I found a real deck first. It's a hand-painted playing card from Flanders, around 1475, sitting in the Met's Cloisters collection — nobody knows who made it, and it's one of the only near-complete 15th-century decks left. What got me was the suits: Horns, Tethers, Collars, Nooses. Five hundred years ago a card game was already organising people by the things that hold them. So I trained a Recraft V4 Style on that card's pen line, flat paint and gold leaf, and built the suits this century would have — Cables, Chargers, Notifications, Subscriptions. Seven cards, same hand: a runner, a cyclist, a soldier, someone walking a dog with her headphones in, a photographer, a kid climbing onto a school bus, and a guy carrying a console box home.
