Anthrax Bet You’d Like Some For All Kings Playing Cards

Since the record industry began its fifteen year tumble at the turn of the century, bands and labels have been looking for all sorts of ways to incentive fans to actually purchase records: we’ve seen artists release new album packages that come with everything from t-shirts to ouija boards in an effort to lure buyers. We know of one band who even wanted to make silver cocaine straws that would come with their record, before their label nixed the idea.

But I can’t recall anyone doing playing cards before now…

On 1/15/16 we will be releasing a deck of custom FOR ALL KINGS playing cards at indie record stores. There is a download card inside that contains two tracks from the album prior to street date. on Feb 26th the whole album will unlock. Find a store in your area and make sure they get them in! http://www.recordstoreday.com/Venues #anthrax #forallkings

A photo posted by Anthrax (@anthrax) on Dec 9, 2015 at 2:10pm PST

Not a horrible idea by any means, although I have to wonder if anyone besides Anthrax mega-fans who were gonna buy the album anyway will care. You can’t see the cards very well in the above illustration, but based on what you can see, they don’t seem very Anthrax-y. Is Not Man the Ace? Is Scott Ian the King? Is Charlie Benante the Queen? Is Joey Belladonna the Joker? The art from the “Evil Twin” single appears on the box for the cards — but does any other cool artwork from the record appear anywhere else? And what the hell will these cost, anyway? A deck of cards is normally about two bucks, and an album download is about ten bucks. Are the cards MORE than ten bucks?

Also, which two tracks do you get with the immediate download? Is one of them “Evil Twin”? That’s already available as an immediate download with pre-orders of the album, so that doesn’t seem like much of incentive to buy these cards, either.

But, hey, fuck do I know? Maybe these will prove to be really popular. Stranger things have happened.

[via The PRP]