Tarot - choosing a deck

'The fool' from the Shadowscapes tarot. ©Stephanie Pui-Mun Law

There are so many wonderful designs for cards out there it is very hard to choose which one is for me. I already have an old tarot deck knocking around but I've always found it a bit too garish for my tastes. I wanted something that is more visually appealing but, as I discovered, there are a lot of different decks out there.

Ideally I would have preferred to hunt up a shop and look through their selection but I didn't really fancy doing this with my lads in tow so I was left with the wonderful and expansive world wide web. At first this seems like an obvious place to look but there are so many choices that I even found myself considering designing my own. Two drawings later and I'm back hunting on the internet - I do not have the time available to develop 72 meaningful cards for me.

So, how to search through all of those wonderful designs? Ultimately I found that the easiest way was to do an image search using the name of one card. By clicking through to the pages I quickly built up a small list of favourite card decks to explore. I repeated this with a couple of Major and Minor Arcana cards and was pleased to see that the same decks kept coming up.

I am particularly drawn to the dark medieval style designs with deep colours. They seem so mystical and full of suspense. But on a closer look at none of them held up well enough for my liking apart from one... which wasn't dark at all! It's a light, watercolour painted set with an ephemeral feel without being too fluffy. The Shadowscapes Tarot. I love it! The cards are fairly thin which works well with a tarot set, tarot cards are larger than normal playing cards which can feel awkward to handle to start with. I chose to purchase a set that came with a starter book to refer to should I feel stuck with the interpretation of a card. I now just need to make the time to play!

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