choosing your first tarot deck

Today on CARD TALK, I’ll cover:
-why choosing your first deck can feel really intense
-things to know when deciding which deck to start with
-techniques for assessing decks
-the three main tarot traditions in deck structures
-how to identify which deck might be a great fit for you

For more on Meg, check out 3amtarot.com, and order your copy of Finding the Fool through Bookshop.org or your favorite local bookstore.

Find episode transcripts and more over on the CARD TALK website.

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Chapters

• 0:15 Choosing Your First Tarot Deck
• 10:53 Choosing Your First Tarot Deck

Transcript

Meg: 0:15

My name is Meg Jones Wall and you're listening to Card Talk, a mini-podcast for Tarot Basics, and Evergreen Insights. I'm glad you're here. In today's episode, we are going to be talking about how to choose your first tarot deck and before we get into like the nuts and bolts of this topic, I want to just acknowledge that picking your first tarot deck can be really exciting and also super overwhelming. Not only are there thousands and thousands of different decks out there, but there can be a lot of pressure in choosing your first deck, as the first tarot deck you work with can really help to shape your practice over time and has a big influence on how your relationship with the tarot forms. Don't let that scare you, but it is just a reminder that it's okay to take your time and not just buy the very first deck. You see, I also want to acknowledge that there is a lot of advice out there for which deck you should start with specifically. And look, I'm not here to tell you what to do or to tell you that you should start with the same deck as me which was the Wild Unknown Tarot, by the way and I'm definitely not going to insist that you start with the Rider-Waite-Smith, or with the Marseille or with any other specific deck. What I am going to do is encourage you to start with any deck you like, but to keep a couple of things in mind, as some decks really are designed to be more beginner friendly than others. I'm just going to give you some different tips and tricks so that you feel supported in figuring out which deck is going to be a good fit for you specifically.

Meg: 1:44

Let's get into it. If you only take one thing with you from this episode, if you only remember one thing, let it be this it's important to want to be drawn to and excited about whatever tarot deck you ultimately choose. Again, there's a lot of pressure in choosing a specific kind of deck, but ultimately, you're going to be spending a lot of time with these cards. You're going to be spending a lot of time with them in your hands. You're going to be spending a lot of time studying these images and you're going to be learning how to speak the language of tarot with this particular set of images as your guide. So don't be afraid to pick a deck that you are genuinely interested in learning more about and studying. This deck is going to serve as your companion on your tarot journey. So please, please, please, do not force yourself to buy a deck that you don't really like just because someone tells you to in a book or in person. Just because a deck is familiar or comfortable doesn't necessarily mean it's going to be the best possible fit for you.

Meg: 2:43

I think that having a lot of excitement about the deck that you choose, just feeling really excited about and interested in and curious about the images is one of the most important aspects to choosing your first tarot deck. But there are a couple of other things that can be really useful to keep in mind as you're assessing whether or not a deck is going to be a good fit for you. First of all, make sure that you can recognize what each card is in the deck fairly easily. I know this sounds really basic, but you would be amazed at how many decks there are where the font or the text is kind of hard to read, where they use like symbols or glyphs or other imagery rather than necessarily spelling out exactly which card is which on the face of the image itself, and that is a really important part of reading tarot what you prefer in terms of how cards are labeled or named, how large the font is. Whether you like glyphs or symbols or not is entirely up to you. Again, this isn't about me telling you you have to pick cards where the font is really big, but instead it's just about making sure that however the cards are distinguished from one another makes logical sense to you and is easy for you to quickly and easily understand what the cards are communicating. I promise you that is going to save you a lot of headache down the line. Having beautiful, compelling, captivating and interesting images is a really important aspect of it, but if every single time you pull a card you have to dig out the guidebook just to identify what the card is, it can be kind of a hassle along the way.

Meg: 4:11

Another thing to keep in mind when you're assessing a potential tarot deck for yourself is to pay attention to how the cards actually feel in your hands. This is beyond, again, imagery, which we're going to talk about more in a minute, but really paying attention to the size of the cards, the shape of the cards and the card stock and finish itself. There is a really wide variety of card shapes and sizes. Standard size is a little bit longer and just a hair wider than a standard playing card deck, but especially modern decks love to play around with the size and the shape and, depending on your hands, your shuffling style and the different preferences that you might have in terms of texture, cards are going to feel wildly different based on all of these different properties.

