Working under the name Thirdway Industries (TWI, for short), Giovanni Meroni is one of those artists who tries to give Jackson Robinson a run for his money, in terms of the number of decks he releases each year. In the eligibility period, he released Galaxia, Poison and a reprint of his first ever project, with its reprinted companion deck: Good & Evil.
Galaxia is inspired by the dystopian sci-fi stories of the mid-20th century. The three editions of the deck (Promessa, Altezza and Domina [the limited edition of the series]) tell the story of human colonists traversing the galaxy to reach Terra-2, their new home. In addition, he tacked on two more editions through the campaign, Intregra (a design tweak of the Domina deck, intended initially for Kickstarter backers only) and Superba (a limited, gilded version with a black background design). Meroni considers it to be a direct sequel to the totalitarian government-based series, Order. The decks were printed by USPC, except Superba, which was printed by Expert PCC. (Images 1 & 2)
Poison has a looser story, based around pharmacists and poisoners in America during the Roaring '20s. The editions of this project are Aspis (green, unlimited, printed approximately 2,000 copies), Kingslayer (a gilded, Kickstarter-exclusive version of Aspis, limited to 888 copies) and Belladonna (pink background on the faces, holographic foil on the backs, limited to 1,500 decks). The first two were printed by USPC, while Belladonna was printed by Legends PCC. (Images 3 & 4)
And finally, there's the reprints - The Evil Deck was created in 2014 as a result of Meroni winning a contest on this forum before it was purchased by 52 Plus Joker, the prize of the contest being to have your deck printed by Expert PCC. The companion deck, the Good Deck, was designed later but not printed after trying unsuccessfully to crowdfund the project on the now-defunct Decklauncher website. Many TWI fans have asked Meroni in the intervening years about the Good Deck, but he decided that the files for it on his computer were just too old and needed an update - and he didn't want to update the Good Deck design without matching it with the Evil Deck! The biggest update was on the spot cards - both decks now have artistic images instead of uniform suit pips on them, with standard pips in the indices only. Both decks this time around were printed by USPC. (Image 5)
The project pages:
Galaxia, on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thirdwayind/galaxia-playing-cards/descriptionPoison, on Kickstarter:
https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/thirdwayind/poison-playing-cards/descriptionGood & Evil, V2, on the Thirdway Industries web store:
https://www.thirdwayindustries.com/product/good-evil-v2/
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