Someone who had bought my Apocalypse Playing Cards approached me, asking for a custom deck of Eevee-themed playing cards. I was a little busy at the time, but felt like I could get it done in the month timeline that was proposed, since decks of playing cards are actually a fairly low amount of work when compared to something like Triple Triad.

The client wanted the face cards to feature the Eevee evolutions, both shiney and regular versions. They also mentioned wanting something that was similar to the Apocalypse Cards, I wasn't totally sure what exactly they wanted, so I offered two test images, one in a more traditional patterened playing card style, and one that looked more like stained glass, since I wasn't exactly sure what the client liked about the Apocalypse Cards, or how to translate that into pokemon.

The client ended up picking the playing card style, which isn't what I would've gone with, but I felt like I could make it work, and honestly incorporating geometric patterns into the iconic designs was actually a lot of fun. The next step was to figure out which pokemon would be going where, face-card wise. I wanted to group them by color to keep the suits somewhat visually consistent, which is easy if you use the regular versions, espeon, jolteon and flareon all fit nicely into the red color palette, however for the other red suit, the shiney versions end up going a little off the rails.

After solidifying what pokemon would be on which cards, the next step was to figure out the suit symbols. Initially I wanted to keep close to the original suit symbols, so I chose items in pokemon that were both iconic and that I felt I could adapt to the symbols, the two eggs being heart shaped and the three apricorns being arranged in a club. The revive crystal was an easy diamond, and the potion, well it's not really a spade but it certainly doesn't look like the other symbols!

However, the client wasn't a huge fan of this idea and wanted instead the suit symbols to be the pokeball and masterball for the red suits and the movie-featured mewtow ball and dark ball for the black suits. I'm not a huge fan of all the suit symbols essentially being circles, since it slows down readability and isn't really color-blind coded very well, however it definitely does feel more iconically pokemon, so I wasn't super opposed to the idea.

The overall aesthetic of the cards wasn't something I spent too long on, I kept them pretty close to the design of the Avian Playing Cards because the timeline was really tight. However where the bird cards have the suit symbols in the background and opt for a clean look, I decided to go for a textured background with a consistent silhouette of a pokeball. If I'd had a little more time I might've spent longer on this portion, but during that month I was doing events every weekend and also crunching to get new artwork done for a convention.

The next thing to knock out was the cardback. This being my third or fourth cardback meant that the intimidation factor had worn off a while ago, Once again I was on a tight deadline, so I opted for a more simple design that I usually go for. I opted to go for a layout similar to traditional bicycle cardbacks. Usually I go for a cardback that has the circular imagery in the four corners, but this time I went for the three large central circles, just to shake things up a bit. I kept the filigree to a more reasonable amount, doing light detail work, and filling in the large area inside the central rectangle with a tiled pattern of pokeballs.

Finally, I needed to finish up the jokers, the client specifically wanted Eevee to be on the jokers, and after a bit of confusing back and forth I figured out that they wanted me to recycle the revive crystal from earlier and recolor it to be reminiscent of Eevee's evolutions!

I was going through my small run printer for this job, since I both needed the quick turnaround and also wasn't sure how they would sell, because of that the decks were actually 55 cards, so for the extra card I put all the eevee evolutions!

When they came out of the printer I was actually pretty impressed with the linen texture on these!

This was a super quick project that I felt like while I technically had a month, the majority of it was done over the course of 3 days. I'm actually pretty happy with how it turned out, and if the small first batch sells well, I might consider running off a larger amount of them in the near future with actual gold ink instead of the just the "gold look" that I had to do with the small run printer.