I play with the cards; not the box. the box is to hold and protect the CARDS. however, with limited custom decks, such as aurum, i understand having a custom box as well.
what really grinds my gears is the rebel deck. its a custom backed deck with a cool box and is priced at $7 why!?
They can charge $7 because they print tens of thousands of decks and can spread their costs over a very large number of purchases. They also have 100,000 fans on Facebook. They will make a huge amount of money at their lower margin because they will sell tons of them. If even 2% of their fans buy just a few decks, they would eclipse an entire 5,000 deck run. Trust me, the big companies are making a LOT of money. They are not releasing decks out of the goodness of their hearts. 
Designers like me work alone, slave for months on our projects, and only have the capital to do a small run. I have to recoup costs and time in a much smaller amount of product.
Don't forget as well what many companies charge for shipping. They might charge $7-8 for a deck, but add an $2-3 extra into the shipping. I could make Aurum $9 and simply charge $6-7 shipping like D&D. Would that be "better" or perceived as more fair? I personally feel taken advantage of when that happens. I prefer to know what the product actually cost, and pay a reasonable shipping charge.
Other factors about why Rebels were cheaper:
- One-color back, and it's a "basic" CMYK color, black.
- No gradations or shading whatsoever anyone on the cards or tuck box.
- Standard USPC faces, albeit recolored to look nicer.
- No metallic ink on the cards (they saved the $ to put foil on the boxes instead, it seems...)
Rebels are a poor example to compare to something like Aurum, and Paul makes many excellent points. The per-deck cost of a print run plummets when you're running off somewhere between 10K and 30K - these are typical print runs for these guys. Paul's shipping is fairly cheap - it's just Paul, the boxes, the tape and usps.com. Bigger companies have overhead like warehouse space and staff that Paul doesn't have, so Paul can undercut them on shipping at the least and make the combined total price more competitive on a superior product. And it appears that T11 is aiming for a more "sustainable" stable of products by reviving them through reprinting. Some known examples are Propaganda, Black Stingers and Sentinels. It still boggles my mind that they aren't selling the first two on their site, but whatever.
Don't get me wrong, I'm actually not knocking T11. They used to have some rather lame business practices - "version two, now with EMBOSSED BOXES, ooooooh" - but I think for them things came to a head with the original Monarchs. They promised the moon, sun and stars but delivered a merely decent deck - it's one I like, but it didn't live up to their hype. So they appear to have throttled back the hype machine a few notches and instead of making EVERY DECK they design a limited edition, some are actually being kept around or revived.
