Hey guys,

Been a while. I have been busy designing a web site for the deck and learning some flash motion graphics to make a video, while researching how to produce reward items as efficiently as possible. I also added 2 new philosophers in to keep in the one-eyed Jacks and one-eyed diamond King. I thought I would show you the work:


I have been lazy and not added in the scribble effects to the bottoms of the art yet...

Alright! I am glad to see there has been some great stimulating discussion on this topic here. Time to add a monster-sized response! Let me give some feedback/thoughts on what I have heard in a topical manner:

(1) Cost: It looks like I missed a few other charges here that have been kindly pointed out to me. These are Kickstarter's cut of profits, sales/reselling taxes, and then a related cost of promotion (say for websites or any ads). With taxes, there might also be income taxes to think about too later down the line. This leads to another question of cost for the emerging Kickstarter--must he set his own business up to kickstart a project and how does that factor into cost as well? Some of that will be state specific. Anyone have anything to explain on the tax/business license end?

Shipping, both domestic and international, looks like it should be its own topic! Since a deck of cards is around 3.3 ounces and the packaging is going to add some weight, the shipment weight is going to be around 3.8-4.8 ounces. Based on the United States Postal Services prices, shipping 1 deck of cards could cost:

(a) If the package can be considered a large envelope (3 oz /4 oz): $1.50/$1.70. On this, I am not sure of the exact thickness of a deck of cards, but it has to be right on the border for the envelope qualification, which sets it a 3/4". I think a deck is around 5/8"-3/4", so it might even depend on the human factor--who is during your order at the post office. Don has suggested that the deck's rigidity will make it qualify as a parcel anyway, so:

(b) If the package is considered a parcel (3 oz/4 oz): $1.95/$2.12

However, the domestic shipping does have other costs, such as the envelope/packaging itself, and any reasonable handling fees. For the former, I looked on Amazon and saw bubble padded envelopes available for around $15 for 100 (so add .15). For the latter, what should be considered a fair handling fee? 2 minutes of labor at $10/hour (around .33)? Or do we consider the kickstarter to be waving the mundane labor of packaging and shipping the products? Regardless, it seems clear that a $2 charge built into a deck doesn't even cover domestic shipping, let alone help with international costs. It seems more like $2.50 just to cover (on parcel price) domestic shipping + handling, and yet some people have said that $2  is too steep already. Something to think about.

I think that mostly covers the domestic shipping. But with international, things change. When it comes to smaller orders, I think it is worth it to stick with first class mail international, regardless of it not having delivery confirmation or tracking as Don pointed out. As a quick aside I have heard, but need to do more research, that there are ways to insure the product even with FCI. I doubt it would be worth the price hike, though. Anyway, speaking from experience, I have had numerous decks from my BANG! expansions shipped on first class international without any problems. Since the difference in the cost of shipping is substantial, if a deck is lost in transit, it is no big deal to ship another replacement deck given the money saved by using first class international. Let me show the price break down for First-Class:

(a) If the package can be considered a large envelope (3 oz/4 oz) and is shipping to Canada, Mexico, China/Japan [price group 3], or Bangladesh [price group 6]: $1.80/$1.95, $2.56/$3.09, $3.31/$4.09, $3.23/$3.97.

(b) If the package is considered a parcel (3 oz/4 oz) and is shipping to Canada, Mexico, China/Japan, or Bangladesh: $3.30/$3.45, $4.05/$4.59, $4.56/$5.34, $4.48/$5.22.

Now, look at the price hike for Priority Mail International:

If the package is a large envelope OR a small parcel (up to 4 pounds) and is shipping to Canada/Mexico or other international countries: $12.95/$16.95.

The increase is so substantial (300-400%) that I would only consider it only for the +$100 pledges, or maybe as an add for international pledges if they were willing to pay for it. With international, there is also an increase in handling time with customs paperwork. I have no idea how long one of those sheets takes to fill out, but it could add a .50 cent surcharge given the $10/hour figure used before.

Now, these prices have been thought out just for 1 deck of cards being shipped. Costs will change depending on the items pledged. On the whole, I imagine that shipping/handling costs will decrease in scale as the items pledged increase. For instance, 2 decks domestic shipping could cost:

If the package is considered a parcel (7/8): $2.63/$2.80. Note that that would only a 35%/32% increase in the cost of shipping; not double. Packaging and handling would increase in cost, but this would also not double. Packaging only gets problematic when an additional package is needed, because then the shipping cost does double. This could be the case with an additional package being needed for a rolled poster. So if one built in cost for price of domestic shipping per deck, he would make a higher profit margin on larger orders. This would be the same with international if shipping was built in for those orders, but there would be more awkward price hikes, such as when a parcel suddenly weighed more than 4 pounds.

