Totally agree! They may not be very practical for poker or magic, but the concept is interesting and new, and I personally think they look really cool, so I'm in for a few...
Someone's been drinking a bit too much hatorade, methinks... As for watches, there are many, many high end watches which are totally impractical, either for wearing or for reading the time off of, but some are still prized by collectors or admirers as works of art... Not every watch has to have the readability of a pilot's watch, and not every deck has to be perfect for playing poker or doing magic with... Sometimes it's ok to just have something for novelty or for art!
It's not the hatorade, trust me.
As a work of art that can sit in a frame hanging on the wall, sure, they're pretty cool - there's no denying that. It would even be a pretty cool t-shirt design or something. But for me, I simply prefer decks with greater functionality over decks that simply look pretty.
I could easily imagine my poker group's reaction to these cards. Anything too far from standard they're likely to fling at me like monkeys flinging their own poop. And these would be even worse - a dealer can literally read the cards as they're being dealt, if he knows what he's doing and holds the deck in the left hand to deal with the right hand. It's possibly the most marked deck ever created, even more marked than the Bicycle Braille deck.
Buying a high end watch I can't read to me is nearly as practical as using a sundial watch while riding the subway. I even tend to not get watches that are lacking markings for the individual minutes/seconds on the face! I'm currently wearing
this watch more frequently than any other. I do own watches that I like for fun, but they're generally VERY inexpensive, usually under $20. Most of my watch collection is dead-on practical.
This watch never needs a new battery (it has no battery, using a solar panel behind the face and a capacitor for energy storage), can display a second time zone, has an alarm, a 24-hour indicator and a perpetual calendar - it knows not just the day of the week and date of the month, but what the month is, how long that month is and whether this is a leap year or not, so it can automatically adjust the date at the end of the month without me having to do it. Tonight, the date jumped from 30 to 1 because it knows it was September, a month that has only 30 days in it. The calendar feature of the watch never needs a manual adjustment from me until the night of February 28, 2100 - a "fourth year" that isn't a leap year. And of course, it's water-tight to any depth I'd be comfortable swimming in.
Again - I'm running on a tangent. Back to the topic.
Suffice it to say that I think they look nice and all that, but I'd never put this deck in my collection. It's such a novelty that I'd never use it, and there are too many things I own that are sitting somewhere, just collecting dust. As far as the attractiveness factor, it's OK but I can think of many much-nicer looking decks to show off.
But if anyone else loves this deck, by all means, buy it! Me not buying it simply means there's more for you! I never hate a person, preferring to hate the individual acts that person commits that are worthy of hatred. If I don't like or even hate an object, that doesn't mean I'm going to get you not to buy it for any given reason - I'm simply expressing basic individual preferences, not proselytizing to convert you to the Church of Me, 'cause that church simply doesn't exist! I'm just like anyone else here, except perhaps for having a tendency to write more frequently...
