Aaaaaaannnnd ...
I finally bought it, today.
I've been twitching for a while. Yesterday I was on tenderhooks, knowing I would have money today. And guess what, this morning I found I had more money than I could account for!
Which worked out fabulously, because once freight was calculated in (from the USA, for an Australian product!) and the money translated into real dollars, it was $126 and an odd handful of cents, enough to buy a fortnight's groceries for me at Australian prices.
Until now, my two most expensive decks cost me: $300 and $100 including freight, so this one overtakes the second-most expensive one. I have hosts of decks that are worth much more than that - but that is because they have gone out of print and have become super-desirable after I bought them at much more reasonable prices. This one is in-print, and peculiarly difficult for Australians to buy, ironic for such an Australian product.
I'm willing to bet the deck is gorgeous and worth every cent, certainly as a collector. I'm also willing to bet that if I end up reviewing it, no matter how much I may rhapsodise over the deck itself, I'll have an ascerbic paragraph or two to say about pricing, ease of access and customer service.
Now that I've stopped twitching about actually buying it, I'm now twitching abut receiving it.
Oh, and if you're running Kaspersky Internet Security as your firewall of choice, you'll already be familiar with the pain in the neck that it's financial subroutine, "SafeMoney" is. Well, buying this deck off the "buy now" link, which was the only way I found to buy it, involved a step more than usual: in the end, I had to completely uninstall Kaspersky, buy, then reinstall it. It wouldn't even take me into its usual "unsafe" option of a "protected browser". Nup. Refused to deal with them at all. And it was just a Paypal link!
I'd better bloody enjoy this deck, is all I can say. All the difficulties have actually made it MORE likely that I really, really will!