Customizing Decks.

So who here has altered a tarot deck they own, other than just cutting the border off, and how?

I'll go first. I found that I sometimes had trouble connecting to the female face cards and papi on my RWS deck even though I love the deck overall. So I traced printouts of the Minchiate papi and some older looking pages from other decks and colored them in according to the conventions of their suit to give them that RWS feel, so I now have the Grand Duke (II) The Eastern Emperor (III) (with some of the Emperesses nature scene behing him) and the Western Emperor (IV) (with some of the Emperor's mounatins behind him) and four Jacks (in imitation of the King/Knight/Over/Under courts I've read about in some German decks) that I lay over the corresponding cards if they just don't feel right. I actually found that it opened up new understanding of the cards to read the Emperors as equals rather than regent and consort and to see the 13s (now 11s or 10s I suppose) taken off their thrones. It puts a whole different spin on how you view the realtionships between the personality types they describe, sort of like switching from King/Queen/Knight/Page to Knight/Queen/Prince/Princess for the first time.

Anyone else?

Someone out there is going to cringe when they hear this, but I have the Il Meneghello limited edition of the Vaschetta..... There is a card (I believe it is the 6 of wands... maybe swords) which was marked with a "VI" (6) on one side, and a "V" (5) on the other. Obviously this was a mistake made in the original engravings. I took a drafters pen and corrected the "V" to read "VI".

If I ever decide to trade this deck away, I may regret this- but until then, it is an improvement as far as I'm concerned.

-tb

From my mouth to your ear (no further... shhh)

I used the Robert Wang Golden Dawn deck to practice learning my qabalah and so wrote the planetary sigils, Hebrew letters, decades, and other correspondences within the border of the frame. I also wrote key words for the court cards because I was having a hard time grasping the court cards.

I used an indelible black marker to put some shorts on the ten of pentacles (I think it was) guy in the World Spirit deck.

I coloured a BOTA. Then I hated it so I had to buy another....

When I was reading with the Ancient Italian, I didn't like the way you couldn't tell which way the Swords were, the other suits had little black dots to distinguish upright and reversed so I went and checked with the Classic Tarot and marked the Ancient Italian the same way.