DollsArtCats

I'd say, after using this deck, that this is a gorgeous art deck, and not really a reading deck. It was a labor of love and a Kickstarter project of Arthur Wang's, and you can read about it, and see more of the cards, here: https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/61940810/true-black-the-tarot-deck The Kickstarter is over, but you can still order the cards like I did --they ship fast and are presented in an admirable way: I actually had some trouble photographing the deck--for one thing, the black is very black--a soft matte black, with the image and the Major Arcana having line decorations in shiny ink, like a fabric jacquard. Here's the box cover so you can see the contrast between matte and shiny: This is a deck that you select your favorite cards from, and lay them out on your black slate coffee table with a few carefully chosen stones and then Instagram the whole thing :D Or set them up inside one of those brass-and-glass terrariums as a display piece...

I was disappointed in this deck. The art is lovely (I am a fan of Stoke's art) but the designers who put together the deck were not either aware of tarot iconography or they were more interested in showcasing the art than in the card meanings--but if that was the intent, I wish they had put more art on the minor cards. This is not a deck that is useful for doing readings, IMO. The suits are color coded, the cards are a good size and are reasonable to shuffle and deal out. But..here are some of the cards: The Ace of Pentacles is fine.. no wait that is the 3 of pentacles...all the pip cards have the same motif art in the center and then spots for the numbers. Next, going left to right, is the King of Swords..really? Swords is air, not fire. Then the Queen of Swords, without swords or butterfly, and then the Knight of Cups, with neither a cup or water, but a pretty handsome wolf. So right there you can figure the images are assigned at random. Even the colors are not intuitiv...

This deck totally exceeded my expectations. I bought it because it had on it's promos, "AS SEEN ON TV;" it had Miss Cleo (and all the candles from Sting's "Wrapped Around Your Finger" video on the box), and at 6.47 before shipping it is the cheapest Tarot deck that you can buy, undercutting even the knockoff Chinese decks. While Miss Cleo (born Youree Dell Harris in Los Angeles in 1962) is sadly no longer with us, and the Psychic Readers Network were sued into oblivion by the Attorney Generals of many, many states; the cards linger on. (I suspect somewhere in New Jersey there is an entire warehouse of these cards.) You will see this in the book--haha DON't DO IT BAYBEE: ( At one point the Psychic Readers Network was estimated to have 1 billion dollars in cash from these phone calls..at 3.99 a minute. Miss Cleo eventually settled for around 100 million .) The backs are pretty... and don't reveal when a card is reversed! Yes, J.F. ...