I like this quote from Encarded. {Prepare yourselves for a new raft of card projects "based on the book/character/etc" as someone else is going to try to cash in on this.}
We've already been experiencing this. Three of the four Albino Dragon decks are based on literary works, while the one that isn't is based on a genre that started with literature.
Hell, we even have people creating decks that not just are based on books, but LOOK like books!
Every Cthulhu deck, every Jules Verne deck, every Alice in Wonderland deck, every steampunk deck, every cyberpunk deck - all originate from literary works either directly or as a genre. One could even argue the same about the zombie decks, since before the zombie decks, before the zombie TV shows and movies, there were zombie stories...and you can't swing a dead corpse around Kickstarter without hitting a zombie deck...
Ironic, since most people into custom cards are in an age group that as a whole today is practically allergic to books...
My current deck is based on novels by Jules Verne and Edgar Rice Burroughs, but it was designed and planned long before Albino Dragon announced what they were doing. My first deck was based on my own novel. Good news is that my future decks are not based on novels. But that brings up another point, people are going to see that someone made over $300K on playing cards, so everyone one and their dog will be putting up playing cards, book related or not. It's going to make it hard for the decks I plan on launching in the future as now I will have to compete with every Tom, Dick and Lazy. If your deck is good, people will want it, but if they have to wade through a hundred decks, they may never see it. And if they look at 4 or 5 really crappy decks, they'll assume all the decks are crap.
We were having that already. But it doesn't take long before the crap gets swept away. The opportunists who have no real love of playing cards and just want to make big bucks will see that it's not all that easy and requires real work to make something even moderately successful - and by successful, I'm not talking about a deck with a goal under a thousand bucks made by a print-on-demand company like Zazzle. Those decks are the laziest of the lazy, like that "Impractical Joker" deck; no only could he not be bothered to make a real design, he couldn't even be bothered to find a quality printer that didn't use 100% bog-standard faces.
The biggest problem with finding GOOD deck projects (or ANY deck projects, for that matter) has everything to do, in my opinion, with the lousy way that Kickstarter displays its search results. There's zero rhyme or reason to it, no way to sort out the completed projects from the ones still running, they aren't in alphabetical order, chronologically order by start date, chronological order by end date - or any other order beyond tossing darts at a list. It really feels at times like random.org does their sorting for them. Fix THAT, and maybe people will start finding things more easily around there...
This is, what, DOUBLE the previous record so far? Anyone ever see a deck break a half-million?
I wonder how much the deck by it's self would have brought in with out all the add-on's
The add-ons in this card project weren't any more or less exceptional than others that have gone before it: dice, t-shirts, poker chips/sets, coins, 'fridge magnets, art prints, even a few bits of jewelry. What made this really blow up were, as I see it, the stretch goals. Celebrities appearing as characters in the deck? Not something you see every day...