Hi Don, thank you for your thoughtful insights. You raise a lot of good points. I'll try to address them as best as I can:
"While the concept is a little more interesting than some of the steampunk decks that have drifted through KS, I think you've created a bigger challenge for yourself. You can have a gorgeous deck and it won't get funded because your goal is rather high due to the fact that you're trying to produce two decks right off the bat and you're a completely unknown variable in the playing card design world. Look for a KS project for a two-deck set called "SiShou - Four Beasts" - gorgeous deck, but missed the goal for being a little too ambitious off the bat. I thought it was downright criminal that SiShou failed when so many utterly horrible decks made it to their goal (albeit usually because they set an insanely low goal and used an off-brand printer)."
I spent many days trying to figure this part out and obviously there are some ideas that I hadn't thought of (e.g. unlimited deck as a stretch goal -- great idea). I reached out to maybe 10ish other people with decks, plus some stores that sell collectible playing cards) and got their advice - some aligned, some varied widely. For example, this project almost became a single deck, printed by Liberty Playing Cards. Feedback I got was that Liberty has great quality cards, and from the price quotes I got from them, their minimum is substantially lower than USPCC. I also found a couple of other companies - one in China that was substantially less expensive. I was going to set a stretch goal to print on Bicycle stock if we hit their minimums. However from looking at the decks that did get funded, very few were non-USPCC, so I decided to make that the goal.
Getting funded - one thing to keep in mind is that I do online marketing as my day job. Plus, this deck involves some very well-known people in the steampunk community. They're sharing it with their networks, and I'm doing traditional online marketing. I also have 3 other people on my marketing team helping out between client projects. We're doing Facebook advertising, a press release next week and some other stuff. Right now one of the people on the team is working on hitting up other playing card forums and crowdfunding websites.
You could be right and it would be a huge disappointment if this didn't get funded. But you're looking at a production that involves maybe 12 people at its core, plus our networks of friends, family & colleagues helping out. I'm very optimistic and ambitious about this project and I think we made the right decision with our offering. I know we don't have the following right now, but that's part of why I involved some incredibly influential people in the steampunk community (besides the fact that I absolutely love their work and think that they're all amazing people) - they do have a following, just not in the playing cards space.
"Have you considered removing the frames around the court cards and the pips? Beautiful art like this shouldn't live within such tiny boundaries! But do be careful about printing your faces into the bleed, past the cutting edge. If certain cards have print-to-the-bleed and other don't, the ones that do will be spotted when the deck is held together in a pile. Leave yourself a decent margin of error for the faces, as well - USPC focuses more on centering the backs than registering the fronts and backs to perfect alignment, so a centered back will almost invariably have a slightly off-center face, and if it's off jus a little too far, you'll be slicing part of your face imagery off the card. It makes sense when you think of it - apparently there's a bit of art to printing as well as science, and for a deck of cards, a well-centered back is far more important than a well-centered face."
Great advice, again, thank you. Yes we're exploring all options. Right now we're 17 hours into the campaign and are already getting lots of great suggestions like yours. My plan is to explore and aggregate all of it for the next couple of days and then start making some decisions on direction based on what people want to see, and what matches our aesthetic and the themes built into this deck.
