I often wonder how many contributors on the forums understand the amount of time spent just on the concept and design of a deck of cards, let alone the back design and tuck box.
When you're printing thousands of something...you want it to be right. You want it to look great, feel great and make sense. You could easily slap together a deck of cards using stock images and vector graphics found online and launch a kickstarter, but that's about as creative as cutting images from a magazine, pasting them together as collage on construction paper and hanging it on your refrigerator.
Sounds like most people voicing their thoughts and opinions want every deck of cards released by companies like D&D, T11, Ellusionist, etc to only release decks that are 100% custom from the pips to the court cards (for example, JAQK's). As great as that would be, you simply cannot expect that to happen for every release. For starters, unless you are an artist (with a ton of free time), it is very expensive. Secondly, the cards any company releases is their vision...not yours. You can choose to purchase them or not...just like Don said.
In my opinion, the Artisans are incredibly well crafted. One thing Theory11 does exceptionally well is the tuck box. They've consistently produced playing cards with incredible detail to their tuck boxes and it wouldn't surprise me to find out they've spent more time on the boxes than the back design. One of the greatest things about this particular deck is the imported paper used for the box. It's not white paper with black ink printed on the surface leaving disgusting white edges...they did it right and used solid black paper. Bravo! This combined with embossing, gold foil, and custom seals makes this stand out as a very well crafted and produced deck of playing cards (even without custom faces). The wooden box is just a nice little bonus to those that would appreciate it.
Limited or not...custom faces or not...this deck (and many others) are far from 'standard.' They are cheap enough to buy a couple...add one to the collection and ACTUALLY use the other. OMG, mind blown!