Anyway, since the pricing can be pretty complicated when taken as a whole, what is the best way to explain your costs to a kickstarter in the most intelligible way? I don't know if saying "just be honest" cuts it. Clearly, one should be honest, but the explanation needs to be understandable to the kickstarter in a quick and digestible manner. How much should be disclosed?

I don't think I have seen any playing card project that really break down the costs, and you wonder how honest the designers are about the costs. And I don't mean this in terms of stiffing the pledgers, but in terms of stiffing themselves. For a successful project, I wonder how much profit a designer typically can make. Given the hundreds of hours you spend designing the project, advertising the project, getting and responding to feedback, and fulfilling the orders, do you even come close to minimum wage? In most cases I doubt it, so I wonder where the rumors of greedy designers come from.

(2) Price of a Deck: There has been a larger variety of responses in this area than I was expecting. This might be because I didn't specify as to what the cost of a deck should be with free domestic shipping being built into the price. International would be added separately, but with the recognized difference in the built in price. I wouldn't want a total built in price for both domestic and international.

Don/Alex has suggested that it might be worth turning a loss on 1-2 deck orders, so that you can benefit from their WOM (word of mouth) advertising. This is a possibility to consider, but I wonder if there is proof that it really pays off.

(3) Fulfillment Times: Most haven't discussed this, but it looks to be pretty fair what I suggested. Also of note is the importance of communication in any shipping time frames to your kickstarters.

(4) Marketing: One important item in discussion in this area has been the importance of securing business from retailers for larger orders. This has led me to some questions on how to do this with a product that does not yet exist. How do you merchandise to shops and businesses with a kickstarter project, especially when it is your first one?

It seems that a retailer would want a sample of the real deal, but you don't have that yet. You can mitigate this somewhat with a prototype deck. Yet any quality prototype deck is going to cost a lot, even if you use Brahma playing card's sample deck ($50). You might be able to show that deck around town, but what about to out of state vendors? You can't ship the deck to them--no guarantee they will send it back, and $50 for a lost deck is a steep cost. Perhaps you could mitigate this by only shipping out a few cards instead. Also, you could use a printer on demand to make decks for $6 a pop, but here you have to worry about the quality of the product in selling a far higher quality product.

To buttress the lack of a finished product, you can always have a well designed website with a good video and images showcasing the final design. Some PR and buzz from your product on popular blogs might also help. But is all of this enough? I don't know.

Out of state contacting seems difficult in general. Do you just call a shop up or send them an e-mail with an attachment and hope they respond? You can't really afford to drive or fly across the country in hopes of getting a vendor for your product.

(5) Rewards: There seems to be some consensus around the rewards, and I want to synthesize the remarks and ask some questions. In general, I think the real struggle of other rewards is finding a reward that is appealing to the kickstarter, price efficient, and easy to fulfill with the original project.

(a) Stickers and Postcards. There is a general consensus that such items are nice, but should be offered either as a free addition to other items as a perk OR as an add. I think I am okay with that idea; the former sort of encourages people to jump to another price point to get the free items that come with it. I think there is the question of whether these other items might hurt your ability to cover the costs for your own project, and if they are worth the time for their development and quality assurance. However, the extra something that they add might help in building a good relationship with your customers for future projects.

(b) Posters. People have been pretty split on this, some thinking it is worth the time and relatively easy to do, and others think it is not. It looks like it depends on the attractiveness of the design of the deck and the poster as an art piece in itself. No surprise here, really.

(c) T-shirts. There has been some debate on whether a t-shirt should be clearly tied to the card project itself (such as the t-shirts for Deck of the Living Dead or Tendril) or more loosely connected to it (such as Blue Blood's Memento Mori shirts and the ones I designed in the past). I think this may depend on how oriented your project is to playing card fanatics and also what kinds of t-shirts people like to wear. In general, I am not a fan of walking advertisement t-shirts, whether for a product or company, although I design them all the time for work (lol). But others may really like them. The real problem with t-shirts is their large cost of production in minimum quantities; are they really going to cover for themselves. In my project, it might be good to have them exclusively as adds if I was going to do them. Also,  I would have to narrow down the shirt options. I could always use my designs on posters instead.

