Early history
The first playing cards are recorded as being invented in China around the 9th century AD by the Tang dynasty author Su E who writes about the card game "leaf" in the text Collection of Miscellanea at Duyang. The text describes Princess Tongchang, daughter of Emperor Yizong of Tang, playing leaf in 868AD with members of the family of the princess' husband.
The mass production of Cards became possible following the invention of wooden printing block technology. Early Chinese packs contained 30 cards with no suits.
The first cards may have doubled as actual paper currency being both the tools of gaming and the stakes being played for. This is similar to modern trading card games. Using paper money was inconvenient and risky so they were substituted by play money known as "money cards".
The earliest dated instance of a game involving cards with suits and numerals occurred on 17 July 1294.
European Adoption
The first four-suited playing cards appeared in Europe in 1365. They are thought to originate from traditional latin decks whose suits included: cups, coins, swords, and polo-sticks. As Polo was not yet a European game, polo sticks became batons (or cudgels). Wide use of playing cards is recorded from 1377 onwards.
Professional card makers in Ulm, Nuremberg, and Augsburg created printed decks. Playing cards even competed with devotional images as the most common uses for woodcuts in this period. These 15th-century playing cards were probably painted.
The Flemish Hunting Deck, held by the Metropolitan Museum of Art is the oldest complete set of ordinary playing cards made in Europe.
Cards were adapted in Europe to contain members of the royal court and by the 15th Century French and English packs of 56 cards contain the King, Queen and Knave cards.
Modern Cards
Contemporary playing cards are grouped into three broad categories based on the suits they use: French, Latin, and Germanic. Latin suits are used in the closely related Spanish and Italian formats. The Swiss-German suits are distinct enough to merit their subcategory. Excluding Jokers and Tarot trumps, the French 52-card deck preserves the number of cards in the original Mamluk deck, while Latin and Germanic decks average fewer.
Within suits, there are regional or national variations called "standard patterns" because they are in the public domain, allowing multiple card manufacturers to copy them. Pattern differences are most easily found in the face cards but the number of cards per deck, the use of numeric indices, or even minor shape and arrangement differences of the pips can be used to distinguish them. Some patterns have been around for hundreds of years. Jokers are not part of any pattern as they are a relatively recent invention and lack any standardized appearance so each publisher usually puts their own trademarked illustration into their decks.