Demystifying and making relatable tarot and its archetypes is my greatest goal as a reader; I want most of all for querent to leave surprised to find how grounded and relevant this tool might be in their everyday life. To that end, I continue to curate an ever expanding library of high quality, well considered tarot decks, from the most classic to short run unlicensed ones by independent artists. There are many fun themed decks out there, more everyday, but not all of them, in fact I find not most of them, are faithful translations of the archetypes they are labeled under. I strive to find a balance of referencing the classic forms, and translating them into images and characters querents can more easily place and know deeply enough that they can act as something of a shorthand for the much larger concept.
Without further explanation, the decks:
The Cosmic Slumber Tarot
My comfort deck, absolutely gorgeous imagery from a comic artist, with two additional cards, The Night and The Morning
The Knight-Waite Tarot
No relation to Arthur Waite of the RWS tarot, created by one of England's most beloved esoteric popular figures, and I love a good collage
Hexen Tarot 2.0
Macro/societal level view of the RWS archetypes, focusing on the intersections of technology, culture, and surveillance
X-Men Tarot
Deck by an independent artist, encompasses all of Marvel, not just X-Men
The Modern Witch Tarot
My first deck, super relatable modern imagery with a total absence of gender-conforming men.
The Sci-Fi Tarot
This one sort of clobbers you over the head with the card meanings, and I love that about it. really fun vintage style imagery with text that drives home the essence of the cards.
The Avian Tarot
Extremely cool deck, especially for curious naturalists- the accompanying book gives loads of bird facts to explain how each species relates to the card it represents
The Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot
Pamela Coleman-Smith’s art colored as she originally intended, more muted than what we usually see from the flashy Rider-Waite decks.
Arthurian Tarot
Circa 1990, this is a great alternative interpretation of the RWS archetypes; all the minor arcana are represented by landscapes, fantastic for those familiar with Arthurian Lore
The Golden Art Nouveau Tarot
The deck most frequently chosen by my querents, it's luminous and the imagery hews close to the original RWS, but with a little extra gravitas and elegance
Movie Tarot
Teeny figures from popular films, well selected to translate their archetypes
The DC Tarot
Exactly as you'd imagine, fantastic archetype translation from the RWS to the DC Universe
Grunge Tarot
Famous musicians and scenes from life in the 1990s grunge era, simultaneously very weird and quite grounded
The Schitty Tarot
The amount of love in this deck- absolutely dead on translations of the RWS original card meanings into moments from the beloved show
The Nightmare Before Christmas Tarot
Totally weird but very cool, I pull this one out personally when I need a complete shake up in how I'm looking at things.
Now that you’ve perused my collection, maybe you’d like to book a reading?
In readings I only work with decks that reference the archetypes and symbols of the Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) deck; I see each type of tarot deck (Rider-Waite-Smith, Thoth, Marseille, etc) as a different alphabet, and each deck within the structures they provide as translations between languages that use the same alphabet. Just as my trying to learn a language written in Cyrillic or Arabic would be much harder than learning a language written in the Latin alphabet I’m familiar with, using a deck from one of these other formats would take additional years of study for me to use meaningfully with others.
I also don’t work with oracle decks, a more freeform version of a divinatory deck that many enjoy and get great personal benefit from. I am someone who finds the restriction of structure necessary to the ignition of my intuition and creative process, and so I work with decks that follow a traditional format.
