Seventy-eight cards, drawn down to the idea

What arrives

• All 78 cards. Major and Minor Arcana, standard Rider–Waite size, so any spread you have learned still works and any pouch you own still fits.
• A rigid box. Two pieces, lid and base, matte laminated. It survives a bag and does not tear at the corner the way a tuck box does.
• A 32-page guide. Keywords, one line upright and one reversed for every card — short enough to read with in your hand, and smaller than a card so it lifts out of the box. Ruled pages at the back for your own notes, and seven rules for reading on the last one. The full entry for every card is free on this site.

The marks

• One colour per card. Always the card’s own idea — the lightning on the Tower, the slack chains on the Devil, the edge that stops under the Fool’s foot.
• One horizon. Every card standing on the earth shares the same ground line. Cards of sky, water and suspension have none.
• A correspondence under every drawing. Its planet or sign on the Majors, its element on the Minors — so the deck teaches you the system while you use it.
• A back that gives nothing away. Rotationally symmetric, so a reversed card cannot be spotted before it turns.

Order

Drawn for this deck, printed to order. Every card was drawn from scratch as geometry rather than illustration — nothing licensed, nothing borrowed from another deck, and the precision is the method rather than a style. None are kept in stock: yours is printed when you order it, then posted. Allow about three weeks within the United States. Your address is collected at checkout.

Who this deck is for

The Majors are drawn. The Minors are not — a five of pentacles is five pentacles, with its element marked underneath and no scene telling you how to feel about it. That is deliberate, and it is the one thing worth knowing before you order. A card that draws the answer for you saves you the work of finding it, and the finding is the part that teaches. Read from the number and the suit and one rule carries all forty minors, instead of forty memorised pictures.

If you already read, this is the deck that stops doing it for you. Every card is also written out in full here, free.

If you have never read before, start with the course rather than here. All seventy-eight cards are read aloud in The Drawn Card on the App Store, and it works with whatever deck you already own. Come back to this one when the pictures have become training wheels.