Your Very First Time .......

Okay, first deck 1JJ Swiss, loved it, the colours, the figures, the "swiss" bit in the name. because I my paternal ancestors were Swiss.
Couldn't make head or tail of it, and looked for an online course to help me LOL

Next then, something based on Rider Waite (for the said online course I wanted to take), Cloisters. Truly love that deck, it is my comfort deck, but couldn't use it for the course, because it was circular

Then a Universal Waite - by this time the lady at the local shop knew my name LOL
And like others, my collecting, as well as my reading, was underway

The first deck I bought was the Macondo Tarot, I hadn't even started learning how to read, and the LWB wasn't much of a help, so I bought a book to help me read the cards ("The New Complete Book of Tarot", by Juliet Sharman-Burke), and while studying I realized I needed a more RWS-based deck, especially because of the Minors. So I bought the Morgan-Greer, which I now consider to be MY first deck, because it was the one I started reading with.

The Macondo tarot ended up in my Tarot drawer, and I never touched it again, so I don't consider it my first deck at all... I will pick it up one day though. On the other hand, the Morgan-Greer has and will always have a very special place in my heart, I still use it sometimes, when it "calls to me" for a reading

My first deck was the 1JJ Swiss, and I bought it around 1970. I was on a trip to San Francisco, and I found it in a gift shop. I'd known about tarot from reading books, and this was the first deck I'd actually seen, so of course I had to have it.

I used it for readings, laying out the Celtic Cross on the spreadsheet that came with it and looked up meanings in the book. The readings that I got were pretty far-fetched, so I put it away. I looked in my tarot journal a couple of years later, and everything had come true. I started reading again and read for a few other people. Then I got a little freaked out because the readings were so accurate, so I put the tarot away for many years.

I had the deck up until a couple of years ago, when I had to throw it out because it had gotten terribly moldy.

I started getting into tarot again about ten years ago, when I bought the Artists Inner Vision deck, because I was into rubber stamping and paper arts.
After that, a friend of mine gave me the Osho Zen. And then I discovered Aeclectic, and now I have over 100 decks. The first deck that I could really read with was the Buckland Romani. Now I'm going back and studying some decks that I've had for a while. I am definitely permanently hooked on tarot.

My first deck was the 1JJ Swiss deck (French version), in the mid 70's, when there were not many decks around. My parents gave it to me for Christmas, when I was 12 years old, after I became hooked playing with my best friend's copy. But in the early 80's I picked up the Sacred Rose Tarot at a local Metaphysical shop, fell in love, and a year later started doing professional readings with it. That was really the deck that reeled me in for life.

I purchased my first tarot deck 20 years ago,
(after fruitlessly waiting for YEARS for someone
to gift me a tarot deck - I read all those erroneous books
that told me your cards "should" be a gift - Hooey!)
I adopted The Enchanted Tarot because, at the time,
I thought it less "scary" than the other decks available -
but I soon adopted many others, the "scary" (haha) RWS among them.

I was forced to give away my first Enchanted a few years
after I got it, but I've since replaced it -
still one of my most cherished decks...

Cara

My first deck was technically the Hudes. I had expressed an interest in tarot to a friend, who referred me here and told me to pick a deck. I picked the Mystic Dreamer. While waiting for it, I visited my mom (who used to read tarot professionally), and she let me go through her collection. When I handed the Hudes back to her, she hesitated, and then put it back in my hands. "Apparently," she said wryly, "This belongs to you, now."

The thing about the Hudes is that, while it is beautiful and calming and serene, it is also not very intuitive. I tried, but it wasn't until I got the Revelations that things started making sense.

So, the Mystic Dreamer (which I have never really used) was the first deck I fell in love with, the Hudes was the first deck I ever used, (and is among my most treasured, because it has been broken in through hundreds of readings at my mom's hands) and the Revelations is the first I ever read with.

My first was the Gilded Tarot. I fell in love with them the minute i seen them.

Back in the early '80s I was researching a lot of esoteric things, due to innate interest which had recently been stirred up by discovery that several new friends of mine were also Pagan, and some (Pagan or not) were into divination, a topic that resonated well with me since I'd had a long interest in astrology and had the knowledge that my maternal grandmother had been a card-reader (playing cards) but my mother had never bothered to learn while she had the chance. So I was buying lots of books about Tarot, among them Eden Gray, whose books were illustrated with the RWS, and one by Madeline Montalban, who used about a dozen different decks for illustrations. So I was aware that there were quite a few decks out there, but this was still a long time ago. From going to esoteric conferences, I knew dealers who carried decks; one dealer became my "go-to," and it took me some time before I got up the nerve to actually spend for a deck. So after perusing their demo-decks, I picked the Stairs of Gold, which I thought was totally gorgeous, and I was fascinated by the tie-ins on them: Hebrew letters, angel names, and so forth. But I didn't start to actually read till I got the Morgan Greer, which I fell in love with from Montalban's book, but which freaked me out in person because of the lack of borders. At the time it was the only available deck like that. It took me some time to get over it and actually buy the deck, because the images haunted me till I gave in. And an experience I had on the day of purchase finally twisted my arm. I've posted details in a long-ago thread, but I'll repeat if anyone cares to hear.

After that, I'd buy a new deck every year or so; there were a couple dealers, and a local store, that suited my needs. It took me over 20 years to gather the collection I had before finding AT.

My first deck was the Connolly, bought in the early 90s when I was still in high school. I also got at the same time, Connolly's "New Handbook for the Apprentice" and dutifully worked my way through that. What an exciting time that was!!

I know the Connolly is a bit of a contentious deck, but the renamed devil and death cards helped me to make sense of what they were about in those early days. And to be honest, I think the people are some of the better-looking ones I've seen in a while.

I don't use the deck much these days for anything except shuffling and reminiscing, but I trimmed last year, which gave them a bit of a new lease on life

Wendywu said:

Mine was the RWS, and I didn't exactly love it but studied it nonetheless. I appreciate it now, and think it was an ideal learning deck.

Click to expand...

Same here. It's a good, reliable deck that gives you a solid grounding in Tarot which you can take from deck to deck without having to re-learn. In contrast, if you learn on many of the other modern decks around including a lot of RWS clones, you have to re-learn when you get another deck.

I love teaching with it. However, these days it's almost my last choice for reading with.