Dead Man's Deal
Poker Faces and Phantom Hands in the Dusty Backrooms of the West.
- Volume 6 of the Nickel Souls Series
Cards never lie - and neither do the dead.
Their luck lingers. Their wagers still echo.
In this ghostlit tribute to the saloon underworld, Dead Man's Deal unveils a gallery of phantom gamblers, skeletal bluffers, and memory-haunted hands. Here, the dead still play for stakes that never settled - and every card cut carries a story sharper than the spade it came from.
This isn't just a deck of illustrations. It's a séance in silver.
Each page reimagines the Buffalo Nickel as a stage for forgotten legends of the Western card table - players whose names vanished but whose presence remains. Some hold royal flushes. Some hold regret. All of them play like something is still unfinished.
Every portrait is a still-life of tension: a gaze across the felt, a half-smile hiding a history, a revolver just out of frame. These aren't just ghosts. They're echoes of the long game - where memory was the pot, and silence was the tell.
Featuring over 30 pages of intricately inked, black-and-white artwork in the hobo nickel engraving tradition, Dead Man's Deal explores the rituals, myths, and misdeals of Western card rooms. Accompanied by poetic vignettes, this volume is a meditation on luck, loss, and the spirits who never folded.
This book holds space for the unsaid: the soft clink of coins long spent, the phantom shuffle of a vanished deck, the cold certainty that some games never end. You'll find characters mid-bluff, mid-toast, mid-fall - each one frozen in the moment the game turned.
What Is a Hobo Nickel?
And Why Reimagine It This Way?
The Buffalo Nickel, first minted in 1913, quickly became a favorite canvas for outsider artists - "hobos," drifters, and carvers who transformed coins into miniature sculptures. These altered nickels captured not just faces, but folklore - stories of struggle, rebellion, and identity, etched with knives and fire-hardened resolve.
Nickel Souls continues that tradition.
Only now the tools are digital, and the spirits carved are those left out of the history books.
This volume carves not outlaws or icons - but the shadowed hands behind the chips, the breath between bluffs. It honors not the winners, but those who never stopped playing.
Skulls are not death here.
They are memory made permanent.
And cards, not fortune-telling tools, but confessionals of fate.
Perfect for fans of:
- Engraving and coin art
- Dark Western aesthetics
- Haunted Americana
- Macabre folklore with emotional weight
- Black-and-white art books for collectors
- Gothic storytelling and visual poetry
Dead Man's Deal is part of the Nickel Souls series - a growing collection of art volumes by Rustfetish that reimagine the mythic West through skull, coin, and spirit. From Native warriors to painted ladies, cowgirls, cowboys, and now cardroom phantoms - each volume is an engraved remembrance of the unspoken West.
Whether you're a fan of macabre coin art, Western-themed art books, or collectible skull illustrations, this volume offers a bold blend of folklore, symbolism, and detail. A must-have for lovers of dark art, historical reinterpretation, and alternative Americana. Perfect for fans of outlaw mythology, Wild West ephemera, vintage engraving, and gothic poker tales - Dead Man's Deal brings a haunting new face to Western legend.
