I spent most of last night trying various microphone tweaks in order to get just the right sound.

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If you're a regular Shoebox player, you'll probably notice that all of the card sounds have been "remastered!"

I grabbed the deck of Chance cards from the "Monopoly Gamer - Mario Kart" edition that's sat beside the couch, and sat here going "flippy flappy flap" with them for about half an hour.

Incidentally, the Monopoly set has also been used for all the Dice noises, along with the various clicking and tapping sounds throughout the game. The "Pop" of the bubbles is literally me going "Pop" into the mic, but those were recorded in 2005 for Stringy Things DS!!

In the end, the best mic seemed to be the iPad, making use of the app AudioShare, which has a Record and Normalise feature that produced a fairly decent output.
The laptop's mic is alarmingly bad, and the mic that came with Rock Band 2 (many moons ago) seems to have a slight echo to it.

Anyway, recordings done, I then snipped away using CoolEdit Pro, from where the output was churned through my audio-compile program, eventually ending up as part of the "all.wav" which holds all the sounds.

Having spent a good while then playing the games, I think I probably need to add a lightness filter (Equaliser) to the sounds. The cards all sound a little "heavy" with a bit too much bass. Either that or a pitch-up for them all.
I'm not sure which will sound better, so I'll be experimenting.