Hey all,
I've been working on a deck of cards. Still trying to flesh out the main theme I want to go for but right now its sort of based on Tarot cards. Spades, Clubs, Hearts, and Diamonds are also Swords, Wands, Cups, and Pentagrams respectively like in a tarot deck. There's also 4 colors instead of 2. The idea is for this deck to also be the minor arcana of a tarot deck and later I can design a "major arcana expansion" deck that when combined with this deck would make it into a full tarot deck. The major arcana card in a tarot deck are the ones with names like "The Magician", "The Fool", "Death", "Justice", etc. The minor arcana are the 4 suits with the Ace, 2-10, and the court cards so that would be this deck. Maybe even will include a couple Major arcana as the Joker cards. Like "The Fool" and "Death" cards since most playing card decks have 2 jokers anyways.
I'm also playing around with a duality idea of each of the court cards having slightly different sides. One being normal and the other side being a bit rough or unkempt. This would make them not perfectly symmetrical which would also be good for using them as Tarot cards since a card being upside down means something different than if it is turned right side up. That's one of the reasons I went with the current diamond pip design that isn't symmetrical top to bottom.
Anyways, I'm rambling on now. So what do you think? Any critiques or suggestions on the design?
TL;DR - I'm designing a deck of cards. What do you think?
Well, there's a few interesting things to note here.
One, know that four-color pip designs have their fans, but there aren't quite as many of them as there are people who really don't like four-color pip designs. It might work as a drawback when trying to raise funds on a crowdfunding site like Kickstarter, where you want the deck to have the broadest possible appeal to stand the best chance of getting funded. That doesn't mean there aren't ways around that, but just know that if you're set on a four-color design, you have a tougher row to hoe.
The highly geometric design has some appeal to me. Some might like it, some might not, but to me, it reminds me of a popular Theory11 deck, now out-of-print, called Sentinels.
As far as the symmetry, I wouldn't worry so much about the deck's court cards having asymmetric designs for the purposes of fortune telling. What you say about tarot is true - but this is NOT a tarot deck right now, even if it is tarot-inspired. If you were making a full-blown tarot deck, I'd say yes, it's something to seriously consider. But for a poker deck like this - and this is an International Standard poker deck, your own bells and whistles notwithstanding - you do it solely if you want to for artistic reasons.
Don't think along the lines of making a "tarot expansion" - either commit to a tarot deck or don't. You can make a tarot deck and a poker deck as separate projects if you want (pick whichever you want to do first), but to make a poker deck and later make a tarot expansion to the poker deck is the difficult way to go about it - I've only seen one other artist out there attempt it, and he did both the poker deck and the expansion simultaneously in the same KS project. It was a massive undertaking, greatly delayed in releasing its rewards, though it was very popular.
The biggest problem with the expansion idea: if you make the poker deck, it will certainly be a limited edition, as nearly all KS projects are, so you're automatically limiting yourself on the tarot deck "expansion" to selling only to those people who bought the poker deck in the first place, and only a certain percentage of those customers will be interested in the expansion to begin with.
Then there's also the thematic issues - most tarot decks have decorative art on their "spot"/numbered-rank/non-court cards, and for good reason: the art often gives some inkling as to what the card means when it comes up in a reading. (Unless you're referring to the non-divinatory, French tarot decks used for the game of tarot, and that's a totally different animal.) Making the deck devoid of that art might be a turn-off to devotees of tarot decks. Making a tarot expansion to a standard poker deck might be seen by tarot devotees as a sort of bastardized version of a tarot deck, far less interesting than a full-blown tarot deck with art on all the card faces.
I like what you've done with it as a poker deck, particularly on the Aces - the way the art ties into the tarot is rather unique and original, in my opinion. Carrying that theme into the courts is also quite brilliant, in terms of design - but I wouldn't take it further than that. Consider a wholly separate design for a divination deck - the audiences for the two types of decks are very different and have only a small amount of overlap. Connect the designs if you want with thematic and design traits in common, but make them as separate decks and I think you'll have a better chance overall.
A true divinatory tarot deck with full art for all 78 cards is a major undertaking. Alternately, you could try for a game version of tarot, though there's a much smaller following for such decks, at least in the US - they're mostly used in Europe, and even there the popularity isn't as high as International Standard decks. You would only need art for the four court cards of each suit and for the 22 trump suit cards (ranks 1-21 and the "fool" card, 0), the rest being pip/spot cards.
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