I like to collect themed poker/playing card decks whenever I go anywhere, almost always either a license or themed after whatever the place that’s selling it. I just like to look at the illustrations for the most part.
However I notice that the vast majority of these poker decks are INCREDIBLY lazy in terms of design and it breaks down to two distinct problems.
1. Only the face cards and aces have designs, the rest are the generic bicycle brand cards.
I have a Simpsons poker deck that’s literally just 16 unique cards with designs out of the 52 available, they didn’t even throw in a gimmick joker or “rules for draw and stud poker” card. King Homer is interesting, but then the 10 of Spaces just being a generic card made it a waste of money.
2. Absolutely no organized theme at all
This is when every card has a unique design, but none of the suits have an actual theme. So I bought a cool “Warships of World War 2” themed poker deck which had a different ship on every card, but instead of doing the most obvious thing of having each suit be a different countries navy or type of ship, instead the 3 of Spades was the USS Iowa and the King of Spades was the IJN Akagi. How hard would it have been to organize this? It would even help out with card recognition! Instead I have to parse out what actually those two cards are by looking at the corners.
I only complain because when a deck actually pulls it off, it’s incredibly interesting. But instead 90% of playing card decks mess up this simple idea.