I feel like there is a market for an AIB to include printable cut-outs/templates/stencils with a nice blank card.
The user could then either keep the card blank, or they could print out a pre-designed or custom designed art template to apply to the backplate of the card.
It would 100% blow up among the glass case crowd and add a neglible cost to the shipped card.
There was one from... Galax, I think. It was a mid-range NVIDIA 2000 series card, and featured a metal backplate with a slotted plastic cover to insert any graphics a user printed out. By default it came with an anime girl background and prepunched holes in the graphic to allow airflow through the vents on one side. Users could take it out and use as a template to cut out their preferred graphic and the airflow holes.
It sold decently well in China last I recall, but not well enough to bring back the concept for later cards. Granted, this was before see-through side panels really became mainstream, so it could have just been a little too early for its time.
The next step is to reverse the fan side somehow; maybe heatpipes taking the heat from the front of the PCB to the back (or just flipping the card around and moving the power plug points so that the chip is top/rear facing in horizontal/vertical position), and putting a "front plate" with graphic on top. Basically intended for vertical GPU mounting. For a fact, some GPU makers will just slap on a full-length LCD screen.