Welcome to the boards, and yes, it's a pretty good place to go for information about decks and deck design.
I think what Rose might have been referring to was that there are other printers, less costly than US Playing Card Company (USPC), that you could have turned to who would have done better work. Make Playing Cards does decent but low-budget work - some designers use them for demo decks, then print with a different printer. Others get their decks from them and are perfectly happy with them, but in terms of high-performance playing cards, they're not the best choice.
@Don
The deck designs are actually interesting, but have a few flaws here and there. A little fine-tuning
What would you fine-tune in the designs? What are the flaws?
Cheers
Wow, there's a lot to cover there, since you're working on three decks in a single release - unusually ambitious for a first-time deck maker.
First, the music - I understand it's part and parcel of the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. community (and I had to research that term to learn it refers to a not-yet-released video game set in 2012 Ukraine as opposed to, well, "stalker") and fans of post-apocalyptic fiction and gaming. However, you should be looking at your target audience with a wider field of vision. People who crawl around Kickstarter may never have heard of your game, thought the cards were really cool, then scratched their heads about the music and thought the "stalker community" was a pretty creepy concept they wanted nothing to do with (or worse, wanted EVERYTHING to do with)! If you were starting from scratch, I'd leave the music as a second project. Make it either stand alone or pair it with something a little more appropriate - there was a project around here for a deck of cards by a company making what they called "steampunk goggles" who might have made for an excellent partnership. Steampunk and post-apocalyptic are practically next-door neighbors, conceptually speaking.
Now, the decks.
I'll start with Ornament. You have some very cool design ideas - if you want to leave this simply as an art deck project, the kind that looks pretty on the shelf and gets looked at once in a while but is left behind when it comes time to play a serious game of cards.
The biggest consideration is the faces printing into the bleed. When a card is printed into the bleed, some of what's been printed right at the cut edge of the card can actually be seen from the side of the deck. This means that for a card like your Four of Clubs or Ace of Hearts, I'd actually be able to identify their placement in the middle of the deck just by looking at the deck's edge. For card players, particularly poker players, this is a huge no-no - your deck is effectively a marked deck at that point.
Another thing, less concerning but still important, is the index font. You've got the size of the index down rather nicely, but the width of the value characters is a bit too narrow. Indices should be quick and easy to read. A narrow index is good for hiding the cards in a tight fan in your hand when playing, but too narrow and it's not so easy to read. Keep the height and make them a touch wider - the only exception being for the "10", which despite being a two-character value should be kept at the same width as the rest of the indices. Keeping the indices of a uniform width is also conducive to quick-and-easy comprehension.
On the card back - this is NOT a hard and fast rule, but most card players prefer a two-way back design - one that's the same when rotated 180 degrees. A sneaky dealer might try separating some of the cards out facing one direction and leaving the rest of the deck facing the other, making it easy to spot cards of a specific range of values as they're being dealt. This is commonly referred to as "cheating"!
It's not the end of the world if your design remains one-way, but if you don't have a specific reason for keeping it as such, consider making it two-way instead and you'll increase the deck's functionality, thus its popularity.
It appears based on the back design and the three faces I can see that you may be looking at making this a four-color deck, in terms of having a different color for each suit. There are two schools of thought on this. Some people tend to like a four-color deck because it's easier for them to identify the suits from the different colors. Others, however, find this somewhat less useful for the many games that rely on decks having four suits but only two colors. The only scenarios where I've ever seen four-color decks in heavy use was among senior card players, especially when combined with a "low-vision" oversized face design - people with failing vision have a harder time distinguishing the suits, so the four-color scheme helps. My call would be that if you have a specific artistic reason for using four-color suits, go for it, since it's not like you have a shortage of deck designs to choose from here. Otherwise, stick with just two. It will also help with making the back more of a one-way design, assuming you change the back to match the pip color scheme.
The second deck, Spectacle, is actually pretty good right off the bat, but needs a few tweaks. Make the values larger and suits just a little smaller in the indices. For a two-way design, move the central circular pattern to the top half of the card and create an identical, mirrored version on the bottom half. Some might moan about one-way faces, to which I say, "get over it" - the bleak landscapes are great and should be shown full-card as you've presented them.
For the final deck, Legendary - again, same notes about a one-way back, though for this deck, it might actually be more appropriate to leave it as is. It has more of an older vibe to it, like the kinds of decks you'd find in a hunting cabin your grandpa used to take you to in the summer. Normally, I'd say get rid of the line work around the edges of all the cards, but for the old-style vibe, it works very well. Small indices are also reminiscent of that type of deck, but I'd still make it a bit larger since you're using an atypical font and you want ease of readability. The only other consideration I'd make is a stylistic one rather than a functional one. While it's true many of these old-style deck designs did use a more orangey-red for the red pips, consider using a darker, "casino red" - really more of a blood red. With the wild-animal theme going for it, I think it would create a more visually dynamic appearance for the animal art on cards like the Aces.
If you have any more questions, feel free to contact me - I do consulting work for playing card designers as a sideline business.
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