Meg: 4:53

My hands are a little bit on the small side, so while I really love the look of an oversized card and it's particularly nice when I'm trying to photograph them for clients or for social media, I find them pretty hard to shuffle Again. If the card stock is too social media, I find them pretty hard to shuffle Again. If the cardstock is too thick for me, it's also hard to shuffle, and so I really have to pay attention to the size and shape and cardstock when assessing how easily I'll be able to work with the cards in my practice. But if you have extra large hands or your hands are particularly strong or anything else, that might be a completely different set of preferences. Some folks really like thinner cardstock that's really flexible. Other people prefer a stiffer cardstock. It really just depends on what's going to feel good for you and you're allowed to have your own preferences.

Meg: 5:35

The last part of this kind of goes hand in hand with understanding if the cards are going to feel good in your hands, and that is that if you're able to view the deck that you're considering in person before purchasing it, it is worth the trouble to track one down, whether you go to a metaphysical bookshop that might have decks on display or behind the counter where you can like feel them in your hands and practice shuffling, or whether you need to like find an online review if you don't have a shop like that near you, or if you're looking for a more indie style deck that perhaps just isn't available in shops. Pay attention to how the cards are going to feel and look and be in your hands. The last thing I just want to mention is that anytime you can look at more cards than just the major arcana, definitely definitely do it. I think it's really tempting when we're assessing cards to just get caught up in how beautiful the majors are, and because these are historically the most complex, layered, nuanced and like riddled with symbolism kind of images and portion of the deck, they get a lot of airtime, and they should. The archetypes are really important to be able to relate to and connect with and understand, but there's only 22 of them. The bulk of the deck is actually made up of the minor arcana, and so don't skip out on checking out those images. When you're looking at the deck, try to find and view as many individual cards from the deck as you possibly can, including court cards and the pips, so that you don't end up falling in love with a set of archetypes but then realize that the full deck as a whole doesn't actually feel that great to you.

Meg: 7:17

Tarot traditions or kind of styles of deck that are not only based in history, but are also often replicated in modern decks, and so, especially if you are interested in like correspondences or reading in ways that keeps more traditional keywords and definitions in mind, it can be really helpful to pay attention to the tarot tradition that your preferred decks fall into. But not only is this just helpful for your understanding of the deck itself, but it can also be really useful when you're looking for resources to use to help support your practice and your learning style. Knowing what kind of deck you have is going to make it a little bit easier to narrow down which resources might be the best fit for teaching you how to read tarot, the oldest historical standardized deck that is still distributed and in print today is the Marseille style deck, which originated in France in the 17th and 18th centuries. Now, these are a really cool and interesting style of deck that is more focused on numerology and elements than kind of carrying that forward into more specific definitions for specific cards. Now, that might not mean anything to you in particular, so I'm going to try to break this down a little bit more. Essentially, our Marseille style deck is still going to have the same elaborate and beautiful trump cards or archetype cards from the major arcana that we're going to see across these styles. But whereas other decks that we're going to talk about have more elaborately illustrated minor arcana cards, the Marseille style deck, especially with the pips, which are the numbered minor arcana cards of 1 through 10, are a very simplified geometric style. Really, they're just about showing you what number and element that card is going to be associated with, and so if you're interested in being able to make your own meanings of the card or really rely on your own definitions, marseille style cards are a really nice way to go, because the pips in particular are not going to direct you towards a specific kind of definition. Now you can read in any style, with any deck, but if you want to learn in this way that's a bit more expansive, a Marseille style deck can be a great place to start, and there are some really cool modern Marseille decks that are coming out now. I've linked to some of my favorites in the show notes that are absolutely worth checking out if this style is intriguing to you.

Meg: 9:28

Next is the arguably most famous and most recognizable style, which is the Rider-Waite Smith styleith style deck. Now, this deck originated in the late 1800s, early 1900s, but it has been replicated, duplicated and expanded on so much over the years that, even if you're not using a classic Rider-Waite-Smith style deck, you can still find a lot of modern versions that were inspired by the Rider-Waite-Smith, and what this really means is that, rather than having these more open-ended pips in like in a Marseille style deck, the Rider-Waite-Smith is going to give you really specific illustrations for every single card. This deck is really often recommended to beginners, because what that means is that, even if you draw a minor arcana card, it's really going to paint a picture for you that points to specific keywords and definitions. However, if you don't love those particular meanings for the card, or if you want to expand beyond the meanings of that card at some point in your journey. Sometimes it can feel like you're sort of being pigeonholed into a particular meaning. Now again, there's no rules that you can't read in a marseille style using a rider waite smith style deck and, trust me, I do it all the time. Most of the decks in my collection are rider waite smith style, but it's helpful to keep that knowledge in mind when you're assessing your first tarot deck, because a lot of resources are going to be based on rider waite smith style definitions.

