https://www.instagram.com/roomonecards/
I'm looking at the designs in Instagram.
In my opinion, the faux aging isn't doing your deck any favors. If you want it to look like newspapers, then make it look like newspapers - color it to match the color of new newspaper stock of the era, which was probably a grayish white. Faux aging has been very overused at this point by other designs over the past several years.
On the Joker index, the text is hard to read. Perhaps printing it at a ninety-degree angle in a single line instead of one letter on top of the next would give a cleaner, easier-to-read look to it.
What the hell is up with that scribble on the deck back design? It takes what looked like a promising design and makes it kind of ugly. I'd suggest doing something - almost anything - to replace this with some kind of symmetrical image. Perhaps the gauge of a Geiger counter? Then you can also render those numbers around the circle in the center in a way that doesn't turn the deck's back into a one-way design. There are a lot of people who are dead set against buying one-way backs.
I'd also avoid having face designs that extend past the bleed line, like that airplane on the two of hearts. Believe it or not, you can spot that line work from the edge of the deck in a stack of cards, meaning anyone could cut straight to that two of hearts on demand, if they know what to look for. Whenever you want to print into the bleed, you really should do it not just for a few cards, but for every card in the deck, in a uniform, radially-symmetrical manner, so you can't identify a card from the deck's edge. But honestly, you're best off not even doing that, because if your printer doesn't have perfect registration when cutting the cards out of the deck sheet, you'll wind up with a one-way design that's nearly as easy to use as a stripper deck.
The overall concept is pretty good. I'd tweak those pips a bit - they look a little on the crude, hand-drawn side. You may also consider removing the frames from the indices to make them easier to read - just have some blank space around them to separate them from the background art. Lighten the newspapers a bit and make the pips darker, so they stand out more - if people have a hard time seeing the pips, they have a hard time using the deck to play cards with as well. I suspect you really like your newsprint, but it's dominating the design when it's supposed to be in the background.
And on the topic of those newspaper images... If this is the "Oppenheimer" deck, why are we seeing images of all sorts of events from World War II, many of which have nothing directly to do with Oppenheimer? Maybe instead of having newspaper front pages, you should look into getting a hold of technical drawings of the Manhattan Project's "A-bomb" or some of the other government files about Oppenheimer. Many of those documents will have been typed on a manual typewriter, so they'll have a look that's more in line with your indices and other select elements you've chosen. It would not be hard to find enough images of such documents to fill out a deck of 52 cards, and if they're redacted, all the better - it would look kind of cool, I think. Instead of hand-drawn images of elements like a bomb, a fighter plane or a skull with what looks like worms coming out of it, leave them out and go with just the technical docs printed light and your pips printed dark - not too big on the pips, but not so small that they get lost in the background image.
That's my two cents.
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