Well, it certainly is unique.

"The shatterer can communicate through his sound waves"

That is an awesome power. Think of all the cool things you could do if....

Wait a minute isn't that just talking?

Even though some may not like the art, the artist behind it, Peter Wood, is notable for his transformation decks. He's made several, and his style varies from one deck to the next. Here's an article about him from World of Playing Cards:

http://www.wopc.co.uk/otc/aboutpw.html

Also, I have no problem with Teddy Bears on transformation cards. Even I had one in the Curator deck 

I am a big fan of Peter and his work and have several of his decks.  That said, this one seems quite... busy?  I still pledged for some but concerned it won't get funded.

-C

Yes, i agree. I looked up some of his works and would say his past works were quite good. This seems a little different from his usual style, probably to mimic the effect of a comic book, but a little too busy for my liking.

The characters though, are cute..i guess. I would consider getting this deck for my kid...but i don't have one yet.

While i'll agree with Don that there might be some novelty appeal, those type of decks usually fare pretty bad on KS as it seems most backers aren't interested in novelty or souvenir decks.

Thanks for the post here badpete69.

It is kind of fun to hear some of you point out some of the features of the deck:
- Funny quotes
- Busy art
- Bad Grammar
While some of these may need to be tweaked or changed, many of these are the exact features we were trying to capture in a deck of cards that is trying to capture the look of a comic book.  For example, the "Incredible Hug" uses poor grammar just like the green dude that he parodies.  Also, yes, it is VERY busy, kind of like art that jumps all over a comic book page.

Here is a recent response I gave someone else about this deck.  Why we did the deck?  Personally I love semi-transformational decks.  Especially when they follow a theme or topic. It takes a little more to design art that is actually intended for a deck of cards then it does to slap any image on the card faces.  I'm not saying I don't like other artistic decks, but I see the challenge and creativity level it takes to create a deck of cards that has each image that was designed specifically for that particular card.  I have told others that I am a lot different than many of the collectors here, so I do not post much or really even hang out here much.  I am more "old school" and I LOVE trying to bring "new", old school products back to the market.  I don't mind trendy things like 5 million different deck designs that just happen to say "Bicycle" on them, but it isn't really as appealing to me.  It is the art, the design, the originality.

In regards to "thecardcollector", I am guessing this is the same person who sent me a personal message of encouragement from the Kickstarter campaign that said:
"You guys actually thought this deck was a good idea? All I can say is YIKES! As a collector I have no interest, and poker players certainly won't. Don't really see the point to this, but I do see a funding failure, sorry to say.  Victor "
While I can appreciate the fact that he likes to collect playing cards, I also feel there are other types of collectors and card designs that folks like too.  I understand that on the card collectors side there hasn't been a huge following for semi-transformational in the past 20 years or so.  Maybe that is what prompted me to like that particular art even more.

I'm in for 2 because Victor is an ass.

It's not cool what you do Victor. Your a jerk. It's one thing to email a project with some constructive criticism, but to just bash something you don't like is just being a douche.

Victor- in case you don't know what that means-
from Urban Dictionary

douche

a word to describe an individual who has shown themself to be very brainless in one way or another, thus comparing them to the cleansing product for vaginas.

For someone that is supposedly so supportive of the playing card community. All you do is spew negativity. So shut the F up!

Getting over the... interesting color scheme, I'm noticing way too many grammatical errors. Add that to the weird, cheezy dialogue, the mediocre art, and the completely nonsensical theme, I can't see why anyone would buy this.

Also, the bear seems to just be copied and altered on every card. Like the artist only knew how to draw one bear.

Mr Mollusk, I know this deck is not everyone's "cup of tea" but I have to ask, do you not ever read comic books and catch the "cheesy" part of some of them?  That is what we are trying to capture while again trying to bring back an OLD style playing card art design.

On art, everyone has an opinion.  Your opinion sounds like it may be tinted with a little bit of "Bikini Bottom" criticism that is not really constructive.

On the teddy bear faces, my guess is you never owned or saw a teddy bear either?  You probably haven't looked at the bears on Vermont Teddy Bear or Build a Bear either.  While there are minor changes, it is not much.  As we roll out more images there are some bears that have a different look...but again, they're teddy bears!

Grammar, yep, there are some things that need to be changed.  Thanks to those who pointed them out either here or sent me a PM.  We will be uploading those shortly.  We LOVE constructive criticism.

No offense, but maybe you should come out of your mollusk or pineapple for a little and actually just say you have lived a sheltered life that doesn't understand different types of artwork, comic books or teddy bears.  For that matter, you do not seem to understand the historical part of semi-transformational decks. 

Sorry everyone, I could not resist the puns on the name of MrMollusk who looks like he is showing a blinking fish that says "My Eyes" from Spongebob.  Oh my.  BTW, should I make up a more fictitious name for this forum so I can say anything I want with no body really knowing who I am?  The rude comments by some of these people are what has kept me and I'm sure others from sharing any opinion or comments.  If I want all this negative garbage that doesn't mean squat I'll just go to a family reunion or something.

