Great discussion! I get quite peevish when an artist isn't credited for their work on a deck of cards. Omar does a great job of making it clear who is behind the artwork for his projects but it's not uncommon to see no credit for projects. Theory 11 decks come to mind. Also, communicate to backers! Even if it's a little tiny update. Silence is a reputation killer.
My biggest pet peave is how horrible the registry of the card backs have been lately.I hate paying money especially for the more expensive decks and opening them up just see how bad the borders are being off centered with either top to bottom or the sides.Dont they have a QC department at USPCC👀
My biggest pet peeve is artificial rarity and creators calling their own decks rare. Prototypes or artist proof decks are being printed in high numbers, when a prototype run should only be 10 or less. Decks aren’t rare if you and several of your collecting friends each have one or two bricks.
I don't really know how much of an issue this really is considering, as an example, none of my beetle back editions sold out. SO clearly the 'artificial rarity' is only something that affects VERY low runs of 100-200 decks. And prototype run sizes are--for me--not determined by me. Cartamundi always delivers between 30-50 prototypes and WJPC delivered 100 decks for Groundskeeper and Corrupted. For Successor we had 33 prototypes and ALL of them came with unique foil/tuck case combinations. To that degree they were ALL different and if you got one chances are you were the only person on the planet with that specific combination of foils/paper. For the record, I've never called one of my one Decks 'rare'. Only ever used the word Limited. Which has ABSOLUTELY been the case. Because to date I've NEVER reprinted--nor will I--a single limited deck. WIth Successor our KICKSTARTER exclusive deck lead to a surplus of 500 decks that remain at the warehouse to this day because I refuse to offer them for sale on the website. Even if each of those only cost me $9-12 to produce (plus designs costs, r&d etc) then that means I potentially have $5k in sunk costs. Those decks retail for $31. Currently on ebay theres a single listing for $125. The decision to protect that perceived value is very important and its a philosophy that many manufacturers and brands adhere and its a proven tactic. All important to consider. But I guess as a primary collector of older decks you don't really have a dog in this fight. :)
@@TheGentlemanWake My collection is focused on older decks (Congress 606) but it’s actually about 60/40 antique/modern, but there are SOME designers/creators that use the term rare. Not all. Never said you were one. There are terms being thrown around by collectors (and SOME designers) where those words are losing their meaning. It’s causing new collectors who are coming into this community and buying decks that they think are rare or whatever, only to find out later they’re really not, and then they sell their collections. Yes “modern rare” and “antique rare” are two different things in some ways, which I wrote an article about in 52+Joker’s CTD magazine in 2022. If you’re a member I highly recommend reading it. I believe it’s the June 2022 edition. Full discloure: I hyper fixate on certain topics due to ADHD that medicine can’t control, so if I sound repetitive I apologize. My brain won’t shut off at times. Card collecting is my passion, my focus. I don’t like it when terms get misused or things misidentified and passed along as correct. Accuracy is important (OCD) to me and if I ruffle feathers along the way, that’s alright. I am in the middle of building a website from scratch to document every possible thing from the Congress brand from every back design and variation, currently from 1881-1930, every known box color and variation, advertisements, every ace of spades, every joker, etc. Collectors DM or email me several times a week asking to evaluate their decks for value, completeness, rarity, etc. and I don’t ask for a penny. This is where my ADHD kicks into overdrive because I want to be as thorough and as accurate as possible, and it bleeds over into other cards as well, including the modern. When things get out of control and inaccuracies become fact (see OG Jerry’s Nugget), it’s hard to get the masses to accept the facts. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
Totally!@@BehindTheCardsTCG606 No need to explain. I've never been diagnosed myself, but I suspect I have some form of ADHD as well. Regardless thank you for commenting and watching!
My biggest pet peeve and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the discussion, is the use of AI generated art by campaigns pretending they offer "full original art" on their decks. It's a real disease in card design nowadays and it's a scam. And don't think people aren't able to see it. Want a good image? Collaborate with artists. Don't use AI generated art, like you did with the miniature of this video.
Hi Siamfaraj9096, as a designer myself and a former Creative Director for a television network, no one has higher regard for artists and designers than I do. I've made it my goal to always work with top quality designers on all of my projects. Having said that, I don't have a problem with ai. Its an emerging technology and one that is here to stay. I agree that if AI art is used, however, it should certainly not be passed off as original human work. I also believe that ai for use in a thumbnail for an 8 minute video that less than 500 people may see is PERFECTLY adequate.
