1950s and 1960s assassination attempts and mind-control program, known as Project MKUltra. In April 1953 Gottlieb became head of the secret Project MKUltra, which was activated on the order of CIA director Allen Dulles. In this capacity, he administered LSD and other hallucinogenic drugs to unwitting subjects and financed psychiatric research and development of "techniques that would crush the human psyche to the point that it would admit anything.
Gottlieb was living vindication for conspiracy theorists that there is nothing, however evil, pointless or even lunatic, that unaccountable intelligence agencies will not get up to in the pursuit of their secret wars. For two decades he ran a CIA programme aimed at nothing less than control of the human mind. Its tools were mind-altering drugs, most notably LSD. Its subjects, almost all of them unwitting, were society's outcasts: prostitutes and their clients, mental patients, convicted criminals - people, in the words of one of Gottlieb's colleagues, "who could not fight back". At the end of it all, just as the conspiracy theorists would have predicted, Gottlieb himself pronounced that the entire exercise had been a waste of time.
The project, called MKUltra, began in 1953, two years after Gottlieb had joined the agency as chief of its technical services division. It was a period when paranoia ruled at Langley, the Virginia headquarters of the CIA. At home, McCarthyism was at its apogee. Abroad, the Soviet Union and increasingly China were regarded as mortal threats. America had lost its nuclear monopoly, while field operations against Moscow would soon be thrown into turmoil by the obsession of James Jesus Angleton, head of CIA counter-intelligence, that the agency had been penetrated by a mole at the highest levels. Gottlieb's contribution was to oversee MKUltra.
From the early 1950s through most of the 1960s hundreds of American citizens were administered mind-altering drugs. One mental patient in Kentucky was given LSD for 174 consecutive days. In all the agency conducted 149 mind-control experiments. At least one "participant" died as a result of the experiments and several others went mad. By the late ‘60s, MKUltra was terminated, as the use of psychedelics as weapons was considered too unpredictable after many test subjects experienced psychological breakdowns following the experiments.
In 1973, amid government-wide panic induced by the Watergate scandal, the CIA destroyed most of MKUltra’s records—but a cache of over 20,000 documents relating to the experiments were discovered in 1977 and revealed to the public by the agency itself after a Freedom of Information Act request, according to The New York Times. The full extent of the experiments remains unclear to this day.
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Apoteosi is a deck of poker playing cards by Thirdway Industries, inspired by the genesis of the World. Designed by the Italian designer Giovanni Meroni. Click the image above to check out the campiagn!
Divergent Realms Playing Card Series: A little about the series... ♠♥ ♣♦
over 3 years ago
– Thu, Sep 24, 2020 at 05:49:10 PM
Hello Everyone!
It has been quite a hectic week setting up six campaigns and the launch on the first Gottlieb deck which thanks to you has been funded in less then a week. It's a lot of fun each time I launch one of these, and as creators myself and Blackout Brother are always happy to see the feedback and response to this series to date.
I hazard a good guess that most of you are already well-versed in the classic X-Files series. The original idea for Divergent Realms was essentially based around this and the idea was to create a series of decks in one collection covering a whole range topics based on pseudoscience, fringe theories, discovery models and the supernatural. Prior to starting we had about 15 different topics on paper which could be covered so it was very hard to narrow them down and choose what ones would make up this series. The ones which didn't make the final cut were just as good and like the winning selections present great ideas that would translate visusally onto a deck of cards so given the total number there is enough room to do a Divergent Realms Vol. 2 and depending how the first series plays out this could well become a reality much later down the line.
So, a little about the upcoming series and a sneek peek of all the decks that make up the series and the topics they cover. The campaigns for all these decks will appear throughout the entire 2021 period so it's certainly going to be an interesting year. Scroll on down and leave us a comment telling us which you are most looking foward to...
[Deck 1] Gottlieb Deck (Mind Control) - named after Sidney Gottlieb who was an American chemist and spymaster best known for his involvement with the C.I.A's mind control program, known as Project MKUltra, where he supervised experiments in mind control. Experiments on humans were intended to identify and develop drugs and procedures to be used in interrogations in order to weaken the individual and force confessions through mind control. [KICKSTARTER NOW LIVE]
[Deck 2] Faraday Deck (Spiritual Mysticism) - a fascinating deck dedicated to and designed around the forgotten art of the mysterious iconic Ouija board game. The deck is named after Michael Faraday was an English scientist who contributed to the study of electromagnetism and electro-chemistry.
[Deck 3] Gaddis Deck (Bermuda Triangle) - named after Vincent Hayes Gaddis, an American author who invented the phrase "Bermuda Triangle", which he used first in the cover article for the 1964 February issue of the magazine Argosy. For decades, the Atlantic Ocean’s fabled Bermuda Triangle has captured the human imagination with unexplained disappearances of ships, planes, and people.
[Deck 4] Sangreal Deck (Sacred Bloodlines) - named after the new etymology for Old French san-graal (or san-gréal), meaning "Holy Grail," by writer John Hardyng and is based around the conspiracy theory that posits that much of what is known about the Bible is a deception created to suppress some secret, ancient truth.
[Deck 5] Leary Deck (Psychedelic Research) - named after the American psychologist and writer known for advocating the exploration of the therapeutic potential of psychedelic drugs under controlled conditions. He developed a philosophy of mind expansion and personal truth through LSD and President Richard Nixon once described Leary as "the most dangerous man in America."
[Deck 6] Rhine Deck (Extrasensory Perception) - named after usually known as J. B. Rhine, an American botanist who founded parapsychology as a branch of psychology. It is sometimes said that Rhine almost single-handedly developed a methodology and concepts for parapsychology as a form of experimental psychology.
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Divergent Realms Playing Card Series [Gottlieb Deck] is now 100% funded! 🎉🎉🎉
over 3 years ago
– Sun, Sep 20, 2020 at 01:27:21 PM
Hello everyone!
Just dropping everyone a quick message to say thank you to all who have pledged so far since the last update on the new Divergent Realms Playing Cards series and for the for the overwhelming support and love for this project leading up to the campaign. So happy to see that most of you are returning backers from last year's Primordial Playing Cards series as well. I have some good news for you all...
We are less then one week into the campaign and already we are 100% funded! 🎉🎉🎉
Time to get to work and start preparing all your BackerKit surveys!
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