I recently put together some playing cards for a game of Pulp Alley we're planning to try. It was quite fun and utilised my crafty side, which I haven't used in ages!
Here are some pics of the process. It's a very simple deck - there are 5 "Rewards" cards, 5 cards that appear only once and 20 cards that are duplicated in the deck, all labelled so it's easy to work out which one's which:
They're just printed on paper and glued to coloured card, then slipped into some deck protectors to make them easy to shuffle. You could laminate them too, I guess, but I always find that laminated things tend to stick to each other ...
The finished product: