I recently put together a deck (two actually) for Aldo Colombini's draw a blank. The deck contains cards from a blank backed deck and from a double-blank deck and some of the cards are face up and face down. When you look carefully at the side, you can see small breaks where the face up blocks meet the face down blocks (because of the natural curvature of the cards) and the edges are slightly different shades of white.

I'm hoping that with practice and performance that the cards will get worn together and these discrepancies will vanish.

On the other hand, it could be so subtle that nobody will ever notice. Am I being paranoid?

Yes.

Try holding the deck in such a way that they are mostly looking down on it.

No. you are not paranoid. Even Paul Harris admits he doesn't pencil dot cards because he is afraid someone will see the dot.

Put the deck in a Porper Card Clip, or use a card press.

All that proves is that Paul Harris is paranoid too!!

Syd

Paul Harris isn't THAT paranoid.

Way back when I was a teeny tiny lay-person (and my eye-sight was much better), I actually spotted the pencil dots someone was using.

It depends on where you pencil dot the card and how do you do it. I challenge you to see a little red dot in the design of the back of a bycicle card if you don't even know that it's there. Of course if you pencil dot it with a black sharpie marker, perhaps someone could suspect something...

Dave