50 Pfennig Skat Series - Rote Spitzen

Altenburg's claim to being the home of Skat — the German card game codified there in the early nineteenth century — made it natural, if not inevitable, that the city would issue Notgeld designed around the game. The Rote Spitzen series is among the most deliberately collectible of the early 1920s emergency issues: the Altenburger Spielkartenfabrik, a playing card manufacturer, printed its own municipal currency, which is an almost comically perfect convergence of subject matter and production.

Designed by the mononymous Pix, the series was issued knowing full well that collectors, not shopkeepers, would be the primary audience.