(d) Card clips. The discussion has suggested that these have been recent popular items; long term success of these items may decline as they become more widely available beyond the kickstarter projects. Most seem to think that for my project one should not be done or I should just add plain ones.

(e) Miscellaneous. A few additional items have been suggested that could be of value: wristbands, dice, guitar picks, dealer's coins, card boxes/display cases, and additional gaff cards. I don't know how you could do additional gaff cards well. Even if you did extra gaffs through Brahma's sample decks, couldn't there be some serious color differences on the backs with the different printing and material? I imagine gaffs only work well when they look like they fit into the deck. But I might just be showing my ignorance again. Lol.

As for the book/card box idea, I like it for larger orders or as an add. I will have to try making one to see how it works and how much labor is involved. Getting my hands on old philosophy books and getting them shipped to and shipped from me might get a little pricey, but I will try to consider that in the price.

@Don: Just saw that I had missed your response. For the Nietzsche one, would you want just the quote on the top without  the name, and then the name with time period on the bottom?

I wanted to start a poll, but it doesn't make much sense to use the forum's built in one as I didn't see anyway to include pictures. I wanted to get votes on the best overall design for the card fronts since I have been getting feedback. I have nine designs below for you to choose from. I have already whittled down the results based on feedback I have gotten from the playing card and philosophy communities.


I would greatly appreciate it if:

(1) You listed the number you liked most (ie, 7).
(2) You stated whether you would buy a deck (this helps me prioritize the results; i definitely take all under consideration--as should be apparent by now--but I should cater more to those actually interested in getting a deck).

I thought of a more minimalist design idea that is fully symmetrical you may or may not like:

(1) Removed the quotes.
(2) Replaced quotes with key ideas of the philosopher, such as William James' "stream of consciousness." The key ideas are placed in the background replacing the old abstract idea collages. They repeat all across the card. I arranged the text boxes of the key ideas so that they are symmetrical. NOTE: I am thinking of still using those collages, but working them into the aces.
(3) Kept the philosopher art and made it two way.
(4) In between the philosopher art I placed pips that are vertically symmetrical.
(5) Names of philosophers either read vertically down the card sides (my preference) OR are in the background text.

Here is an example:


What do you think? I am sad to see the quotes go, but something is still learned about the philosopher this way and the design is more conducive to playing cards while also less complicated.

Forgive the doublepost.

Random idea that may be worthless: I wonder if I could provide hidden text quotes on the cards through the use of QR codes. The codes could be placed say on one of the pips if I put those in instead, or they could be placed on the back of the cards to replace the eye of the sun. A person could scan the code and then get the quote. While this is a novel idea, and does get rid of the text to make room for other design elements, I wonder if anyone would use it? Interesting at all?

Don! That was a fantastic amount of information. I am about to get on the road for a business trip, but I will get back to your comments tonight. Thanks so much the suggestions in advance, though! As for your jokers question, I chose to use skeptical thought experiments from philosophy. The first is Descartes' Evil Demon (or evil genie as it is in the French). He supposed it was logically possible that there could be an evil being manipulating his entire perception of what he thought was reality. The second is a modern variation on this, that of the "brain in a vat," where all of our experience of reality is governed by a super computer programmed by a mad scientist (yeah, Matrix definitely picked up on this). I thought these would be appropriate sense the jokers warp the game, skewing reality. The art on them is still tentative and needs some improvement. Here is a draft of them:


I tried to create unique backgrounds for them as with the suits.

And as for Eastern philosophers, yes, a second deck was what I imagined for them. It seemed to me that western philosophers were, on the whole, more popular to an English-speaking audience than Eastern. I am betting that a layman can name more western philosophers than eastern. For the latter, they'd probably list off Confucius and Siddartha Gautama and then stop. That being said, I quite enjoy Eastern philosophers, and exposing people to their thought would be quite rewarding as well. That deck would be historically structured like the western deck. Although contemporary eastern philosophy would have a lot of crossovers with Western, which could be a fascinating conundrum if the deck was not about simply philosophers who lived in the east, but philosophers that typify eastern philosophic ideas. Definitely not unsolvable, just a challenge.

