Courting Tradition

I’ve finished all of the art for my steampunk-gearpunk playing card deck.  That was the easy part.  The court cards took the most time, even though they are relatively simple compared to something you might see in this sort of deck (which is really cool, by the way).  The Jules Verne card is my favorite, but this Thomas Edison card will always be a bit special, in that he and I have the same initials.

Thomas Edison

Anyway, you might note that he’s rusty red now, instead of the silver I’ve been showing thus far for the nonblack cards.  Y’see, part of making this into a Kickstarter project is doing market research.  It seems like most of the decks offered thus far on Kickstarter and the commentary threads I’ve read suggest that there is a strong desire for traditional playing card design.  The standard red/black color scheme is less relevant when talking about custom art on playing cards, but there’s still a strong traditionalist streak to appeal to, it seems.  Since I’m not doing the “one eyed Royals” or some of the other fine details of tradition, I figured I’d fall back to the red/black color scheme.  I miss the silver/steel Hearts and Diamonds, but rusty red works in the theme, too.  I took the opportunity to de-purple the edge too, make it a bit rustier, and spiffy up a few other little things.

10 of Hearts

Similarly, I’ve made a new set of cards that use the standard pip layout instead of  the custom one that I did earlier.  So… now I effectively have two decks of cards designed.  I’ll offer my original silver/black deck via The Game Crafter, and set this new one up as the Kickstarter deck.  It’s a bit of a compromise, but it seems like it might be the better choice for the venue.  (And, really, though I miss the silver, this new design is looking a bit sharper and more unified anyway.  Maybe I’ll do a silver variant sometime, just on principle.)

So yes, the art is done.  Doing a Kickstarter campaign requires a bit more than that, so I’m going to a semi-ghost town this weekend, among other things.  More on that later.

There’s more research to do, numbers to run, paperwork to file, people to email… plenty of stuff to do before this baby is ready to launch.  But it’s getting there, and I’m pretty excited to get it out there for public consumption.  Thanks for your interest, everyone!