Guys, I like a good joke as much as the next guy, but we're getting more tangent than topic at this point... What are your thoughts about the deck?
Me, personally - I've said it before recently. I'm a little tired of the 52-cooks-and-the-soup-du-jour method of making an art deck. It's moving in all directions at once, ultimately ending up nowhere.
From the initial images provided, I prefer the Playing Arts deck more. With the Playing Arts deck, most of the custom images paid homage to the appropriate suit.
I do like the juggler for the MCAD project.
Okok. Some seriousness in here.
Contrary to Don, I actually like decks that have 52/54 different designs on an "art" deck. In fact, I would even collect uncut sheets for these type of decks because i think it will look fantastic when framed up. That being said, to actually judge if this is a nice deck would actually require seeing all 52 or 54 artwork of the cards, or at least a majority of it. I would say at least 35-40 card minimum before we can really say, maybe this deck is worth collecting.
Right now, all i can see is 5 designs, and i only know 2 of these designs belong to which card, namely AoS and AoD. Yet...AoD, no pips? AoS & AoD different indices? Basically i do hope to see at least some standardization to tell people that this is still a deck of cards, and they belong to the same deck.
I could make a guess that the juggler is 8 of Clubs. But....The giant head is possibly a Nine/King of Weird and i hope i am wrong but the green pickle/cucumber/alien is 3 of Hearts? No indication, no pips, no indices. Cannot comment much. But i do hope that at least for the design of the cards, unless you are an artist with a certain style of design, if not, i think they should at least try to have some connection to the cards they are designing.
As for the quality of design,(I'm trying to be objective as a designer here) I would say it is the work of students. Compare it with the ultimate deck or even the KS Playing Arts Deck, you can tell the difference in most of the cards. The latter decks are much more detailed in designs with much more concept behind their design. It seems that they have a reason for adding every detail and usage of colour palette, and it has a certain style to each card. More importantly, it seems they are designing for playing card. They know where are the borders, the pips, the indices and they merge their designs in together.
The MCAD deck however, seems less refined. For an art deck, the colour palette seems a little more lacklustre as well. And it looks more like a postcard than a playing card. Again, it probably comes down to the problem of not having pips, indices and even borders.
I'm not saying they are a bad design by any means, but there is definitely a lot of room for improvement.