@@TheGentlemanWake Hi and thank you for your answer and your honesty. I understand very well it's comfortable and practical for companies to use a wonderful technology that litterally couldn't exist without stealing art. I'm not sure it's being on the side of artists.
If by 'Stealing' you mean 'trained on artwork' then let me break it to you... no artist in history learned his craft in a vacuum. When I was a teenager I obsessed over comic books. I copied. I traced. I emulated. For years afterwards I drew EXACTLY like marvel artist Jim Lee. Did that make my artwork stealing? All of the old masters learned to paint by copying the paintings of their forbearers. The truth the technology is still not completely understood. The most prominent court case currently on-going ( a law suit against Open Ai, Midjourney and Deviant Art) claims that the images are embedded in the source code. Which is impossible due to the small size of the source code. When pressed for examples the plaintiffs claim to have produced replica work made by other artists but then again were unable to produce the results in midjourney. Photoshop uses ai trained on artwork specifically licensed (their own stock library)--is that stealing? Because artists are getting paid. When people claim that AI is 'signing' artwork I see a nascent program doing the same thing a child would do... imitating what they've seen. Imitation is not stealing. What makes AI a real threat is that it simply does the entire process in a fraction of the time. Where it took me years to emulate the style of a handful of comic book artists, AI can do it in days, hours even... and not just a handful of artists or styles. If artist's don't embrace the future they will be left behind. After all, it's still real math whether I add and subtract and multiply or use a computer to do it instantly.
@@TheGentlemanWake First I apologize for my english, it's not my native language, and it's probably not good enough for a technical conversation. However I understand that "let me break it to you" is quite condescending. ;) When you were "copying" Jim Lee you did not do it to plagiarize his art. You were doing it to learn how it's done. You were trying to understand the technique, but your goal was to be better to do your own art. It's a natural part of the process of learning, I did it too. That's not what a machine who generates images do. It's absolutely not the same. It doesn't learn, it doesn't have intentions. AI art is only statistics. I doubt you consider your own creative process as "making statistics". Or do you? For me, being an artist is more than to just be the sum of his/her influences. I'm very well aware of the lawsuit against those programs & platforms, also that OpenAI teams have publicly recognized that they can't make their programs work without using copyrighted art. Precisely because their programs don't "learn". They are fed of art, they don't learn to create. And no, artists are not paid when millions of their images are scraped by this technology. I'm quite puzzled as why one can be so eager to defend this "technology of the future" owned by billionaire companies, instead of using this energy to defend... I don't know, maybe, artists' rights?
"Let me break it to you" is a colloquial term. Its an informality. I suppose it can be used in a sardonic tone. So I apologize if I came across condescending. I enjoy good discourse and discussion and thank you for offering your perspectives. However, from what I understand--from individuals who have worked in the training of these AI models--the process doesn't work the way you described it. AI is very much an observational tool. It perceives (albiet digitally). And builds rule sets for commonalities in images and illustrations then constructs highly intricate if-then statements that use statistics to 'predict' what pixels would go next to what other pixels. It does't KNOW what a human hand looks like or what a davinci painted 'looks' like. It only knows that on row 3.45 to 10 power pixel 4.32 to 10 power is blue, which means when prompted with the text 'make mona lisa' it knows 4.32, 4.33 and 4.34 have 99.9993% probability of being blue. Artist hold no control over who can OBSERVE their work. ANy more than nature can. So does that mean every AI generated landscape is stolen art? It's a very complex topic and one that neither you nor I will solve in the comments section of a youtube video. BUT i can tell you that the technology is already a billion dollar business... and if we know anything about billion dollar businesses is that they don't go away. They might evolve. But they aren't going anywhere. It's an inevitability and as and artist I can only evolve with it. Use it to make me better, faster.
Is that thumbnail AI generated? If yes, could you please don’t do that anymore? It’s incredibly frustrating to see people I like using gen AI. In case you are unaware (which is fair enough) those things are trained on stolen art. They scrape the internet and use everything they find to train their “AI”, without asking and without compensation. As an artist (photographer) it’s frustrating to see people using these things. If it’s a real piece of art made by a human being, then I’m sorry for this little rant.
