Transformational Tarot (Arnell Ando)

Most of the other threads on this deck are related to the US Games publication that followed the creator's self-published edition, so here's a thread for those who want to discuss the deck (presumably the mass-market USG edition) on its own merits.

I'm using it in the Deck of the Week group. I did a few exercises with is using the The Tarot Playbook .

I like handmade collage decks and I like decks that make use of classic artworks so this deck should be a home-run. It's a nice deck, but it suffers from a big "no-no" for me: the Majors, numbered Minors, and Courts are not sufficiently differentiated and all blend into one another.

They are all collages; they all contain artwork from the same 2-3 artistic eras. Collages of diverse pieces of art have a certain static, "this-is-art" feel that doesn't feel scenic enough for the numbered Minors, especially when compared to the icon-like Majors and portrait-like Courts they closely resemble.

The courts are also not sufficiently differentiated from one another by suit or by denomination/title. As an illustration of this: one of the Playbook exercises was to mix up the court cards and then randomly put together new "families" in which each family member came from a different suit, then to see what unites and differentiates them.

The exercise was largely moot/without benefit because the cards all resembled one another to begin with and, too, because most of the Pentacles courts do not have anything particularly "Pentacle-y" about them to begin with, most of the Cups courts do not have anything particularly "Cup-y" about them to begin with, etc. I think the King of Swords was the most emblematic of his suit and role; that was an effective rendering, showing a grimacing medieval knight bringing his sword down hard onto the flailing enemies (or victims?) below him.

I'm sure the clunkiness of the handmade pastiche, complete with some hand-drawn cartoony dragons and spiders, scimitars/swords, and fragments of typed text will be a turn-off for others, but that's not a big problem for me. As I said, I like handmade collage that does not try to camouflage its collage-ness (and much prefer it to the slick digitally-inflected work of many decks today).

Any one who has thoughts on the deck is welcome to weigh in.

Interesting Chiriku

I have looked at this deck on a number of occasions, really liked some of the cards, but even from the small number I saw, there were some cards that didn't speak to me as a reading deck. But I find that a lot with certain, ok, many, collage decks. They seem more about the art than tarot...for me. Tarot is so subjective though. The Silent Tarot has been the only collage deck I really wanted to read with so far. I don't count some decks as strictly collage if they are basically just manipulating pictures. The Boho Gothic, for example, I don't really see as collage as it doesn't seem to really fall into that category like the Transformational or the Silent. I really appreciated reading your thoughts about the Transformational as I haven't seen that much about it. Some of the images I do find amazing...as art.

Exchanging opinions about a deck is one of the valuable features of sites like Aeclectic. Arnell's Transformational should be in the collection of anyone interested in contemporary seminal decks. Whether or not the Transformational meets your needs or expectations for practical use is an individual question, of course.

Ando's deck was among many early self-published collage tarots. She was working with scissors and glue, sourcing found objects and, as much as possible, butchering illustrations that were in the public domain. No scanning, no interweb of massively searchable visual archives. Her collage format is unique, I believe, in that the deck made the transition from an artifact one could only obtain directly from Arnell to a widely available version. Kaplan's troops knew it was an important contribution to the craft and therefore to USG's inventory.

Some of the cards suffered alteration on the way to USG to cover their (completely understandable) aversion to copyrgith infringement. I have the original (and, brothers and sisters, it's SIGNED) but I have never done a card-by-card comparision to the published version.

You can read about the artist and her throughts about that ol' deck at her site. That's a fun google search all by itself.

I LOVE this deck - I have both her original and the USG version. There's no comparison. And it reads well.

I think I'm convinced

I just looked at this deck again. I keep going back to it. I feel strongly attracted to the images I've seen, I just wasn't sure if it would be cohesive enough for me to read with, but I won't know til I have the deck and something must keep drawing me back to it! I do admit the Strength card with the cartoon dragon is the one card I'm having trouble getting past. I'm sure most of you are waaaay too young to remember the Beanie and Cecil show from the fifties, but that's what the green dragon reminds me of on the Strength card.

greatdane said:

I just looked at this deck again. I keep going back to it. I feel strongly attracted to the images I've seen, I just wasn't sure if it would be cohesive enough for me to read with, but I won't know til I have the deck and something must keep drawing me back to it! I do admit the Strength card with the cartoon dragon is the one card I'm having trouble getting past. I'm sure most of you are waaaay too young to remember the Beanie and Cecil show from the fifties, but that's what the green dragon reminds me of on the Strength card.

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GD, did you ever get this deck? I'm wondering about it too as I like some of these cards, but the more goofy or obvious ones with the dragon are a bit of a turn off. I wonder if as a whole I would get beyond those few cards as most decks seem to have a few cards that are less likeable.

Anybody else tried this one?

no, G6 i never did

I couldn't get past the green cartoonish Strength card. It just didn't go with the other cards for me personally.

greatdane said:

I couldn't get past the green cartoonish Strength card. It just didn't go with the other cards for me personally.

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Yeah, I wish when they did sample images of a deck that they didn't just pick the best ones, but pick best and worst, so you can see the potential deal breaker cards.

that's what happened. Saw some great images, but then looked up all of them, saw the Strength card and that was it for me. It just didn't fit for me. Pity, because other than that card, I likely would have bought the deck.

Oh my!

Compared to the rest of the deck, it really doesn't fit does it?