I'm never particularly fond of their works.
Like what everybody else notices, it gets fairly boring the more decks they release, and i already mentioned this a few projects ago. It is their "style" and what may not be right for us definitely is for many others as shown in all their successful projects.
But in all fairness, their artwork and design has been good. Just look at the back design and you can tell they have some talent there. As a collector, i just hope they can have some new design breakthrough in their work.
Think of it like a car company. You could even say it's a luxury car company, if you wish. "Baroque Motors", if you will.
They put out their first car, everyone loves it. As the months and model years go by, they put out new models but they're strikingly similar to that first car - meaning they're all strikingly similar to each other, as well. You can get away with this for a while, perhaps, but eventually the public will tire of the design and want something different. It's either that or the car company has to find ways to make the old model look fresh and new to its consumers.
One easy way to do this is to introduce the car to people who've never bought cars before, another is to heavily court those people who've bought these models before and can't get enough of them. The first strategy will last for a while, but without real updates to the design, they'll just look at it like it's a "grandpa car", while the second strategy can't last long either due to the dwindling number of people who'll want absolutely no major changes to the design at all. Only the most stubborn and stagnant people will want that same design without any major changes ad infinitum; the rest will eventually change their minds If this wasn't the case, car companies would have maybe five models to choose from in all their vehicle categories in total, all at a single trim level, and they'd all look like the Ford Model T, which was available in any color you wanted as long as that color was black.
I get your point but you can't quite compare it to a car company. A Mercedes Benz 10 years down the road with the same design might still get people buying because of its reliability and performance as well. Whereas in this case, unless their cards have better performance that appeal to magicians or cardist, their value will die of much much faster before they even realise it.
Another saving factor could be the branding and timing. For branding, coming out with first few good designs definitely helped their cause. Coupled with good delivery and reasonable pricing, Elite, i believe, have a strong group of supporters.
Timing. Well, basically the playing card market is much hotter than a few years back. There are so many cards out there, but also a huge plentiful of horrible decks as well. A decent design more often will get all the new card collectors backing the project early while waiting out to see the response. On the other hand, a shitty design will most probably be waited out by card collectors to see the response, and only backed if it gets funded, just to follow the crowd and add a deck to their collection.
To carry the car metaphor a bit further, let's look at Mercedes-Benz. A ten-year-old Mercedes Benz may have some appeal to drivers as it's a well-built car and can last a long time. But picture this: what if all the new Mercedes-Benz released for the current model year looks extremely similar to that ten-year-old model, nothing really new added to it, no new technology or safety features and only minor differences overall? There would have to be some customers out there who've tired of the old design and want something new and different. Any car collector owning the ten-year-old model might look at the new ones, scratch his head and say to himself, "I have this already - do I want more of the same?" While some people will answer that with a yes, I suspect more would answer with a no.
The car business (much like the card business) is tied to fashion as much as it is to technology. Playing cards get new stocks, finishes, bonus features on the tuck box, etc., while car companies add back-up camera, on-board navigation, etc. In a collectors' market, such as the one we face now, people expect new and different to be synonymous when it comes to design. The best example of this I can think of would be Uusi - every deck they made (except for the Blueblood Redux, of course) is different than all the decks that preceded it. If a company's tenth deck is pretty much similar to the first one and all those in-between, it may be new, but it's not terribly different.
You mentioned the market (specifically the collectors' market in this case) is very hot right now, rife with both good and crappy designs. If there's enough good designs that are new and fresh compared to the company that's churning out essentially the same deck they did ten projects ago, I believe more people will flock to the new design. Without innovation, you end up with stagnation.
The one saving grace in such a situation is that, just like there's many new designs, there is also an influx of new customers in the market, beginning collectors who haven't tired of the old designs because they've never seen them. Combine that with enough diehard customers and the fact that the project needs only a small percentage of market share to succeed, and they can merrily continue cranking out the same exceptionally-similar design until some other variable in the market shifts.
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