I think this deck would be better served with white borders, not the hit and miss themed backgrounds, some of which lend to the card, some detract. White backgrounds would make each card feel more like a panel from a comic book and less like a 'fill in every inch with a random fistful of crayolas'.
I'm not really getting a comic book vibe from this deck, it feels more like a collection of Hero-Bear concepts than the homage to comics that it claims to be. Super Heroes doesn't equate to comics.

While I am entertained by the different bears and their powers I a really thrown off by the inconsistency of the artwork. The artist is clearly talented, some of these are great, and his other projects have some excellent quality to them, but here you have a number of cards that seem hastily drawn, there is a lot of irregularity, some cards have a great balance to the bears or setting where as others have dramatically skewed proportions or a very amateur grasp of dimension and depth. (Pyro's pants clearly have draft lines showing in the flames where the artist didn't bother to clean up before he colored it in; Saturn's Ringplane at best is a triangular oval?) and the images across the board look like they were scanned using a cheap scanner, the colors are grainy and don't look true; I can only imagine they will print even worse. Invest in making better digital quality scans before committing them to the design, or maybe just scan the line work and color it digitally so that the color is more consistent?
Maybe include some half tone style to the images to get a more classic comic feel? Redraw some of the bears to get a cleaner image with reworked proportions, something that looks less like it was drawn by a kid. Create a little more consistency throughout the deck.

You have a really great idea here that is worth the time and energy to produce, but you have to work on it a little more. As it stands now I see a great rough draft that isn't ready for production.

Hey, I appreciate you guys being open to feedback and criticism, it really shows a desire to grow as a creator and instils a lot of faith in backers, both current and potential.

I love the reference you guys are using, glad to see you have some classics in there. I like the backrounds that each card has behind the beras, but the border around the boxes that frame each bear (i.e. the water drops border on the four of spades or the pyramid on the queen of hearts) I think would both look better than what you have now and also create the panel feel of comic books.

And to be more clear on the proportions: From one bear to the next there are radical inconsistencies, not just the bears as whole. some of them have well proportion head to bodies to limbs (For teddy bears, which should be stout and round) and then other has very skewed skinny heads, or strangely long legs, or their arms are like a primates. A previous post mentioned that it was the same bear over and over again, and I feel as though that might have been a good template to start with for each image, to have chosen one great bear outline and then worked up from there.
I would genuinely love to see other peoples feedback and ideas about this design, it is obvious that people aren't really on board with it, but how could the creator improve it? Not just tell him how bright and busy it is.
Everybody can see it is bright and busy, it's hard to miss. I don't think there is anyone out there that, after reading one of the several posts about how bright or busy it is, went "OH MY GOD it *is* bright and busy!! I didn't even notice until the third post that said so!"

Great feedback Justin O and MrMollusk!  We'll hash through it and give it some ponder.  Not saying we agree with everything, but that is some good stuff.

MrMollusk, that's pretty cool that Peter Wood appears to be the inventor of this particular form of semi-transformational art!  Or whatever it may be called.  I never really meant to call it just "transformed" either.  I apologize if I did call it that.  From my understanding of what I've seen and collected, this deck did fall in to the "semi-transformational" style or category.  But, LA-TEE-DA, I could be wrong! 

Hey Justin O.  On the "create the panel feel of comic books" part.  I do like that idea a lot.  That was part of what we were already trying to grasp.  The idea was when you see the uncut sheet it would take on more of the look of a page.  Since each card is so small we didn't want to make more than one panel per card.  So I'm not quite for sure what you had in mind.

Hello, all!

This is my first post here in quite some time.

For those who don't know me from my posts on UC, a quick introduction:

My name is Robert S. Lancaster. I have actively collected unusual decks of playing cards (mostly ones with custom courts) since 1978 (although I purchased the first deck in what later became my collection/obsession in 1968, when I was ten years old.

I now have more than 2,500 unique decks in my collection, mostly stored in thirty boxes from BCW, each of which hold approximately eighty poker-sized decks.

I first became aware that I was not the only person in the world with this unusual hobby in 1996, when I started what I believe was the first web site devoted to the hobby ("The Bob Lancaster Gallery of Unusual Playing Cards") and started receiving emails from people all over the world who also collected playing cards!

I ended up joining both the IPCS (the International Playing-Card Society) and 52 Plus Joker, creating 52+J's first web site in 1997.

My old-school web site was hosted on AOL, and so was destroyed when AOL deleted all of their members' web sites in October 2008 (I missed the warning that this was going to happen, having had the bad sense of timing to be in a hospital, in a coma, when AOL warned its members about the upcoming mass deletion.

