Now THIS is what playing card companies should be striving for - decks that genuinely qualify as works of art. No cheesy, lame clip art, no goofy color combinations, no claims that it's valuable simply because it's as rare as the Hope Diamond (replicas sold in the lobby)... Those decks are all recently created, and any one of them could be proudly displayed in an art museum and would be warmly received.
Can ANY of the popular card companies we all have come to know and love (or hate, or both) make these claims with a straight face about their decks? Works like the Sentinels and the Infinity come close, closer than most. No, not every deck should be like this, but they should certainly be much more front-and-center than off in the shadows, barely heard of. Who here wouldn't freak out if they could get any one of those awesome art decks from a company like E, D&D, TBC, T11, DBlaine, etc.? Imagine the magic tricks you could devise with a deck that practically tells a story on the face of each and every card?
If Merz67 pulled a deck like this out of his butt and started selling it, I would be struck dead on sight. Which I suppose is a good thing, since the odds of it happening are the same as the odds of me having dinner tomorrow night with Andy Warhol, Harry Potter, King Henry VIII, the Curies, Amelia Earheart, Jeanne D'Arc and Gandalf over at the Windows on the World Restaurant on the 106th floor of 1 World Trade Center (the North tower), all of us sipping absinthe while concocting the Grand Unified Theory that eluded Albert Einstein, who will just so happen to be our dessert waiter for the evening!
