Hi Holland -
I'm one of those "collectors," but I didn't really plan to be. I'm 60 years old and I got my first two decks when I was a teenager. The Swiss 1JJ attracted me because I was studying French in high school. I didn't like the stark colors, and the curved swords on the pips were a little weird looking. So then I found the US Games Rider-Waite deck, which is the one deck everyone "has" to have at least one copy of. (I've got four: standard, giant, mini and B&W).
Being a Virgo I kept trying to get more and more details to really "know" the cards, and by the time I had about a dozen books and maybe 6 decks, I realized that it was up to me to synthesize everything and give the authors credit, but not power over my readings. From there on, I was fashion shopping.
Luckily my Navy career gave me the financial ability to buy decks and try them out. Sometimes I'd be enthralled with the images on the box, but when I got them home many of the remaining cards were just so-so or even downright UGLY! So there are many decks in my collection that only held my attention for a few weeks. I'll never do readings with any of them.
Then there are the cards that are truly beautiful artwork but too hard to use for readings. Shadowscapes is like that. Stephanie Pui-Mun Law's cards are all SO similar in color and design (and my eyesight is so bad), that I really have to struggle to figure out what the card IS, much less what it's supposed to mean. When doing a reading I want to know instantly what the card is, then I can point out details as I give the interpretation. David's Tarot is the same way; nice minimalistic ink images, but not instantly recognizable.
I've bought decks that others swear by - they love the artwork, or they collect all things by one artist. A good online friend in Washington State was waxing poetic about the H.R. Giger Tarot, so I bought it. GAG! Holy cow, that guy is truly weird, but Katie likes him so another deck in the closet with the rest.
I have some reproductions of historical decks, Marseilles, etc. I'm so comfortable with the core A.E. Waite meanings that I never even tried to get back to the older interpretations. But I can say I "have" them.
Speaking of Waite, I love Pamela Coleman Smith's artwork, and I have at least a dozen clones of that deck. I've used the Universal Waite for many years because of the softer, more modern printed colors. I bought Indigo Kelleigh's 8-Bit Tarot since they were obviously a labor of love and the faces are so cute. I've just bought the new Witches Tarot that has gorgeous computer-generated renditions of the PCS scenes. I'm thinking that may displace the Universal Waite for a while.
I have fun searching online for digital decks. I use Gunnar Kossatz's World of Tarot software and it's easy to add decks and texts to it. I think I've got well over 200 digital tarot sets, but I only keep about 30 active in WOT at a time. I rotate them in and out as I get new ones.
Sometimes if the artist isn't going to publish, or even if they do but the cards are too big for my short stubby fingers, I'll print a set on business cards so I can shuffle them and use them in readings. Andrew Plotkin is famous in the world of interactive fiction. He did two digital decks. Zarf's Tarot is entirely digital; he designed it in the Inkscape vector graphics program. His Uncarrot Tarot is a bunch of 3" by 5" index cards that he drew when he was in high school (about two decades after me). I took his images and added frames to them to indicate Major, Minor, Meta and Misc. arcana, then added titles and made a deck. Zarf says they're nifty. ;c}
The other fun thing about collecting is that most of the deck creators are very friendly and I've had nice email friendships with several of them.
I've branched out to other oracle decks: Mah Jongg, I Ching, Hanafuda. For some reason, I just don't synch with Madame Lenormand. I have a leather zippered bible cover that can hold 4-6 decks and their LWBs or other info so I can have a RWS clone, a new tarot deck, and a couple of other oracles with me for study and readings.
So yeah, collecting comes easy, but it's not necessary to love tarot.