Hi Eirik. I have the utmost sympathy for what you are feeling. But my position is different. As an artist myself (designer, photographer and videographer) I see ai as a tool. Please see my reply to another commenter on this video Siamfaraj
@@TheGentlemanWake I don’t agree with that to be honest, if AI is a tool then commissioning an artist is a tool. Both do the same thing, you describe what you want and you get an image from someone/something else. Doesn’t seem like a tool to me. BUT that is not the issue. Call it a tool if you want, I don’t actually mind. The issue is that it’s trained on other people’s art. They had no say in whether their art was used for the training and they were not compensated. Will you really not reconsider?
It is a tool for me. The art AI spits out is VERY flawed. It's one thing for throwing up a 2 minute thumbnail for a video less than a thousand people will be exposed to... it's altogether something else if using it for something intentional. AI makes glaring and obvious mistakes--so even if the intent WAS to use the result in some commercialized way it would need MASSIVE adjustments. It's a tool in the sense that you can quickly sketch out a image with much more detail then you could with a quick pencil sketch. Then use the frame work of that to build an original image over it. Again, to reiterate, when I was a teenager I obsessed over comic books. I copied. I traced. I emulated. For years afterwards I drew EXACTLY like marvel artist Jim Lee. Did that make my artwork stealing? All of the old masters learned to paint by copying the paintings of their forbearers. The truth is the technology is still not completely understood. The most prominent court case currently on-going ( a law suit against Open Ai, Midjourney and Deviant Art) claims that the images are embedded in the source code. Which is impossible due to the small size of the source code. When pressed for examples the plaintiffs claim to have produced replica work made by other artists but then again were unable to produce the results in midjourney. Photoshop uses ai trained on artwork specifically licensed (their own stock library)--is that stealing? Because artists are getting paid. When people claim that AI is 'signing' artwork I see a nascent program doing the same thing a child would do... imitating what they've seen. Imitation is not stealing. What makes AI a real threat is that it simply does the entire process in a fraction of the time. Where it took me years to emulate the style of a handful of comic book artists, AI can do it in days, hours even... and not just a handful of artists or styles. If artist's don't embrace the future they will be left behind. After all, it's still real math whether I add and subtract and multiply or use a computer to do it instantly.
Pricy decks , too many variants of the same tired old face/court cards. AI/CGI generated designes. Rehashing old decks. Leave them alone , your done with it. Come up with sonething new
Great discussion! I get quite peevish when an artist isn't credited for their work on a deck of cards. Omar does a great job of making it clear who is behind the artwork for his projects but it's not uncommon to see no credit for projects. Theory 11 decks come to mind.
Also, communicate to backers! Even if it's a little tiny update. Silence is a reputation killer.
Very good point re: communication!
My biggest pet peave is how horrible the registry of the card backs have been lately.I hate paying money especially for the more expensive decks and opening them up just see how bad the borders are being off centered with either top to bottom or the sides.Dont they have a QC department at USPCC👀
My biggest pet peeve is artificial rarity and creators calling their own decks rare. Prototypes or artist proof decks are being printed in high numbers, when a prototype run should only be 10 or less. Decks aren’t rare if you and several of your collecting friends each have one or two bricks.
I don't really know how much of an issue this really is considering, as an example, none of my beetle back editions sold out. SO clearly the 'artificial rarity' is only something that affects VERY low runs of 100-200 decks. And prototype run sizes are--for me--not determined by me. Cartamundi always delivers between 30-50 prototypes and WJPC delivered 100 decks for Groundskeeper and Corrupted. For Successor we had 33 prototypes and ALL of them came with unique foil/tuck case combinations. To that degree they were ALL different and if you got one chances are you were the only person on the planet with that specific combination of foils/paper. For the record, I've never called one of my one Decks 'rare'. Only ever used the word Limited. Which has ABSOLUTELY been the case. Because to date I've NEVER reprinted--nor will I--a single limited deck. WIth Successor our KICKSTARTER exclusive deck lead to a surplus of 500 decks that remain at the warehouse to this day because I refuse to offer them for sale on the website. Even if each of those only cost me $9-12 to produce (plus designs costs, r&d etc) then that means I potentially have $5k in sunk costs. Those decks retail for $31. Currently on ebay theres a single listing for $125. The decision to protect that perceived value is very important and its a philosophy that many manufacturers and brands adhere and its a proven tactic. All important to consider. But I guess as a primary collector of older decks you don't really have a dog in this fight. :)
@@TheGentlemanWake My collection is focused on older decks (Congress 606) but it’s actually about 60/40 antique/modern, but there are SOME designers/creators that use the term rare. Not all. Never said you were one. There are terms being thrown around by collectors (and SOME designers) where those words are losing their meaning. It’s causing new collectors who are coming into this community and buying decks that they think are rare or whatever, only to find out later they’re really not, and then they sell their collections. Yes “modern rare” and “antique rare” are two different things in some ways, which I wrote an article about in 52+Joker’s CTD magazine in 2022. If you’re a member I highly recommend reading it. I believe it’s the June 2022 edition.
