The Queen of Spades Pepe

Deck of Degeneracy is an NFT art project in the form of a playing card deck, where holders of each specific card get sporadic airdrops. It was created by and is led by professional poker player Jonathan Little, co-founder of PokerCoaching.com. The project started a few years ago and is still active in 2025 (Total volume 622.22 ETH just wow!), which is rare for the fast-changing world of NFTs. In this way, I feel connected with Jonathan: he continues his card project, and I have also stayed in the crypto art space without leaving. My painting - the Queen of Spades Pepe - was created specially for "Deck of Degeneracy" and will be airdropped to 51 holders of a random card in the near future.

To a Western viewer, my Queen of Spades Pepe may look a little strange — a lady with a peculiar headpiece. But for me, this idea was obvious. In Russia, where I was born and grew up, poker was never particularly popular, but card games absolutely were. In the 1990s (and maybe still today), you could see even five-year-old kids playing cards. The most popular games were “Drunkard” (a game of pure chance, requiring no strategy at all) and “Fool” (Durak), which, in contrast, was all about mind games.

The decks themselves were slightly different from the standard poker deck: no jokers, and no twos, threes, fours, or fives, but otherwise the same. And the designs varied too. Some decks showed light erotica, which never interested me as a child, but others fascinated me deeply. Those were the decks where the queens and kings appeared in lavish costumes.

With no internet at the time, these playing cards became a source of imagination for me. I would look at each queen and wonder: Who is she? How old is she? What kind of personality does she have? And of course - which queen has the most beautiful dress? For me, the queens of the deck were something like Barbies: absolutely elegant women in whom you could imagine a whole character.

So here you see the Queen of Spades Pepe dressed in something like a traditional Russian costume from the pre-Petrine era. (During his reign in the early 18th century, Peter the Great ordered his subjects to adopt European dress and shave their beards.) A deck called “Russian Style” with traditional Russian costumes really did exist and was quite common — I remember it very well. But it was not just any deck, it had a story behind it.

That deck was based on the costumes of the famous masquerade ball of 1903, organized in St. Petersburg to celebrate the 290th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty. Here are photographs of the original costumes and the playing cards inspired by that ball:

So, the costume is clear. But why the Queen of Spades?

Of course, it’s the famous short story by the Russian writer Alexander Pushkin from the 19th century — for any Russian speaker, he’s basically the number one writer, like Shakespeare for the English. The story includes mystical elements and later became the basis for an opera of the same name by Russian composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky (who probably needs no introduction). In other words, it’s something very Russian, squared!

Having lived outside Russia for several years now, it’s amusing to observe myself from the outside — how, in this new life, certain pieces of Russian culture that surrounded me in childhood suddenly light up inside me.

In this way, the entire world and centuries of different cultures have settled in my mind as an artist — an international meme of American origin became part of an NFT collection, wearing a kokoshnik that makes me think of Pushkin, Tchaikovsky, the Romanovs, and St. Petersburg.