Myrrha said:
The fish-footman is perfect! I had been hoping that the suits would be Spades, Diamonds, