Out of curiosity, why did you opt to make the design marked, aside from the obvious reason that you're a magician?
I love a good marked deck as much as the next magician, but when it comes to custom work like this, it's not that big of an enhancement. What I've been discovering is that magicians, especially old-school magicians but younger ones as well to a lesser degree, have a major phobia about using anything other than a plain old standard (as in "mass-produced") deck design in their shows. If they do use something custom-designed, the design still tends to hew closely to the standard and strongly resemble the old stand-bys like Bicycle Rider Backs/Standard, Bee Diamond Back, Tally Ho Circle Back and Fan Back, Hoyle Shell Back, etc. Some might even go as far as using Arrco designs or Studs from Walgreens, but those are still fairly standard-looking decks. For the old timers, they're afraid the spectators will think that anything the doesn't look like the dog-eared deck sitting in their kitchen drawer should be considered suspect, while for the newer magicians, they know that any deck the audience gets near to will have a very good chance of winding up ruined, so better to stick with what's widely available and cheap instead of a limited-edition custom model.
Having said all that about magicians, they still only make up a really small fraction of the card-buying market. Most are collectors, some are players - that much-larger end of the market tends to really stay away from marked decks because, should anyone discover you're using a marked deck in a game against them, they tend not to react well to the news. Even if your markings are subtle, nearly all factory-printed markings can be discovered with a simple riffle test.
Long story short, making your deck marked may appeal to a really tiny fraction of the overall potential audience, but at the same time it will turn off a much larger segment. You wind up reducing overall demand.
(Read 2234 times)
