Suit Preferences?

LotusSong

I'm making this post to ask you guys about suit preferences. I started thinking about this ever since I bought a deck that used some non-standard suits, so I wanted to know your opinions.

When it comes to the suits, what do you prefer? The usual suspects (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles), suits where you can easily tell what they're "suppose" to be (like... Scepters, Bowls, Spears, Coins), or does it not matter to you if there's a list of correspondences in the LWB/companion book/website (like if Swords were Butterflies, as long as the LWB said that you wouldn't care)?
 

Libra8ca

I prefer the traditional suits as I find it easier to switch from one deck to another especially as a beginner. However, there are some decks where non-traditional suits are used and it really works well such as the Halloween tarot. It should be very obvious which suit you are looking at because if you have to start thinking about it then it distracts from the flow of the reading.
 

Amary

I really like standard suits, for a couple reasons. First of all, I'm a beginner, so changing the suit name really throws me. Second, in a lot of decks it just strikes me as overkill- to me, it pushes the deck across the line from niche to campy (for instance, a vampire tarot with a suit of fangs would make me roll my eyes so far into my head they may not be retrievable.) Also, I've seen some decks with altered suit names where I honestly could not figure out which was which.
 

WingspreadPhoenix

I personally prefer traditional suits and suits similar to them (ex. coins/discs/pentacles are clearly the same) mainly because I'm a beginner, but also because even though I know that it's cool to deviate from the norm, sometimes it just becomes too much. Amary's "suit of fangs" is a good example of what I'm talking about :|
 

SolSionnach

Anything but pentacles. Please: Disks, Coins, Deniers, Worlds (?)... anything but Pentacles. I just don't like them.
 

Promise

Pentacles slightly irk me, which is odd since I'm Wiccan.

I prefer coins, but if I really like a deck, I'm not going to stop using it just because it uses pents. The rest of the suits I'm pretty passive about, as long as it's an understandable system. If you're going to change cups to butterflies and swords to pinwheels, I need to know why and it needs to make sense in my tiny little brain.
 

Morgane_49

I prefer traditional suits.
 

Curtis Penfold

I don't think it's bad to reinterpret the suits, as long as you have a good reason as to why.

The suits are associated with different elements, so to find another elemental symbol wouldn't be bad. Or maybe something that emphasizes the characteristics of an item.
 

olivia1

LotusSong said:
I'm making this post to ask you guys about suit preferences. I started thinking about this ever since I bought a deck that used some non-standard suits, so I wanted to know your opinions.

When it comes to the suits, what do you prefer? The usual suspects (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles), suits where you can easily tell what they're "suppose" to be (like... Scepters, Bowls, Spears, Coins), or does it not matter to you if there's a list of correspondences in the LWB/companion book/website (like if Swords were Butterflies, as long as the LWB said that you wouldn't care)?
Click to expand...

I prefer traditional suites, but I dont mind minor variations. I wouldn't mind if a deck used "Chalices" instead of "Cups" or "Coins" instead of "Pentacles." But that is where I draw the line (unless the drawings were so obvious that I could still make the distinction that suit X correlates to water, and suit Y refers to earth).
 

Curtis Penfold

I don't think it's bad to reinterpret the suits, as long as you have a good reason as to why.

The suits are associated with different elements, so to find another elemental symbol wouldn't be bad. Or maybe something that emphasizes the characteristics of an item.
 
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