Kickstarter: Ascension Playing Cards by Steve Minty

Since the epic Season 8 started this week, though we would feature this awesome deck! There's something special about Steve Minty decks, and his latest deck, currently funding on Kickstarter, is no different. Ascension Playing cards are epically designed and illustrated as an homage to his beloved TV series while giving it a spin in his style and interpretation. On how the deck came to be, Steve said on the project page,

To me, the aspect I wanted to focus on were the diverse "families" depicted in the series as opposed to individual heroes, villains and so forth. Each house has its own agendas and values that they live (or die, a lot) by and I couldn't help but find that intriguing. I thought to myself, how could I represent each family visually and voila, "Ascension Playing Cards" came into existence.

The deck features fully custom artwork from the gorgeous Aces, to the pips, indices, and courts featuring characters from the series. However, Steve points out that if backers are expecting specific characters, that's not happening. Steve explained,

While the characters are fantastic, I felt it was a disservice to the series and myself as it wouldn't be an inspiration, but rather a copycat. The face cards will follow a straightforward system of a patriarchal figure, matriarchal figure, children, advisors, and helpers.

When it came to designing the decks, Steve had to boil down the essence of the families into a couple of words to use as a foundation. The Wolves were dark, brooding and stalwart whereas the Lions were opulent, lush and ornate.

In addition to that, Steve felt that it was obvious to incorporate the moon and sun motifs as wolves have been synonymous with howling at the moon and lions basked in the warmth of the sun. The motifs visually contrasted with both families. Steve added,

Once I had figured this out, my final goal was to tie these decks together so that it would be obvious to a passerby that they were designed to be in the "siblings". One solution is to color swap and call it a different edition, but I felt it wasn't enough. I decided that I didn't want that and so I walked a fine line to make it different enough so it embodies the essence of my distillation while making sure it was similar enough to each other that it wasn't jarring. I hope I was able to achieve that.

Also available in this campaign is the Signature Edition decks. These incredible decks are able to stand out from other decks by incorporating a large 3d sculpted figurehead on a subdued tuck.



The tuck itself will also be metallic foiled but done in a way where it does not lose focus from the figurehead. The Signature Edition decks will come with a numbered edition seal as well as handcrafted edge gilding.

Printed by the United States Playing Card Co. and pledge starts at $15 for an Ascension deck on Kickstarter. Only 4 days to go... don't miss out!

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