Full discloure: I hyper fixate on certain topics due to ADHD that medicine can’t control, so if I sound repetitive I apologize. My brain won’t shut off at times. Card collecting is my passion, my focus. I don’t like it when terms get misused or things misidentified and passed along as correct. Accuracy is important (OCD) to me and if I ruffle feathers along the way, that’s alright. I am in the middle of building a website from scratch to document every possible thing from the Congress brand from every back design and variation, currently from 1881-1930, every known box color and variation, advertisements, every ace of spades, every joker, etc. Collectors DM or email me several times a week asking to evaluate their decks for value, completeness, rarity, etc. and I don’t ask for a penny. This is where my ADHD kicks into overdrive because I want to be as thorough and as accurate as possible, and it bleeds over into other cards as well, including the modern. When things get out of control and inaccuracies become fact (see OG Jerry’s Nugget), it’s hard to get the masses to accept the facts. And that’s what I’m trying to do.
Totally!@@BehindTheCardsTCG606 No need to explain. I've never been diagnosed myself, but I suspect I have some form of ADHD as well. Regardless thank you for commenting and watching!
My biggest pet peeve and I'm surprised it wasn't mentioned in the discussion, is the use of AI generated art by campaigns pretending they offer "full original art" on their decks. It's a real disease in card design nowadays and it's a scam. And don't think people aren't able to see it. Want a good image? Collaborate with artists. Don't use AI generated art, like you did with the miniature of this video.
Hi Siamfaraj9096, as a designer myself and a former Creative Director for a television network, no one has higher regard for artists and designers than I do. I've made it my goal to always work with top quality designers on all of my projects. Having said that, I don't have a problem with ai. Its an emerging technology and one that is here to stay. I agree that if AI art is used, however, it should certainly not be passed off as original human work. I also believe that ai for use in a thumbnail for an 8 minute video that less than 500 people may see is PERFECTLY adequate.
@@TheGentlemanWake Hi and thank you for your answer and your honesty. I understand very well it's comfortable and practical for companies to use a wonderful technology that litterally couldn't exist without stealing art. I'm not sure it's being on the side of artists.
If by 'Stealing' you mean 'trained on artwork' then let me break it to you... no artist in history learned his craft in a vacuum. When I was a teenager I obsessed over comic books. I copied. I traced. I emulated. For years afterwards I drew EXACTLY like marvel artist Jim Lee. Did that make my artwork stealing? All of the old masters learned to paint by copying the paintings of their forbearers. The truth the technology is still not completely understood. The most prominent court case currently on-going ( a law suit against Open Ai, Midjourney and Deviant Art) claims that the images are embedded in the source code. Which is impossible due to the small size of the source code. When pressed for examples the plaintiffs claim to have produced replica work made by other artists but then again were unable to produce the results in midjourney. Photoshop uses ai trained on artwork specifically licensed (their own stock library)--is that stealing? Because artists are getting paid. When people claim that AI is 'signing' artwork I see a nascent program doing the same thing a child would do... imitating what they've seen. Imitation is not stealing. What makes AI a real threat is that it simply does the entire process in a fraction of the time. Where it took me years to emulate the style of a handful of comic book artists, AI can do it in days, hours even... and not just a handful of artists or styles. If artist's don't embrace the future they will be left behind. After all, it's still real math whether I add and subtract and multiply or use a computer to do it instantly.
@@TheGentlemanWake First I apologize for my english, it's not my native language, and it's probably not good enough for a technical conversation. However I understand that "let me break it to you" is quite condescending. ;)
When you were "copying" Jim Lee you did not do it to plagiarize his art. You were doing it to learn how it's done. You were trying to understand the technique, but your goal was to be better to do your own art. It's a natural part of the process of learning, I did it too.
That's not what a machine who generates images do. It's absolutely not the same. It doesn't learn, it doesn't have intentions. AI art is only statistics. I doubt you consider your own creative process as "making statistics". Or do you?
For me, being an artist is more than to just be the sum of his/her influences.
