This would have been a great idea about twenty years ago. Today, it might as well be a deck of automats, telegraph machines, gentleman's corsetry, etc. - it's far enough out of date that the likely audience to find it won't relate much to it. In fact, the corsetry and telegraphs would be appealing to the steampunk crowd at least! Here it's a handful of people into old-school film photography that would be interested - and that's about as popular and large a group as surviving WW2 vets.
The tuck box idea is nice, but the front image is stretch wide to the point of distorted - not a selling point.
The cameras are lovingly photographed, but again, it's an obscure category. He could have easily left the pips out, keeping just the indices, and the deck would be better for it artistically.
Do you remember the movie "The Mod Squad?" It was a semi-serious movie from 1999 based on a TV show that ran from 1968-1973 and was probably almost entirely gone even from reruns by 1979. The target audience of the movie wasn't even born when the TV show was on the air and would have been infants at best when it was in reruns! This deck is the playing card equivalent of that movie, as I see it. Well-intentioned, reasonably well made in terms of design, but too far out of date to be relevant.
At $17 for a single deck, no early bird, it's very expensive. Considering it's going to be on par with a typical short-run digital printer like MPC at best, it's not worth the price. This might have actually done better as a collection of art photography assembled into a coffee-table book. He could have targeted photography enthusiasts and charged premium prices for a high-quality book.
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