Meg: 10:53

The last style or tradition and I'm going to be real with you, it's the one that I know the least about and it's the one that I do not work with is the Thoth deck. I would argue that this is the most esoteric, the most layered and probably the most complex imagery of the three traditions have plenty of benefits and cool meanings woven into the cards, but I don't know a lot of people who read with this style. Personally, if you take a look at these card styles and are really drawn to them, definitely check them out, because there's a lot to unpack and a lot to dig into. In my experience, the Thoth decks are the least likely to be modernized. So if you're working with these decks, you're probably going to be working with, like the classic deck illustrations that were developed by Aleister Crowley and Lady Frida Harris, but there are a number of books, both old school and modern, that really explore these cards in more depth.

Meg: 11:47

If you're trying to decide between these three styles, it really I think what it breaks down to is, if you really love a lot of intensive correspondences and you like the idea of bringing in, like Kabbalah or other Jewish mystic traditions, check out Thoth first. If you love numerology, you want to work with elements and you want to have the most correspondences available to you without feeling like the cards are telling you what they mean, check out Marsai style. And if you want to have the most resources available to you in terms of study or courses, or if you really like the classic Rider-Waite-Smith style deck, definitely go for Rider-Waite-Smith. I like to wrap up these episodes with a tip, trick or technique that you can use right now. So my best tip for choosing your first tarot deck is to spend time on a visual app or a visual kind of social media.

Meg: 12:36

Instagram and Pinterest are my personal favorites, but you can also just browse the web or use whatever other like collage style software you prefer, but what I suggest is that you start saving images of decks and cards that you feel really drawn to. You can take a few hours at a time to do this, or you can just start to pay attention when you're like scrolling on Instagram or TikTok and you see someone holding up a set of cards that you really like, but start to save them in a folder, save the images and do this over the course of a few weeks or even a few months. This doesn't have to be a process that you rush. Once you have at least a dozen photos, but you might even have 20, 30 or more take some time to go through all of those images and look to see what they have in common. You might find that you end up like pinning or saving the same literal deck over and over. Or you might find that you have a really clear artistic style or shape preference or general look or vibe of the cards that you can start to really recognize as a pattern of something that you particularly are drawn to.

Meg: 13:38

When I was first trying to choose my first tarot deck, I was really trying to convince myself to buy the Rider-Waite-Smith, and it ended up like kind of halting my tarot journey for months because I kept getting to the point where I had the Rider-Waite-Smith in my online cart and just couldn't quite get myself to click purchase because I didn't really want the deck. It didn't really sing to me. Again, there's nothing wrong with this deck, but I was really trying to convince myself to purchase and start with a deck that I wasn't super into, and ultimately, I've never bought a copy of that deck and it's been fine. Instead, I started saving all of these images of different cards that I was really drawn to, and when I went back and looked at them all, I found that like more than half of them were of the Wild Unknown Tarot, which is what I ultimately ended up choosing for my first deck.

Meg: 14:25

But if that doesn't happen to you and it ends up that you have a lot of different decks that you're kind of drawn to, especially if there are a lot of different styles, I would encourage you then to go research those different decks, check out how the artist developed the deck, what tradition it follows and if there's a particular story or artistic goal with the deck. Look to see the origins of this deck, how the art was developed and what the cards really have in terms of their meanings, built right in. Again, look at as many cards from that deck as you can not just the Major Arcana and if the deck comes with a guidebook, you might be able to research some of the writing and philosophy of the person who wrote the book, to kind of see if it vibes with what you're looking for. Remember that the artist who created the images for the deck is not always the same person who wrote the guidebook. So generally, you want to try to research both.

Meg: 15:13

I hope that this process is genuinely fun for you. Looking at new tarot decks and exploring the cards that they have to offer is a really exciting part of the process. So again, don't rush it. Enjoy this. Take some time to really soak up some cool tarot art and see what deck you're ultimately drawn to as your first deck. That's all I've got for you today, but I'll be back again soon with more tips and tricks via Card Talk soon with more tips and tricks via Card Talk. Card Talk is committed to staying ad-free for everyone, which is only possible thanks to the generous support of listeners like you. To pledge your monthly support or to make a one-time donation. Click the link in the show notes. You can also find episode transcripts, more about me and additional Tarot resources through my website, 3amtarotcom. See you next time.