She breaks a few rules of card design with this project, but considering the audience she's aiming for, I don't think they'll care that much. She'll definitely attract more of the cartomancy-and-tarot crowd than the magic-and-cardistry-and-collecting crowd, but considering the comparable size of the two, that's not a bad thing.
What are these so called 'rules of card design' you talk about?
They're the design features most commonly found in a standard deck. For example:
- She has the corner indices lowered, so a wider fan is needed to read them.
- The red deck has faces with two different colors printed into the bleed - you'd be able to use that in a number of different ways for magic/card cheating.
- The indices are made with a serif font and decorative pips that are a little too ornate for an index; indices should be rapidly and easily read on the merest peek.
Now, calling these "rules" doesn't mean they can never be broken. Quite the contrary, in fact. However, if one breaks a rule, there needs to be a good reason for it in the design. Since this is the furthest thing from a poker deck I could imagine that still shares the Anglo-American design standard and is designed from the start primarily for the use of cartomancy, some of the rules matter less. To respond to the "broken rules" one at a time:
- These cards will more often be read in a cartomancy spread than in a player's hand.
- While it's somewhat possible to "cheat" a fortune in this manner, it's very unlikely because when preparing to use fortune-telling decks, a random number of cards gets inverted before the deck is shuffled, thus eliminating any chances of putting the one-way in-the-bleed faces to any good use.
- A cartomancy reading takes place with face-up cards spread on a table being interpreted based on the card's value, suit and position, which is a time-consuming process not to be rushed, so rapid identification of a card's value and suit from its index is less important.
It's like anything in design - there's rules for how something is done, but the rules aren't ironclad and never to be violated. Should one choose to violate them, however, there should be a real justification for why one is breaking them - otherwise, it's just bad design. This deck can get away with breaking some rules because of the nature of the deck and its overall intended use. You
could use them for poker or any other game requiring an Anglo-American deck, but its primary intended use is cartomancy and as a cartomancy deck, certain standard design practices can be overlooked in favor of design features that are appealing to fortune tellers rather than card players.
I tell you, though - I would be interested in seeing her hit the stretch goal for stripper decks! Imagine the things a magician could get away with in a fortune-telling routine... I've never seen a purpose-built fortune-telling deck of any kind that had a stripped edge. It's also telling that she's opted for the most stripped-down version of the design to have that feature - the design most likely to be used by professional cartomancers!
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