Thanks for the feedback, guys.
Don, I don't think the single deck option works for a number of reasons that are, to someone outside the group, largely silly and nonsensical. There's a lot more weight behind your argument for putting court figures on the cards and I've experimented with that and what I found was that the cards became very difficult to read because of the size changes in the pips and the extra complexity the court figures add to what is already a very busy background. I have two very different modified versions of this deck in mind that include court figures (the deck becomes almost entirely court figures, in fact) but I'm waiting until this summer when a much more talented artist will be working with me. I hope.
Justin, I agree the back is very plain. I've gone back and forth on that issue almost as much as I've gone back and forth on the court figures. The early playing cards had plain backs or painted, monotone backs (such as the crimson backs on the Ambras Hunting Deck). I was trying to strike a median between a modern deck and a medieval deck with the monotone back augmented by the laurel wreathes (the symbol of the organization as a whole). I'll take another look at it.
As far as the back goes, plain works. There's nothing wrong with it and you're correct in that early decks were very plain. There's still a trend towards a plain back today, if the recent sell-out of the white NOC deck is any indication. Countless new decks have come out with backs plainer than this and did very well - plus, this is a deck targeted to a specific audience, to whom this plain back bears great significance.
There's ways to do courts that don't dominate the entire card. Many new deck have small, more "dainty" courts with a lot more negative space - a good recent example would be the
Fatale deck on Kickstarter, and an older example would be
Bicycle Amazing Adventures, a successful steampunk-themed Kickstarter deck of two years ago. The clean design can be very attractive, and would leave ample room on the card face for your coats of arms, be they each unique as I suggested or suited by kingdom as you proposed.
The simplest way to sell this, on the surface, would be to use the coats of arms themselves as your suits (as you're doing) and sell the suits as individually-packaged sets, in terms of allowing people the flexibility of assembling their own deck out of that. Unfortunately, the logistics involved in tracking NINETEEN suits of cards are daunting on a good day. Even if you sold the cards as complete 52-card decks with mix-and-match suits, you're still looking at a minimum of FIVE different, unique decks (the twentieth suit could be either left blank to represent the unknown or you could use the SCA's own standard/logo on a coat of arms). While not as difficult, it's still challenging, and presents the problem of cost effectiveness to the purchaser. Pretend I'm SCA member "Joe Renfaire" and I want to make a deck - if one deck contains all the suits I'm looking for, lucky me, but if I'm looking for four suits that end up spread across four different decks, I'm going to be shelling out a lot of money and buying a lot of extra cards I don't want. Picking and choosing individually-packaged suits would work well for me, but creates a nightmare for the creator who has to track nineteen different suit designs and doesn't want to end up holding too many extra sets which would lie unsold for months.
And none of this covers the costs and minimum print runs of five wholly-different decks which only share a common back design - and before even considering any bells and whistles such as metallic inks, as it appears your Queen in the first post has metallic paint in some areas. Regardless of which method is chosen, you're looking at a print job that's equivalent to making five decks, and the costs will be high as each individual deck won't be made in large-enough amounts to allow for good bulk pricing. Honestly, you're looking at a very challenging project, and the individual decks, no matter how they end up being created, will be very expensive. Have you priced out the work yet with any potential printers? That right there should be your next step before creating any more new designs - it could potentially put you in a position where you have to alter your deck to accommodate economic realities.
There is a possible alternative. This, however, would only work if the regional groups had certain groups/factions/alliances that would never meet in "combat." You could make the deck using the four standard suits, then for the court cards, create courts for five groups that are allied as I described above and make them in a single, common suit, doing this for all the regional groups. One would then just mix and match only the court cards, not the entire suit, as long as they didn't mind not having their allies in an opposed suit. A typical example might be as follows:
19 regional groups
Groups 1-5 are "allied" with each other, as are 6-10, 11-15 and 16-19.
Make Ace through Ten in standard suits.
Groups 1-5 are all "spades" - you have five sets of three court cards each, one for each group in the "alliance," from which you can assemble the court cards for your deck.
Groups 6-10 are all "hearts," 11-15 are "clubs" and 16-19 are "diamonds," each organized as described above, with the diamonds only having four regional groups sharing a suit/alliance.
Done in this manner, you would create a total of 99 cards - enough to fit comfortably on two deck sheets, thus being the equivalent of making only two decks instead of five. The cost of production would drop significantly as every single deck will have all the cards in it, allowing you to take advantage of bulk pricing, and people using the decks could mix and match the courts in any manner they saw fit by purchasing just one "double-sized" deck, leaving you without all the logistic headaches you're in for if you use your present concept. Joe Renfaire gets the deck of his dreams without having to mortgage the house in the process. And most importantly, you're not left holding the bag for a bunch of extra suits groups that didn't and won't sell. You might even be able to afford fun things like metallic inks on the cards, a custom deck seal, embossed tuck boxes, etc., depending on how popular the cards end up being - all of those additional features can be structured as stretch goals so the costs are guaranteed to be covered.
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