Hello, everyone! I am new to the Discourse and the online playing card community in general, so I will start with a brief introduction. My name is Martin Pulido, and like most here, I love card games (as well as board games). I've run a blog for the playing card game BANG! for over a year now and created various expansions for it. I have recently wanted to get back into drawing and design, and so I created a project for myself: to create a deck of philosophy themed playing cards. I have always loved studying philosophy--it's fun to explore our lives and the world we live in, look for justifications (if any) for our deeply held beliefs, and it also creates great late night conversations. In making a deck about philosophy, I wanted it to be (1) aesthetically pleasing, (2) thought provoking, and (3) functional. An ambitious goal.

Through much deliberation, I determined to organize the suits according to philosophical time periods: spades (ancient and medieval philosophers), diamonds (modern philosophers: 16th-18th c.), clubs (contemporary analytic philosophers: 19th - 21st c.), and hearts (contemporary continental philosophers: 19th - 21st c.). Each card suit also has a unique card face background, highlighting ideas taught by philosophers in the specified time period. These backgrounds are gray or a faint red on white depending on the suit, and I hope help in suit identification. I prefer the white backgrounds/borders as they limit damage from scuffing (or so I believe; maybe I am wrong?).

Each card contains a personally hand-drawn and then vectorized and digitally finished portrait of an important philosopher. I tried to find the most famous depiction of the philosopher, regardless of the medium (sculpture, drawing, painting, photo, etc.) and then redraw it to have a more consistent look across the cards. Many design decisions were tough: I looked up in biographies to discover the hair color of many philosophers, but with ancient philosophers, I just had to arbitrarily decide. I also had to make decisions on clothing. Here is an example of the design process from the original famous depiction to the hand-drawn art, to the vectorized art, and the digitally-finished piece:


Since each card, versus just the court face cards, portrayed a specific philosopher, I chose not to include pips. I tried to include some "micro pips" that went vertical up and down the sides of the portraits, but I found these to be too busy and not very appealing. I recognize that this will be a downside for the pip enthusiasts. 12-16 philosophers, however, didn't seem to cut it for the deck, so I had to make a call, which ended up being a lot more work for me! Maybe it was a bad one.

The next step was to make the cards "thought provoking." I concluded to include a quote from each philosopher that wasn't loaded with jargon, so it could be understood by the layman. I also tried not to pick quotes that were (a) cliche, (b) made funny trite statements but said little philosophically, (c) made little sense out of context (Nietzsche's "God is dead" for instance), (d) ridiculed the philosopher by making his ideas appear impossible to understand (Heidegger's statement "The nothing itself nothings" is often used in this respect), or (e) were too religious (this deck is about philosophy, not theology). This required lots of reading, careful selection, and revision to get the right quotes. One of the consequences of including quotes such as these was the inability to have the philosopher's art be symmetrical. My design decisions will make this deck definitely a novelty piece, but I can't see a "thought provoking" philosophy-themed deck being done another way well (very subjective claim, I know). Perhaps it shouldn't have been done at all, then? Maybe.

Anyway, here are some samples of the art: 2 cards from each suit.


That should give you some idea of the style of the cards I have gone for and substantiate what I claimed about the design above. As for the backs, I have been debating between two designs: (1) a smaller version of a tuckbox art piece that I created. (2) a colored version of the famous Flammarion wood engraving of a man peering into the "true" universe beyond appearances. For the tuckbox, I chose to recreate a section of Raphael's famous School of Athens piece. I kept Plato and Aristotle at the forefront of the piece, but replaced the figures around them in Raphael's version with philosophers from later eras (Bertrand Russell, Immanuel Kant, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Friedrich Nietzsche, etc.). I think the piece turned out quite nice, but the artist is usually biased! Here is a crude mockup of the tuckbox:


So I could use that art piece on the card backs or use the flammarion piece. Here is an example of the 2 options with their horizontal orientation:


So on to my feedback questions:

(1) Which back should I use (if any of those 2)?

(2) What do you think of the overall design? Do I succeed at making the deck aesthetically pleasing, thought provoking, and functional? While I had to make definite trade offs between those different goals, is it overall satisfactory? What suggestions would you make that align with those goals?

(3) Given the non-traditional format of these cards, would anyone besides myself be interested in this deck? I imagine a few philosophy geeks might appreciate them, but would anyone else? Does it have any wider "promise"?

(4) Any other suggestions?