Here's the cardback for the game I'm working on. Mahoujo.
Hopefully more information to come soon.
Edit 11/17/09: New versions: http://mahoujo.com/cardbacks.html
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Looks nice and simple. I assume the genre doesn't feature hardcore blood and violence.
Or does it?
There will be friendship, cake, flowers, and other G rated content. No blood.
I'll likely at some point get a good artist to redo my design, but I'm pleased with the design for now.
I would suggest a better name, or at least a more phonetic spelling of it. I'm looking at the card and I don't know how to pronounce it.
Mahuju maybe?
Interesting thought. I'm seeing layers of pros and cons now. Expectation of anime overlap is high, so the pronunciation issues might not be bad (Ma like a red neck says, Hoe like the farm tool, Joe like the dude). Desire to appeal to non-anime watchers and younger kids who might not be familiar with the term shoujo and shounen is present.
I've been working on the cardback slowly. I've got a lot of versions, some of them awesome, some of them ugly (I keep the bad ideas in case they inspire me in the future). I've posted 35 card back designs for those who are curious (about 4mb to load). If you have particular favorites I'd love to know which ones stand out as awesome to you.
http://mahoujo.com/cardbacks.html (http://mahoujo.com/cardbacks.html)
I like # 20. the "bolded" look makes it look fluffy, just what this game needs.
Back #20 and #21 are both great.
I like nr. 21 best. But assuming that the pink area is the outline shape of your cards, I'd remove the orange 'corner' that sticks out beyond the shape of the colored orbs in the corners. IMHO the pointy corner clashes with the more rounded corner of the card. I think it would look better when done as in nr. 3.
So this: (http://www.chrisvos.com/meuk/lackey/Mahoujo_corner_01.jpg) instead of this: (http://www.chrisvos.com/meuk/lackey/Mahoujo_corner_02.jpg)
I think you also should take care that the orange borders don't get to close to your text or it will look crowded (as it does in 22 compared to 21).
EDIT: I only noticed now that this discussion is months old, so you probably already decided :)
This won't fully resolve for me until I put this into print. So actually, I appreciate the feedback, even now. :D
If you are going to go to print with this game: what program do you use to do the layout of your cards?
For print you will want do do as much of your layout in vector to keep it all looking sharp. So ideally you will want to use Illustrator or InDesign to make the final files. (I guess you probably already know this but I just thought I'd ask.)
I expect to do layouts in GIMP or InkScape.
Hm, InkScape looks interesting, never heard of that one before...