I fell in love with this deck easily twenty-five or thirty years before I owned it, because I had Alfred Douglas' book on Tarot for all that time, which was illustrated with black and white images drawn from this deck. I had no idea of the colours before I bought it, and found them a bit challenging until I got used to it and fell in love again.
The colours are not shaded at all, producing a surreal flat effect which I rather like, but I can see why it wouldn't appeal to a lot of people.
The cardstock is really, really stuff, and highly, highly laminated with a glass-like laminate: the deck is, as a result, much thicker than most other decks, and the edges are very sharp. Don't let babies chew on it. Honestly, you could chop raw vegetables with its edges. The up-side of that, of course, is that if the cops raid my house and I reflexively flush it down the loo, it won't be damaged. In fact, it could probably withstand a moderately small thermonuclear explosion.
You're either going to love this deck or hate it. No one feels neutral. Due to my history with the black and white images in the book, after the initial shock I was damnably certain I was going to love it, and I certainly do. After all, how could I *not* love a deck whose accompanying book put my feet on the road to Tarot?