I'm so impressed with the Touchstone!
I was offered this deck by a dear lady on AT and I'm so impressed with it! I didn't follow the creation thread so it's totally new to me. At first I wasn't sure I was going to like it but the more I use it, the more its subtle beauty just totally envelopes me. I really love it. It's just a beautiful, sensitive, exquisite deck. What more can I say?
At first I thought the characters weren't expressive. And that the deck wasn't colorful. And that since the whole figures of the people don't appear mostly, it would be hard to read. The two things I really liked were the box and the gilded edges.
But then I started using it and the expressions on the people weren't unexpressive at all. They're very subtley expressive, but there's life in their faces and in their eyes. And the colors only appeared to be muted. In reality, they unfold before you very vividly, especially the blues. Is there such a thing as subtle intensity? If there is, the colors in this deck are that.
There's an overall softness about the images that I find very gentle but eloquent. I'm enjoying the deck very much.
The only card I cringe at and don't like is the Hanged Man, because it's so suggestive of Christ on the cross. There's no cross and he's just hanging by his elbow, it looks like, but the implied meaning is definitely there, it seems to me.