Jennifer, you are indeed a true friend - because only a true friend would be brave enough to present these cards and weather the comments that will undoubtedly arise from them...
I have no other way to say this. They are extremely hard to look at. They are not at all attractive. I want to be objective about this.
The cards are indeed unique - but I've said this before: "unique" and "good" are not necessarily the same thing, and designers try WAY too hard making something unique at times, to the point that the end result is just not very good.
Writing the card's suit along the edge is a terrible idea. It makes it too easy to flash your cards suit to your opponent by accident when playing cards. There's a vintage deck that hand indices all along the outer edge of the card, printed a few dozen times - its popularity didn't last for exactly the same reason.
These colors - they're all dark. When printing dark on light or light on dark, the results can be breathtaking. When printing dark on dark, like this, the results can be like mud floating in black coffee - too dark. His printer is almost certainly printing these cards digitally, which means they're likely to end up even darker still. By the time these cards are finished, without significant retouching, they're going to look like blobs of purplish-black goo, lacking any visible detail because of the lack of contrast.
And speaking of printer - what printer? Some local printer we've never heard of, making card of unknown provenance and potentially dubious quality. Card collectors tend to gravitate to decks by specific manufacturers for a reason - they know they'll be getting a quality-made product that's worth what's being charged. In this case, it's more like a craps shoot. We don't have a name, we've never seen anything they made, so we could be getting the cheapest-made decks on Earth for all we know. Sure, they could also be the greatest cards ever printed, but statistically speaking, the odds would be against it by a very wide margin.
One-way back design... It's not necessarily the kiss of death, but poker players avoid them like the plague, for fear of being accused of cheating. A skillful cheat can rearrange a deck and take advantage of such one-way designs, placing all the high-value cards turned one way while the low-value cards are turned the other way, giving him or her an edge over the other players at the table. Even all but the newest amateur magicians tend to avoid them. That right there has trimmed your potential audience for this deck by a significant number.
But it doesn't really matter, because unless this printer works for peanuts, this goal is WAY too low to cover manufacturing AND distribution, not to mention all those lovely stretch goals which he's GIVING AWAY, according to the terms of his reward tiers. He's be lucky if he doesn't end up broke - unless he pulls the plug on this project, he will almost certainly lose money on it, unless the printer is just so cheap that the cards aren't going to be worth the money being asked for them. And that's only for making a single deck - we're not even accounting for the second paper deck, the holofoil cards, the stainless steel deck or the poker chips!! It hardly matters that the quantities of these items are very limited - if anything, that's worse, because it means a much-higher per-unit cost as well, dangerously close to leaving him without any profit margin at all, especially with his "$5 ships anywhere in the world" special.
Honestly, if he paid me to take these cards, I think I'd still pass on this project. "Ben Klark"/"Benjamin318" himself has so much "faith" in this project, he took down his Facebook page! Why should I have any faith in his capacity to deliver? He doesn't even work in design - he's a "video game modification artist," which as far as I can tell translates to "I hack mods and other cheats for games someone else made and I've never worked in print graphics before, but how hard can it be, right?" It's practically the design equivalent of being an "equine residential sanitation engineer and organic fertilizer redistribution technician" - also known as "stable mucker." Is he even old enough to run a KS project without parental consent? He doesn't look like it in his photos.
(Read 306 times)
