Ah!! Boyer!! I've been out of action for a year or 2 and i missed you and your comments. 
I just find it kind of sad that i listed few hundred unique decks on a selling platform, and i just keep getting asked about the same few decks. Some i feel are great like DB's Gatorbacks, or those from KWP. But more often than not, it is as what you said, those "boring" decks with probably much more greater emphasis on marketing. I just wished there was a better price grading for playing cards.
Yup, still here, still steering the ship...
There's something everyone in this business/hobby needs to remember: "unique" does not necessarily mean "great." Sometimes, it doesn't even mean "good!" I make something "unique" every time I sit down to use the bathroom - I don't see people beating a path to my bathroom door asking for it...
It's not the kind of thing where you go into it thinking, "Oh, I'll just buy a bunch of rare decks, hang on to them a little while, sell 'em off on eBay and retire early..." That's VERY, VERY UNLIKELY to happen. There will be a handful of decks that are highly sought after as well as scarce, decks that will consistently go up in price the older and more scarce they become. But the majority of decks will be barely remembered in ten years, thus when offered for sale ten years after release, more people will shrug than will crack open their wallets looking for the big bills. You might make back what they cost you - or less, if they really weren't all that good in the first place (and if you adjust for inflation, you're probably losing money anyway, especially on decks where you're barely doing better than break-even).
You look at a hundred-year-old deck today, people are interested. Why? No one treated playing cards like anything other than disposable ephemera back then, so that hundred-year-old deck is likely to be scarce, and even in less-than-perfect condition will be worth a pretty penny for its scarcity alone. It's why Action Comics #1 is so insanely valuable - it's not just the first appearance of an iconic comic book character, but it's also incredibly rare, a relic from an era where most comic books ended up in landfills after kids smeared them with chocolate and greasy fingerprints, tore off the covers, used them to pick up the dust after sweeping, etc.; they were considered highly disposable and not meant to last.
By contrast, look at the comic book Death of Superman #1. It was printed in massive numbers, snatched up by millions of fanboys and "investors," stashed into Mylar baggies with back boards to keep them from getting bent and shelved away in the hopes of a future sale to pay for some little tyke's college education. Those "investors" were very disappointed. Few comic books were printed in larger numbers - there are hundred of thousands if not millions of copies in circulation. Many if not most of them are treated from day one like collectibles, which conversely ends up REDUCING their value because of an utter lack of scarcity. Superman didn't stay dead, so the story's a bit of a misnomer, to boot. Comic book stores can't give the damn things away today, they're so undesirable - any collector who wanted it, has it; tons of supply, very little demand.
I'm using an extreme example, but think of what the vast majority of comic books are worth today. They might go up a little bit in value, or if they were pretty well marked up in the first place, might even LOSE value. There's a bit of a glut in the marketplace right now, with dozens and hundreds of titles being released in a given month - the only saving grace being that as publishing anything on paper is gradually going the way of the dodo bird and the buggy whip, publishers are printing these titles in smaller numbers, opting for online sales of digital copies wherever possible. Maybe in a hundred years, if some of these titles are thought of as valuable artifacts of a culture, they'll go up in value some, but a lot of them will simply not be worth all that much - and the same exact thing holds for playing cards, no matter how fancy or "unique" or pretty they are.
So what's the point?
The point is that you don't buy these things because you think you're going to retire off the proceeds of your collection when you sell it. The point is that you LOVE PLAYING CARDS! You buy what you like, you get pleasure from it, it makes you happy to have it - and if you're really that kind of hedonist, you even USE them, busting out a pack for a few rounds of solitaire or a game night with the kids or the Saturday poker game. It's not about their future worth and it never will be - you'll have a tiny amount of your collection go up significantly in value, but a lot of it really won't, period, because there are just too many decks out there and the general public doesn't see them as being all that collectible - they see them as a disposable, consumable, household good. They don't even have the level of popular cultural value that comic books hold today, and may never achieve that level. They do have a longer cultural history, and they do have value for their versatility in terms of entertainment and the hundreds and hundreds of different games one can play with them, not to mention their other uses. But Joe Average doesn't see them as terribly valuable and may never see them as such, so overall, they're not going to get all that valuable.
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