More Custom Deck Previews

I'll be honest, although I'm a long way from being a professional graphic designer, I rate myself as am amateur graphic designer.

The layout for Over the Horizon taught me a lot.  I put that to work in Zero Dark, and learned more.  Hopefully Operation NEMESIS will show what I've learned with another step forward.

So, when I struggled to find a graphic designer to work with on the card design process I thought I'd take a stab at it, myself.  And these are the results.  I thought it was worth discussing where these designs came from and you can let me know what you think.

First, there have always been four faction in play in the larger Zero Dark narrative.  This was something I decided upon right from the point that playing cards entered the design process (pretty close to the beginning), because I wanted to embed that sense of balance into the game as part of the theme and setting as well as the mechanics.  I've always been fascinated by playing cards and by tarot cards.  I like to tell a story that I was taught to read the tarot by an Egyptian sorcerer who claimed a line of mystic authority from the time of the pharaohs.

It's sort of true... ;)

But whilst I don't have much time for mysticism in real life, I do love symbology and the use of secret meaning in symbols and logos.  I love all that Dan Brown/National Treasure stuff (at least, on first encounter - if I make the mistake of actually engaging my brain its utter crapness is, of course, obvious).

So, anyway, there's a bunch of stuff here to unpack, if you care to look.

Clubs are Earth.  The mother planet and its two colonies, "plus" everything else.  As far as they are concerned, the colonies are just wayward children.  Sure, the homeworld has fallen on hard times, but Earth is still the best.  Clubs are staves, wands or rods in the tarot, symbols of the magician - the technologist - and also closely related to the tree, representing the natural life only present on the homeworld.  Mars (horizontal line) is salt - a dead place where nothing grows.  Venus is saltpeter - just as bad, but also on fire!

Spades are Mars.  The emblem shows Olympus Mons, the mighty extinct volcano of Mars, "plus" Phobos and Deimos, the world's two satellites.  Spades are swords in the tarot, associated with war, warriors and the god, Mars, obvs.  Mars is also male and associated (via swords) with iron, so the alchemical symbols for Mars/male and iron are incorporated into the symbol.

Hearts are Venus.  They embrace the saltpeter aspect of their world, taking it from Earth's symbol.  Venus is lethal and deadly.  But they aspire to ascend (arrow pointing upwards) in their culture and literally into the upper atmosphere where life becomes tolerable.  Meanwhile, most of their population lives below the surface (arrow pointing down).  Hearts are coins or cups in the tarot, both of which are referenced, here.  Venus, of course, is female and that symbol, too, is referenced.

Diamonds are the Outer Colonies of the Transmartian asteroid belt and beyond.  The three triangles represent their three origins of Earth, Mars and Venus, but unified into a single (fractured) polity.  With Earth, Air and Fire being represented in Earth, Mars and Venus, the Outer Colonies get Water (in the Bruce Lee sense - they have to flow and adapt to the most dangerous environment of all).  But there's also a hint of the ankh symbol in the negative space, which represents secret knowledge - what have the Outer Colonies learned, out there on the fringes of existence?

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Let me know what you think.  Total bollocks?  Or am I on the right track?  If I said that this custom deck would cost around £10, is that reasonable or ludicrous?