As more and more of these types of projects appear I continue to feel that I'm not even part of the "card market" anymore. There are now 1,024 projects on Kickstarter if you search for "playing cards," which is just flat out crazy. In early 2012 when I did Tendril there had been 6 proper (i.e. USPCC) playing card projects. I think there are about 30 active ones this month alone.
Projects like this are just so unrelated to anything that makes playing cards great. I guess everyone has the right to try to make some money, but why playing cards have become the dumping ground for seemingly every idea under the sun is beyond me.
In a way, they always have been since the antebellum years following the Civil War. Many companies have made advertising decks or packaged decks in advertising boxes. This, despite its imperfections, is the last deck on Earth I'd be all that concerned about. It's the OTHER decks out there, the ones literally slapped together by people with more ambition and avarice than skills and experience.
Companies like MPC encourage this kind of deck, because they're print decks in any quantity you could want, though at a steep premium per-deck for short runs. When I see someone asking $15 for an MPC deck, I have to take a deep breath before asking what the hell he was thinking of. MPC isn't the worst by far and they are improving, but they aren't USPC, Expert or Legends (or even CartaMundi or Card-Shark) by any stretch of the imagination. I just wish more of their innovation was in making better quality cards and less of it was in making decks with three-dimensional printing.
@Encarded - This deck has some major flaws in it. It should fail. Don't worry about it... You should worry about the 40 Kickstarters next summer when USPCC goes with the 1000 deck minimum of Bike stock...
USPC cancelled the 1000 minimum, (to my knowledge) there are some exceptions, I think the bacon deck will be accepted because they have an existing contract.
Too true, Rose. Considering what they can fetch for a larger contract, it's not worth it to them to pursue print runs that small in general, though I'm sure for certain high-value customers they'd make exceptions. Certain aspects of deck design will take the same amount of time regardless of the size of the print run - contracts are signed, Legal inspects the design (wait, shouldn't that be the OTHER way around? You'd think so, right?), proofs have to get approved, plates have to be created, etc. Run off 1,000 or 100,000 and those costs won't change, and neither will the time it consumes. As long as USPC isn't hurting for new deck producers banging on their doors, they'll hold off on making short runs like that for the indefinite future.
Rob, PurpleIce - yes, some people will buy whatever POS deck USPC lets someone produce as a limited edition. The "Bicycle" brand still carries weight, though that grip on the market is starting to weaken, more and more with each crappy design USPC's Bicycle brand manager approves. Since Kickstarter has no shortage of those, in time people will stop buying just because of the brand name and start buying because it's a great deck or something they really want.
And yes, there are some ridiculously indulgent parents out there, mostly upper-middle income or wealthy, who buy their children's affections with money rather than quality time, so yes, there's an inordinate number of teens with cash to burn and a metric fuckton of playing cards in their possession stored in an otherwise-empty room somewhere. Come the zombie apocalypse, they will have enough to last several lifetimes, even if they get really good at killing zombies with thrown cards into the skull or perhaps a nice neck-shot decapitation... If only they could eat them...
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