I've moved a quote here from another topic, since it was tangential to that topic and core to this one.
Huh. Never heard of [Merz67].
The red white and blue deck looked pretty OK from what I saw on Amazon, though. I still want to see one of those decks fanned.
All he generally does with his decks is take the Rider Back design, recolor it in some fashion and literally use clip art to create two unique jokers and an Ace of Spades. The added touch of a two-finger peace sign on the RW&Bs is something new, and it's STILL clip art.
And yet, according to sources, when counting unique deck orders, he's the largest customer of the USPC Custom Department. The Blue Crown/HOPC is second-largest. This would be for number of deck designs, not for quantity printed; D&D, T11 and E outshine them there.
His marketing is also, for lack of a more polite term, problematic. He'll come out with these decks, being the exclusive seller of them in the marketplace, and put them first on eBay for ridiculously princely sums. A few suckers get dragged in, but if no one buys, he'll shill-bid it to a high amount and purchase it himself, or so it would appear - no evidence exists to back this, but as far as I care, for his decks, he can buy all of them that he wants. Then he sells the deck in other places such as on his site, on eBay again or on Amazon, usually with text along the lines of "This RARE deck sold for $XX.XX on eBay! Get yours now before they're sold out and gone forever!" As if we could be so lucky...
He never releases quantities, so there's no way of knowing if he ordered 5,000 or 50,000 in his print run.
I've also seen him selling some very funkily recolored Hoyle decks on his site which I've rarely if ever seen elsewhere, leading me to suspect he "designed" those as well. His "designs" for any of his decks could be created in maybe fifteen minutes with the right software, they're so stultifyingly simple. It probably took him all of an hour to design all six decks in the RW&B series. Excluding the need for certain file formats, you practically don't even need something as sophisticated as Photoshop! You could make them in Microsoft's Paint app that comes with Windows... Give me an idea, Internet access and perhaps an hour, and I could make a "Merz-like" Bicycle deck, and I'm not even close to being a designer. He uses the Bicycle brand name and completists who must have every Bicycle deck in an attempt to make some mad cash - though for all his unsold self-designed decks, he's likely got a healthy cash cushion to sit on or he'd be bankrupt by now. You'd have to ask him how successful he is at it, and I wouldn't hold my breath waiting for a reply other than words to the effect of "no comment", "it's none of your business" or "fuck off, ya punk, you're botherin' me"...
I will admit that his online store's got some good bargains on playing cards. But while I've had no bad experiences, I've heard from others who have - decks damaged by improper packing, difficulty getting him to take responsibility for it and issue either a refund or a replacement, etc. He's not a very well-liked member of the community, either for deck design or for retail, despite (or perhaps even in part because of) his cranking out more deck designs than any other USPC customer.
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