I have recovered much of the old web site using "The Wayback Machine" (www.archive.org), and plan/hope to open a new-and-improved version of it online in the coming months.

As for the "Fantastic Fur" deck:

================================================

First, I should say that I am pleased and proud to count Peter Wood (the artist behind the deck) as a friend, having corresponded with him, off and on, ever since he found a card from his first deck ("The Teddy Bear Playing Cards") on my web site in the late 1990s.

I own several of his decks ("The Teddy Bear Playing Cards", "2000 Pips", "Busy Bears", "Goblins and...", "Pips-N-Paws", "The Chamber of 52 Cards", "The Journey", and "Wild!", as well as some Souvenir decks published by Newt's Games for which Peter designed the tuck box, and a children's book which Peter illustrated, so I will definitely be pledging on "Fantastic Fur" on Kickstarter.

That being said, here are my thoughts on the deck:

=====[ THE NAME ]=====

First, I love the deck's name! When Peter was working on it, he ran a few names he was considering for it past me, and "Fantastic Fur" was my favorite by far.

=====[ "SEMI-TRANSFORMATIONAL" DECKS ]=====

Second (and Peter knows this), Although I (usually) love "fully-transformational" decks (those in which the pips on each card are in the same location, orientation and size as those in a "standard" deck), I am (generally) NOT a fan of "semi-transformational" decks (those, like this one, in which each card has the right number of pips, but they are located, oriented, sized and skewed in whatever way the artist feels best serves his or her concept for the card). I have designed many "fully transformational" cards (though not a complete deck), and so, I think that I understand and appreciate better than most the challenge behind designing and creating a fully-transformed card which "works". Creating an entire deck of fully-transformed cards, in which all of the cards are not only fully-transformed, but also serve the deck's "theme", takes far more creativity (and work!) than most of us realize.  Appreciating all of that, I tend to think of "semi-transformational" cards as somewhat a product of creative laziness (of course, if I ever designed and created one myself, my appreciation for them might increase tremendously).

Peter's "The Teddy Bear Playing Cards" deck was a "fully-transformational" deck, and I loved it. But most, perhaps all of his decks since then have been "semi-transformational", and I can't help but be disappointed in them, if only for that reason.

=====[ THE THEME ]=====

The deck's theme (teddy bears as comic book superheroes and villains) would seem to be a natural for a Peter Wood deck, but I don't think that theme was fully-realized here. The computer-graphic backgrounds of the cards was chosen, according to the deck's Kickstarter page, to give the cards more of a "comic book look", but fail to do so it my eyes. Offhand, I don't recall that effect used in many comic books. To me, it gives the cards more of the look of cheesy web pages (such as some on my old playing card site).  As I believe others have said here, I think that the "comic book" theme would have been better served by narrow white borders, with the inner edge outlined in a thin, black line, and the background of the card a simple background (buildings, etcetera) as are usually used in the panels of a comic book. A rectangular white or pastel "Post-It-like" narrative tag containing simple narrative (such as "MEANWHILE...") could be placed in a corner of some cards, further enhancing the "comic book" look and feel of the deck.

I think that the scene, title and dialog (explaining the hero's powers) used on most of the cards would seem more appropriate to the cover of a comic book than to a panel within a comic book. It may have better served the theme (and have been more fun as well) to make each card the cover of the first issue of that Superhero's comic, including a crisp logo of their name, a small logo of the comic's publisher (a'la Marvel or DC), a price, and even a "comics code seal" in a corner. That would serve to make the blatant describing of the hero's powers/abilities more in keeping with where such things are generally done in real comic books. If, on the other hand, you want the cards to be like panels within a comic book, you should cut way back on the explaining of the hero's powers, and, with a background scene (and perhaps secondary characters, such as a villain), make it look like a panel WITHIN A STORY, and not like a stand-alone advertisement for the hero (which is what a comic book's cover is, if you think about it...)

I know that it would be a LOT of work, but if you came up with at least a general outline of the story in the comic books depicted on each card (whether that card depicts the cover or just a panel), that storyline would inform the way the card was designed and drawn, and would greatly increase both the variety of the images AND the feeling that we are looking at parts of actual comic books rather than contrived comic book-like images.

Personally, I enjoyed the nods to heroes from actual comic books ("The Incredible Hug", for one) more than I did the ones which were solely the product of Peter's imagination. For one thing, they were more open to "inside jokes/references", which would make the deck more attractive to comic book fans (a HUGE market). The more that those jokes/references tied into the world of teddy bears ("Hug", for example), the better. And the more cohesive it makes the deck's theme, I believe.

====[ A FINAL THOUGHT ]=====

Perhaps one more SuperVillain is called for:

Named "Mr. Mollusk" (or, perhaps, "Dr. Mollusk"), his supervillainous power would be discouraging the hero with pointless and vacuous non-constructive criticism. The hero ends up losing interest in what he or she was trying to accomplish.