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I played my first ever games of contract bridge on 4 August 2023 in a physical room, the relatively small room of the Singapore Contract Bridge Association (SCBA), paired with someone who happened to be there that evening without a partner. I was so captivated by the game and the special decks it uses that I picked it up in earnest over the next month through a combination of self-learning (online play) and formal lessons at my alma mater the National University of Singapore (NUS); as a show of gratitude to all those who helped me in this journey and as a way of harmonising bridge with my pony/furry art, I decided to craft this pony-themed deck of standard playing cards suitable for said game. The immediate impetus, however, was an in-progress vector of four characters at a bridge table which I realised wouldn't look good unless the visible cards had proper illustrations on them.
My design combines several features found in real-life decks and adds a few more around them:
- It is a four-colour ("no-revoke") deck with orange-yellow diamonds and pink clubs, based on the Grimaud decks used at SCBA.
- Every single card – pip cards included – is perfectly centrosymmetric. All competition-level bridge decks do this to mitigate the possibility of unauthorised information being passed between defenders by card orientation, but the aforementioned Grimaud decks do not use the method used here to achieve this; the idea of splitting central heart and spade pips came from another deck I saw at one of the NUS bridge sessions.
- I restricted the court card characters to at least somewhat match their corresponding cards' assigned suit colours and be "historical" vis-à-vis the MLPFIM canon (i.e. no Twilight Sparkle, Lyra Heartstrings, etc.) so it could qualify as a pattern – a standardised design among Equestrian card makers.
- Of the court card characters, four are "evil" (all spades and the king of diamonds), four are "good" (Pillars of Equestria – jack and queen of clubs and diamonds) and four are "neutral" creatures. Six characters face left and six face right.
- Two court cards make reference to other card games. Chrysalis on the queen of spades references Black Lady/Black Maria/Hearts, where said card is the worst penalty card; Mistmane on the jack of clubs indicates that it is the highest trump in a non-Null game of Skat (der Alte – the old man).
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