Look, you're taking a bit of flack for the "yet another zombie deck" thing. Give it a reason to stand out head-and-shoulders above the rest of the crop. Maybe full color wouldn't be such a bad thing in this case - it would really make those designs pop.
Those pips on top of the tuck box? Just push them away from the center. Better yet, push all four to one side and place a "card reveal" on the other, mixed in with a few random digits and letters like a manufacturer's model number. If you don't know what that is, a card reveal is a simple but slightly devious way to reveal a spectator's card at the end of a trick. Some designers create fake bar codes on the box bottom to conceal the name of a card where the numbers would normally go. Some will simply print it somewhere unexpected, like on the top flap or the little side flaps (usually the value on one flap and the suit on the other). Some get really tricky, hiding them in jokers, on court cards' clothing, on the extra/ad cards, etc. David Blaine has a mentalism trick he does where he reveals the word "indigo" under the box seal of his White Lions decks, with some of the letters concealed in the words "playing cards". You can really go nuts with them.
About the backs - go color. Really. A really good B&W comic can look really good, but a really good color comic can look great with all those vivid colors. I could be wrong here, but I remember when I was younger that the only comics I saw in B&W were from the publishers who couldn't (or didn't want to) spring the extra bucks for a color print job. There's a reason why there are no more black-and-white TVs in any appliance stores... I do recognize that there's some artists who've done great things in B&W comics - but this is a different medium. A lot of deck makers are creating full-color backs and the people collecting them love it. A monochrome back design can work, but it really has to be a work of art, like a true classic design. The Legends deck and the Split Spades Lions are examples of this. Monochrome can also work if the design is utterly simple and elegant, like with the Madison Rounders by Ellusionist or the Virtuoso deck. You're making a zombie deck - zombies are far more interesting in color than in black-and-white these days. No disrespect to EC - they did some masterful work in their era.
Regarding the courts - two-headed is the way to go. People will go around flipping court cards and revealing them to other players - it's why the two-headed courts came into existence in the first place. I've seen some great decks that have the two heads different from each other - for example, one head can be a straight-up drawing of the art subject in real life, and the flipped head is him or her as a zombie; before and after, so to speak.
Magic Finish does have many names, the most common being "Magic Finish" and "Performance Coating". Some decks even have "Air Cushion" or "Cambric" listed on the box even though it's really Magic Finish (there's a difference in the smell; MF has a sharper, more chemical scent). One magic company, Ellusionist, was offered the chance to test the coating on what was at the time a new deck, the Gold Arcane deck, and back then USPC was using the code name of "Performance Coating" for the new finish. When USPC christened it Magic Finish, Ellusionist opted to keep the code name, thinking that it sounded classier. Personally, I agree - not to mention that putting the word "magic" on a deck of cards could throw off some poker players! But when you get down to brass tacks, you can call the coating anything you wish. Even "Zombie Entrails Finish"! There's already been one deck calling it "Apocalyptic Finish", so why not?
If Bicycle gives you a hard time on the box art and you think it's too much of a compromise, consider going without the Bicycle brand name. It is indeed true that "Bicycle (TM)" is a brand sought after by many collectors - there are some who ONLY buy Bicycle, nothing else. But it's also true that if a deck's design is good enough, the Bicycle name won't matter in the end. Halfway into the KS campaign for the "Federal 52" deck, its creator gave in to backers' demands and created alternate versions of both of the decks his campaign was offering, minus the Bicycle branding. Before Federal 52 broke the record of highest-funded KS deck project, the previous record holder was a high-design deck called "Misc. Goods Co. Playing Cards", also known as the Pedale Design deck after the one-man company that created it. Not only was it the furthest thing from a Bicycle-branded deck, it didn't even initially have strong appeal to card collectors - in the beginning it was of more interest to people who liked the art. Once it got featured on a few design blogs, the rest was history.
As far as stock - many, MANY decks make no claims at all on the box about the stock. USPC will probably give your company two choices, Bicycle and Bee Casino, and that's it. The stocks are defined by being within a certain range of thicknesses, and the two ranges actually overlap, with Bicycle being the lighter of the two at the low end of the thickness ranges and Bee Casino being the heavier at the high end.
Simply put, Bee Casino stock will cost a bit more and require custom tuck boxes that are farmed out to a third-party company, adding eight weeks to the entire production process. I love Bee Casino grade, but I also find nothing wrong whatsoever with Bicycle stock. If you want the heavier stock, consider it as a stretch goal, after you've already locked in the pledges you need to get it made at all.
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