I'm very well aware of the lawsuit against those programs & platforms, also that OpenAI teams have publicly recognized that they can't make their programs work without using copyrighted art. Precisely because their programs don't "learn". They are fed of art, they don't learn to create. And no, artists are not paid when millions of their images are scraped by this technology.
I'm quite puzzled as why one can be so eager to defend this "technology of the future" owned by billionaire companies, instead of using this energy to defend... I don't know, maybe, artists' rights?
"Let me break it to you" is a colloquial term. Its an informality. I suppose it can be used in a sardonic tone. So I apologize if I came across condescending. I enjoy good discourse and discussion and thank you for offering your perspectives. However, from what I understand--from individuals who have worked in the training of these AI models--the process doesn't work the way you described it. AI is very much an observational tool. It perceives (albiet digitally). And builds rule sets for commonalities in images and illustrations then constructs highly intricate if-then statements that use statistics to 'predict' what pixels would go next to what other pixels. It does't KNOW what a human hand looks like or what a davinci painted 'looks' like. It only knows that on row 3.45 to 10 power pixel 4.32 to 10 power is blue, which means when prompted with the text 'make mona lisa' it knows 4.32, 4.33 and 4.34 have 99.9993% probability of being blue. Artist hold no control over who can OBSERVE their work. ANy more than nature can. So does that mean every AI generated landscape is stolen art? It's a very complex topic and one that neither you nor I will solve in the comments section of a youtube video. BUT i can tell you that the technology is already a billion dollar business... and if we know anything about billion dollar businesses is that they don't go away. They might evolve. But they aren't going anywhere. It's an inevitability and as and artist I can only evolve with it. Use it to make me better, faster.
Is that thumbnail AI generated? If yes, could you please don’t do that anymore? It’s incredibly frustrating to see people I like using gen AI. In case you are unaware (which is fair enough) those things are trained on stolen art. They scrape the internet and use everything they find to train their “AI”, without asking and without compensation. As an artist (photographer) it’s frustrating to see people using these things.
If it’s a real piece of art made by a human being, then I’m sorry for this little rant.
Get a life
Hi Eirik. I have the utmost sympathy for what you are feeling. But my position is different. As an artist myself (designer, photographer and videographer) I see ai as a tool. Please see my reply to another commenter on this video Siamfaraj
@@TheGentlemanWake I don’t agree with that to be honest, if AI is a tool then commissioning an artist is a tool. Both do the same thing, you describe what you want and you get an image from someone/something else. Doesn’t seem like a tool to me.
BUT that is not the issue. Call it a tool if you want, I don’t actually mind. The issue is that it’s trained on other people’s art. They had no say in whether their art was used for the training and they were not compensated.
Will you really not reconsider?
It is a tool for me. The art AI spits out is VERY flawed. It's one thing for throwing up a 2 minute thumbnail for a video less than a thousand people will be exposed to... it's altogether something else if using it for something intentional. AI makes glaring and obvious mistakes--so even if the intent WAS to use the result in some commercialized way it would need MASSIVE adjustments. It's a tool in the sense that you can quickly sketch out a image with much more detail then you could with a quick pencil sketch. Then use the frame work of that to build an original image over it. Again, to reiterate, when I was a teenager I obsessed over comic books. I copied. I traced. I emulated. For years afterwards I drew EXACTLY like marvel artist Jim Lee. Did that make my artwork stealing? All of the old masters learned to paint by copying the paintings of their forbearers. The truth is the technology is still not completely understood. The most prominent court case currently on-going ( a law suit against Open Ai, Midjourney and Deviant Art) claims that the images are embedded in the source code. Which is impossible due to the small size of the source code. When pressed for examples the plaintiffs claim to have produced replica work made by other artists but then again were unable to produce the results in midjourney. Photoshop uses ai trained on artwork specifically licensed (their own stock library)--is that stealing? Because artists are getting paid. When people claim that AI is 'signing' artwork I see a nascent program doing the same thing a child would do... imitating what they've seen. Imitation is not stealing. What makes AI a real threat is that it simply does the entire process in a fraction of the time. Where it took me years to emulate the style of a handful of comic book artists, AI can do it in days, hours even... and not just a handful of artists or styles. If artist's don't embrace the future they will be left behind. After all, it's still real math whether I add and subtract and multiply or use a computer to do it instantly.
@@TheGentlemanWake It’s incredibly disappointing to hear you say these things.
Pricy decks , too many variants of the same tired old face/court cards. AI/CGI generated designes. Rehashing old decks. Leave them alone , your done with it. Come up with sonething new