I got my deck in the mail today. You can check out a few pics and brief thoughts here: http://xmetal.me/design-art-in-cards

I understand having a collection of things that you like, but what is less clear to me in relation to cards is that if you collect cards and keep them sealed forever, you have missed out on the vast majority of the "art" in the product. At minimum, you have the box and 52 cards (usually 54+) so if you never open that box, you are getting to enjoy less than 2% of what you paid for, which seems a shame.

If you intend to keep and resell, it certainly makes sense to keep it pristine, but if you buy and intend to keep, having it sealed forever would seem to rob you of the most of the tangible enjoyment.

Ultimately, of course, people spend their own money and are free to do whatever makes them happy.

I decided to pick up one of these from pokerstud. Maybe a couple bucks more than they should be, but I thought they looked sweet, with some different touches. Looking forward to getting those. Got quite a few decks in transit right now which is always fun...

I was looking through some of mine, and noticed on the Bicycle Gargoyles there is a small difference right above the gargoyle head, and on the Arcane the top of the ribbon thing tends to move around a little.

Color variations really don't do anything for me. I just  got some blue and simply changing the back doesn't compel me to want to get those. With so many other totally new decks available I think I'll pass on the green artifice (tho artifice cards are some of my favorites and handle so nicely)

Its not worth making a fuss over, but I was excited to give it a shot, made sure I was ready and all that. If I didn't even get the chance to see the button, that means my local timer was off by at least 90 seconds (what they said it sold out in). So that was poopy programming.

I'd sure catch hell if one of my web sites interactive features was off by that much.

Ah well, hopefully their servers won't die on 11/11/11.

Boo. I call foul play on their timer mechanism. I suspect that their was a minor inconsistency across browsers or via the calculation from when you loaded the page. I purposefully had that page up for several hours, and watched it count down. It went from 0 directly to the Sold Out button appearing. Didn't even see the add to cart, even for a split second. I was ready to click the instant my timer ran down. In theory (get it, in THEORY?) that button should have at minimum appeared for all users at the same time, even if you only had a moment to click it.

It's not like I'm going to sue or anything, and I'll just buy a deck in a couple weeks, but as a professional web developer I'm kind of disappointed that their mechanism obviously did not work perfectly consistently for all viewers.

This is a deck I'm really looking forward to. Love the cardist angle of the joker, and the back is so pretty and elegant. Hope it releases in December like he says to I can add it to the collection.

The box, with what appear to be gold accents look quite detailed and classy. I'm definitely going to aim for a deck of these at some point.

Quite brilliant marketing, a great way to get a lot of people's emails and addresses. Smart enough that even knowing the point I still sent in my info. 

I think that deck looks pretty cool, being a fan of ancient Japanese culture I'm general. But, it's still probably 6th on my priority list behind the more custom stuff like Vortex, Seasons and Mana. Maybe I'll grab those samurai off eBay someday.

The Deck One and Sentinels are awesome, IMO. I didn't even realize the whole world of really cool decks existed until I saw a link to Theory 11 a few months back. I'm still learning so I may not pick up on the subtle differences between decks, but the Sentinels in particular are sweet for their design alone. I love seeing actual custom design work and not just a recoloring or minor change in suit cards.

That said, looking at my pile of decks it looks like Ellusionist wins out over T11 for me at the moment when it comes to the "bigger" companies making decks.