Card cheats have for centuries secretly edge-marked one or several cards in a deck for an advantage in a game. They had no need to mark every card in a deck for suit and value—but magicians did. The first known description of a deck in which all (thirty-two) cards were edge-marked was published by Hugo Schrader in Der Zauberspiegel, Vol. 2 No. 10, May 1897, p. 145: “Das gezeichnete Kartenspiel”.

Eighteen years later, Theodore DeLand manufactured a specially printed, fifty-two-card, edge-marked deck, calling it “De Land's Wonder Deck”; see The Sphinx, Vol. 14 No. 1, March 1915, p. 16. Richard Kaufman provides information on this deck in DeLand: Mystery and Madness, 2018, p. 414.