(Now, I love my Liber T, but only because the art is so sinuous and because it makes one part of the Thoth minors explicit...)
BUT!
Actually, I don't think the RWS-clone plague can hit the Thoth for one simple reason: the Thoth is inherently explicit in ways that the Waite-Smith is veiled. It's the difference between shouting and singing vs. hinting-hinting-hinting. No creator would ever be able to gag the Thoth enough to hijack it properly. To do so they'd have to throw out the very things they were "cloning" for marketshare. It's one thing for Arrien or Ziegler to publish muddled half-assery for gullible newbies and call it a book, and quite another to mush together a deck of their own. Even they knew not to attempt something that stupid.
The reason most people think of the Waite-Smith as a friendly "beginner" deck is because they look at the charming Arts-n-crafts surface and never pierce the caul. It's the reason that SO many lazy, credulous deck creators just regurgitate Pixie's images: they have no f%^king idea why the scenes are what they are, let alone the sources of those images. On the other hand the Thoth is righteously, defiantly, deliciously vulgar and over the top in its candor. It was designed to be.
No matter how many New Age twits try to clean it up or dumb it down the very thing that makes it powerful/seductive/useful is its shameless vulgarity and eclecticism. To reinvent the Thoth you'd have to actually invent something new... because it isn't
secretive enough to lay back and think of England while it was violated by some fluffy halfwit or sneering fraud.
Crowley and Harris knew exactly what they were doing and they won't be silenced or veiled. There is no primer white enough, no muslin thick enough, no hole dark enough to make that content go away. Suzanne Wagner and Angeles Arrien can wave scarves and glitter around it all the want, but they aren't even brushing the dandruff off the Thoth's shoulders.
For any necromantic poseurs, the other extreme is equally unlikely... Crowley's fortune and education and experience made the idea of some bad-ass nihilistic occultist superceding his efforts virtually impossible... dragging the Thoth in the other way and glopping a bunch of hodgepodgy occult ideas that don't fit (Luciferian Thoth! Vampire Thoth! Asatruar Thoth!) is equally crippled and doomed at the outset.
The Thoth is a model of complexity
because it is so explicit about its Mysteries...
The real Secrets cannot be communicated. Tough shit says me to all the fluffy sparklies and left-hand-path gobshites who would eviscerate it for a buck or a bang.
One day there may be a deck that is better or different but the Thoth is monolithic in a way that even the Waite-Smith is not becuase it wears its head and heart and spit and sex on its sleeve. Anyone with the talent to actually accomplish a clone would just go and whip out the masterpiece that will bury all the Golden Dawn decks. So... I think the clone thing is unlikely to ever reach a fraction of Waite-Smith levels.
Let them try; the world needs comedy and wreckage. I think we're more likely to get rhapsiodies and fantasias on the Thoth... like the Cosmic Tribe and Haindl and my goofy Liber T. Those are works of affection and respect. For my money, that kind of creation is always a kind of meditation and riff on a larger/substantive work by people who want to play with an idea or look at that work through a specific lens. Mazel tov! I love fresh perspectives and enthusiasm that arises from respect.
(BTW, I do love when I come back and find lovely threads like this percolating in the Thoth forum.)
