The Strange History of the Tarot and the Hoi Polloi Deck

This is one of the best, most concise histories of Tarot that I have read:
https://tarotluv.com/blog/strange-history-of-tarot/

And it has pictures!

Look! coins, polo sticks (wands), cups and swords are already there.

When my friend Andy came to visit, she brought me a deck of cards that were hers from the 1970's. And they were in great shape--not faded at all. Since they were already in a wooden box, I just kept them there, though oddly I had a chance to buy an original box online a few weeks ago. (I decided that the cards Andy gave me were fine as is in their box). It was the Hoi Polloi deck, and it has two neat little features--the first is that the designs from Coleman-Smith were simplified so the backgrounds were plain (making the cards more like the oldest card sets)

 and there were included several "key" cards, so if you are not great at "randomly selecting" cards, you can shuffle the keys into the deck, and then go hunt for them and pull the cards above or below them for your layout.

(Key cards match the backs, which can be slightly confusing at first)
 I like the idea so much I am tempted to make dummy cards for some of my other decks--handily,  some of my decks already come with advertising and publisher cards I can use for "keys". It beats reaching into a hat.

The Hoi Polloi cards were recolored from the Waite/Coleman-Smith into a fun Peter Max sort of color scheme, with many of the court cards redone to have people of color.

Here is a couple more cards:

The whole deck reminds me of the Troubador Press coloring books I loved as a tween. (I did a web search to try to find the ones I had, and it was a surprisingly malware-ridden search, so I screen grabbed three I could find:)

Which reminds me of this:

(Good heavens, I still use something close to that color palette :o)

You can see why this is such a happy deck for me :D Thank you again, Andy!