I do love all the Creative Criticism and do listen to it, on the other hand I am hearing more of what is wrong rather on what you feel is good. I keep hearing about my Ace of Spades being odd one out but isn't that the case in just about every deck? Isn't the Ace of Space the one that is always different? The mention about someone else art I do understand and I did not say it was mine, I have already talked to the artist. I am not a artist so I have to use what someone else does. I also understand that you can please some of the people all of the time and all the people some of the time but you will never please all the people all the time. There is no way that everyone will like this and someone will always see it a different / better way. I am still currently trying to find a happy medium from your ideas in input but it all still seems on the negative side with little positive. Also like I have mentioned this is meant to be a Novelty and not a Professional Bicycle or USPCC designed deck.
The deck had some flaws, as we saw it. We offered ideas to rectify them.
Yes, the Ace of Spades is usually a stand-out card different from the rest. But if the deck's art is two-dimensional, the AoS is usually two-dimensional as well. Same applies for a three-d deck. Your 3D AoS looks like the square peg you're trying to jam into the smaller, round hole.
Fine, you're not an artist. Not a big deal. But if you use another artist's work, get the proper copyright issues squared away. USPC will not even touch a deck design that doesn't have all of its intellectual property rights cleanly and neatly arranged in advance. Smart printers follow suit - no one likes to expose themselves to a lawsuit.
Don't knock novelty decks! Do you realize how many "Square Decks" and "Crooked Decks" have been sold over the years? The folks who developed them made a fortune, despite how most collectors would turn a blind eye to them. They're not always the best-quality, best-made cards out there, but if you're selling millions of them, does that really matter? (The answer is "No, I like bringing wheelbarrows full of cash to the bank on a regular basis!") The Pet Rock, Rubik's Cube and Tamagotchi were novelties - and made more money than I could count in my lifetime.
Not every novelty does that well. But they don't have to in order to turn a good profit. You just need that combination of right design, right place, right time.
Sample Ace's and Back per Justin's request.. The back Is not all that great but it fits the binary theme cause it just 1's n 0's. The court cards I do agree with but I cant seem to find a fit that i like. I did change them to ACSII images instead, but yes they are still typical type Courts. I thought that would leave the overall deck geeky but still give classic recognition for those that dont read binary. It was also my reasoning for putting the words like king and queen on the Court Cards. A friend suggested something like a tablet for the Jack , Laptop for the Queen and a Server for the King.
Your friend's suggestion is very sound. I'd consider a smartphone for the Jack - laptops and tablets are rapidly becoming the same device these days, so it will "future-proof" your design a little. Of course, traditional courts in ASCII also works perfectly fine and are timeless, as future-proof as an idea gets. Perhaps the "gadget edition" will be your 2.0 deck? Also, as Justin mentioned, make the courts larger - look at how big they are on a standard pack of cards and aim for something around that size, something that fills the card face more.
I notice that you're now using ASCII art for the courts and the card back. One issue may crop up in both cases - the level of detail may be too high to capture with offset printing. Make the ASCII characters a bit larger and use larger numerals for the back. And using a horizontal bar in the middle to separate court halves went out of style about a hundred years ago or more except perhaps in Parisian decks or French tarot decks (the game tarot not the divination system tarot). Also, consider a change to the colors on the back. It's a contrast issue - a design with low contrast will end up looking like mud, especially when it has so many tiny details to capture. Make the backs jet black with white numerals, like you'd see on an old-school Radio Shack TRS-80 or a MS-DOS (pre-Windows, pre-GUI, pre-mouse) computer. Without a doubt - REMOVE the deck name from the back of the cards. The proper place for that would be on the Ace of Spades. All it does for your design is make the back one-way, thus unsuitable for competitive card games. Wise poker players never use a deck with a one-way back.
I mentioned that eight bits was a lot for a specific reason - no one wants to fan their cards that wide or, if you print it vertically, have to look that far down just to be able to read your indices. While you are trying to appeal to a geek audience, you always want to try to keep the indices as easy to read as possible. Four-digit binary is plenty, and people will easily be able to figure out that 1011
2 or 11
10 is a jack, 1100
2 or 12
10 is a queen and 1101
2 or 13
10 is a king - it's not rocket science. Some card marking systems already employ such a system - and if you were interested, you COULD make a marked deck out of this by using the binary numerals on the backs in a subtle way.
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