Many thanks for all your comments! Let me see what I can answer ...
Index free: yes, I am tempted to go index free with a deck, though I fear it would make things less appealing for some.
The Roman numerals: Roman numerals appear on some Tarot de Marseille cards, vertically aligned at the sides of the cards, similar to what I have shown above, but inside the frame. These are certainly there to help with the counting of the pips, but typically they are not there on every card.
So I added Roman numerals to the white space in the margin that comes from having the indices. Maybe they could be shrunk a little.
Roman numeral usage was not always as uniform as it is necessarily taught nowadays, and purely additive numerals, like IIII (and yes, VIIII, which I have also used), were not uncommon. And as Azazaaz says, on Tarot de Marseille cards such additive numbers seem to have been the norm. Where Roman numerals were used to number the trump suit as well, 14 and 19 tend to be written as XIIII and XVIIII. If I was to speculate about the reason for this, I would say that it could be less ambiguous in reading something that is not written horizontally. But I don't know. Also, as an aside, it seems that in preparing the woodcut blocks that were used to print traditional Tarot de Marseille cards, an engraver would sometimes copy a print rather than an old woodblock, so that the new woodblock would come out as a mirror image of the old one. I am pretty sure I saw pictures of cards with IV for 6 which would probably have been the result of this.
Jase, I'm glad to have tempted you out of posting retirement!
I will probably get Cartamundi to do the printing again, yes. For me, that seemed to work OK. As for the colours, I wanted to try something different ...
Azazaaz mentions the colours: this is probably not obvious from the few cards I've shown above, but the colour scheme is based on 5 colours. 3 colours for the pip cards (depending on the suit), and 4 or 5 for the aces and court cards.
Paige, I saw you posted about this on the other forum. Thanks! I should maybe go there and say something as well.
Bruno, Pike and Clover comes from the descriptions of the Spades and Clubs suits and how they are named in French. It is these two suits that are drawn most "differently" from the usual stencil-derived shapes, or drawn in a way that their English names perhaps don't immediately suggest. A pike is a long spear, and the French name for this French suit is pique, as the suit symbol resembles a spear head. And in French clubs are trefle, which means clover. That's it!
