They do at that. I happen to like the design. Granted, I wish the faces were a little more original, but aside from Sentinels I don't think any T11 decks were anything but standard faces with some tweaks to the colors. I heard that the issue with the gold on the Gold Monarchs was that having gold on the backs and fronts of some cards caused ink saturation issues. Yes, we all know black decks are inked everywhere, but metallic inks on playing cards are still a relatively new concept, and the stock in question may have been a little more absorbent and prone to such saturation.
There's actually a helluva lot of science that goes into making playing cards these days...