Sorry about that - I tend to go on and on! But yeah, there's a place for art decks of the type you're talking about. The appeal may be less universal, but if you hit upon the right audience and subject matter, you'll find it popular enough to make a successful Kickstarter project out of it.
Don't be sorry, I appreciate your comments! Especially your comments about coloring the art properly for printing as that is something I've been concerned about for my own deck design. Thanks for bringing it to my mind again. That is something I'll need to do some more research on. :]
As far as the art on "art cards" goes I have a question I've been wondering about. I see a lot of comments around here about making art for cards two way instead of one way. From the card player/collectors perspective it seems to work better and most people like it more. (I like it better too). :] I wonder than if "art cards" would appeal to more of the card players and collectors if the artist(s) could find a way to make their art two way art and still look like quality art. You know, if they made it somehow interesting and artistic rather then just slapping a mirrored image on the bottom and drawing a line through the middle to divide it.
...I probably shouldn't criticize that too loudly. There are a lot of very good decks who have gone with that tactic. I just don't like it. I doesn't seem very creative to me...
But yeah, I wonder if that would make any difference for people who are maybe on the fence about art decks. If it could be done skillfully, making the art two way would make the deck more functional and still be pretty and artsy. :]
Well, as I was using the term "art deck," I was referring to decks that are more like art showcases, where all of the cards, courts and spots, all have a single, one-way piece of art on them. Pick any Anne Stokes deck as an example - she specializes in a Modern Gothic art style (the kind that used to appeal to "Hot Topic" customers before Hot Topic went mainstream).
In those cases, you're utilizing the entire space of the card to show off individual works of art, so two-way face imagery isn't as important, as long as the indices are oriented correctly.
Now, there will be those who much prefer a more functional deck, by which I mean they like court cards that look the same turned up or down. That's fine - an art deck of the type I mentioned won't appeal to that clientele, because they're more about the game (card players) or the trick (magicians) than about the art. There's a lot of decks that cater to that market already. But imagine this - remember the crack I just made about Hot Topic? If they stocked Anne Stokes decks, I'm thinking they'd fly off the shelves pretty quickly. It's just that kind of deck for just that kind of store, and there's way more Hot Topics in this country than there are magic shops or poker stores (poker stores as a standalone brick-and-mortar shop are practically non-existent - often they'll be part of a larger gaming business; for example, a company that sells pool tables and accessories might have poker tables and accessories like decks, chips, etc. as a sideline).
The biggest issue I ever hear from the community about one-way or two-way being critical is in regards to the back design rather than the front. Some decks have an obviously one-way back design - poker players, being the superstitious lot they are, won't touch them with a ten-foot pole, as they can actually be used in a form of cheating. (It's not a very practical form, however, unless you cold-deck a lot (start with a fresh deck, prearranged) or someone stacks the deck at the table (not a very smooth or easily-concealed move for a cheater). Two-way backs are definitely the preferred type among most card players. There is a sub-category, though - backs that appear to be two-way on casual inspection, but have a hidden mark somewhere on the back that actually makes them one-way. I've used decks like this before for simple magic tricks, but again, if a poker player knows there's anything one-way about the card back, they won't touch it. Collectors who collect for the sake of collecting, even those who never open the box, tend to lean in the direction of not wanting an obvious one-way design and tend to be split on whether they'd like a subtle one-way mark on an otherwise two-way back.
Personally, I have a bit of both, and use them for different purposes as needed. I don't reject a design for a one-way back automatically, but it had better be a great deck back for me to be interested, or at least a fitting one for the deck.
It seemed that what you were talking about, however, was the court cards. Two-headed courts are believed to have come into existence sometime around the 1870s. Some early French designs were quite unusual by today's standard - quite literally a portrait (either full-body or maybe just head-and-shoulders) on each half of the card with a frame line drawn between them. It did the job, and it does have a certain beauty to it, but it's not the preferred design, at least not today. Companies started taking the designs from Rouen, France - the home of the current Anglo-American card patterns - and finding ways to artfully connect the heads from each half into a single "body" covering much of the card face.
(It's rather strange, really - much of 19th-century Europe, France in particular, preferred decks in the French design from Paris, while Rouen, being a port town, imported their own style of decks to England, where English printers "forged" them like crazy, to later be followed by the Americans forging off the English! As a result, while the French design remained popular in a healthy amount of Europe where it did - and still does - compete with a few other deck designs from different nations, the Rouen deck was copied and recopied so many times, with little modifications here and there over the years, that it developed into the standard for the British Empire and all of its colonies and former colonies, giving that design a much deeper market penetration. But this is all one big, fat tangent...)
Back to the point - yes, when talking about two-headed courts, people love the "single-body" type over the "line-split" type by far, especially in this country where the Anglo-American design standard pretty much dominates the playing card market. They're much more difficult to create, so some beginners will try cutting corners or creating design alternatives, generally involving some kind of line drawn through the center of the card. By and large, while some decks have made it to funding using that line division through the courts, most haven't and the ones that did make it usually had a hard time of it. The single-body type dominates the market for a reason. (I always thought it looked strange when I was a really, REALLY young kid, but I was kind of strange back then as well!)
If you'd like to discuss your design further, may I offer you some assistance as a consultant? I've worked on a few projects, most prominently all of the Uusi decks except the first - and today I sort of get a chance to help with that as well, since they're launching a re-designed version of that deck on Kickstarter in about four hours! In fact, I have some copy to proofread for them! Better get on that...
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