they also said why there not more chinese customization in the deck on there facebook
Dan and Dave Andrej: You bring up a good point in regard to "Chinese Designs" on alternate cards. I chose not to go that route for good reason. These cards celebrate Chinatown and my love of the Chinese New Year as an American within a genre. They are not an expression of beautiful Chinese History etc (which i love and respect) but rather my personal journey of a very special place, and "state of mind" (as Robert Towne might say...).
Hope that explains my design route and I appreciate you bringing that up actually.
-Fulton.
That doesn't sound like a terribly strong argument to me. No one said he had to bring up thousands of years of Chinese history in order to make a deck based on a part of LA that's been in existence for less than a century. He could have gone the extra step, really got into the place, taken cues from iconic landmarks and popular shops, from the garments worn by the residents, from damn near anything having some significance to Chinatown, LA.
Instead, he made a deck back that looks like the back of a Chinese menu and exactly three custom cards (including both IDENTICAL jokers) besides the ad/gaff cards. Flashes of gold in the red suits, the bare minimum, would have made this deck more visually interesting and required ZERO experience of Chinese culture beyond what he already displayed in the deck box and card back designs.
It was lazy design, in my opinion. What he did, he did well, but he didn't do much of it. He names the deck after a part of LA that he loves, but shows little research behind it other than what he's seen first hand since childhood during the Chinese New Year celebrations. He indulges in his childhood reverie, we get a near-totally boring, practically uncustomized deck as a result. Super.
Would it have been so hard to, for example, find out what the Chinese character is for luck and include it in gold inside just ONE of the red pips on each red-suit card? (Hell, maybe even in one black pip on the black-suit cards as well.) It would have so perfectly gelled with the Fulton's design without being a straight imitation/recoloration.
I'm losing interest in D&D's cards more and more by the day.