The APS deck
Fifty-two cards and the back, drawn as vector to casino structure: five-by-seven poker proportion, rank and suit indexed at both ends, true pip layouts, double-ended court figures. One source of truth behind the trainers, the films, and a printed deck.
250 × 350 units at 0.01in per unit = 2.5in × 3.5in · 12.5 units bleed carried
The back & the signature card
The court — Chaldean register
Drawn from the monuments rather than from fantasy: Assyrian palace relief, the Ishtar Gate, the Nimrud guardians. Black suits run lapis, red suits run mudbrick ochre — the two glazes of the same wall. Silhouette carries the read at drill size; the ornament is for this page and for print.
The horned crown is the Mesopotamian mark of divinity — worn only by gods and deified kings. He holds the rod and ring: not weapons, the measuring rod and coiled line of a just ruler, as handed down in the Ur-Nammu and Hammurabi reliefs. Square-cut beard in pattern rows.
The eight-pointed star is hers alone. Her face is frontal where the men are in profile — divine frontality is the convention that marks a goddess, and it is also the fastest way to tell her from the King at speed. Layered flounced gown.
The eagle-headed guardian genie of the Nimrud reliefs, caught mid-purification with the pinecone and bucket — the gesture that protects the room he stands in. The wing is what makes him unmistakable at any size.
Judge at this size, then judge the same three in the suit rows below at dealing size. If K, Q and J are not callable apart in the small ones, the silhouette is wrong and the ornament cannot save it.
The table — discard tray, player's seat
The discard tray at one, two, four and six decks DISCARDED — modelled on the founder's reference photo: a clear acrylic holder, cards lying flat, the stack read through the walls, chrome base. Thickness comes from real card stock — 0.3 mm a card, 52 to a deck — so two decks is exactly twice one deck on screen. Estimating that thickness is the skill the drill trains, so the proportion is load-bearing, not decorative. The casino palette is scoped to this scene by founder ruling — the chrome around it stays File & Felt.
The row above is the PHOTOREAL COMPOSITE: a photographed empty tray with our vector stack inside it. The tray is a photograph; the stack is ours, calibrated to the image's own pixels (109.67 px per deck, derived as interior height / capacity). This is what the drills now render.
Oblique projection, not vanishing-point: a true perspective would foreshorten the thickness axis by depth and the height would stop being proportional — the one lie this visual must not tell. Compare the six against the one; it should read as six times, not as "a bit more".
Clubs
Diamonds
Hearts
Spades
Count one of these for real on the free trainers.