Don is a straightforward guy and he's doing you a favour giving you valuable advice. The playing card community is a tight one and everything goes around will be heard of.
All I can say is don't let your ego get upon yourself and stay humble. Because looking at your kickstarter project, listening to others advice would be your priority. Its not like Don is picking on you, he also wishes great projects to rise.
Your deck design is great, I can see shadows of federal 52, and you need to know your audience, instead of catering the whole playing card industry (poker, magic cardistry). I know because Ive learnt from experience. Focus on one audience and you will succeed.
Thanks for the support.
I can understand when an artist has a vision and really wants to bring that vision to the world. I'm reminded of an old adage with movie editors. Directors sometimes shoot these absolutely stunning, beautiful, well-acted, perfect scenes as part of their overall production, but then you take all the footage to the editing table and guess what? Some of them just don't work with the movie - they make the story drag, they take some dramatic element in the wrong direction, etc. It could be the equivalent of Picasso on celluloid (or in a digital file, these days), but editors must "kill their babies" at times for the sake of the movie as a whole, leaving those great shots on the cutting room floor (or wherever deleted digital scenes go these days). The director might throw a hissy fit or something, but a good director hires a good editor and trusts their judgment when it comes to the flow of the story, and not every single frame shot will end up in the finished project because no director and no camera operator is that perfect and precisely economical. Directors shoot as much as they do with that very intention, knowing that some of what's shot will be left out because it won't work - but they won't necessarily know until the production is down to the editing stage, so they make the extra shots in order to have options.
"Cardlover" seems personally invested in all the various elements he pulled together and the concept as a whole. That's fine and dandy if he's making just one deck for himself and that's it. But when you're trying to sell to a marketplace, you need to either make your project suit the desires of the largest number of people you can or you need to scale down the project to cater to the specific niche that wants what you've done, exactly as you've done it. I think pursuing a 2,500-deck minimum print run with USPC is ambitious for this project and his numbers would agree, but taking this to a boutique printer like MPC means he can scale down the size of the project to the number of people who've expressed interest by pledging. He might lose a few pledges because some of those people may have backed solely because it was made by USPC or made in the US or will cost more per deck or for whatever other reason - but he might also gain a few more backers because he can craft the project to a scale that's almost guaranteed to succeed. One of the best things about a large, diverse marketplace like Kickstarter is that even if your concept's theme is somewhat esoteric and far from the mainstream, as long as you've put it together well enough and in an appealing way, you'll attract at least a small number of backers - scale the project correctly to the number of backers who'll be interested and you'll have a success. Some types of projects simply can't be scaled down (if they could, the artist probably wouldn't need KS to make it), but for playing cards, when there's a printer out there willing to make print runs as little as a single deck, there's no such thing as a project that's too small.
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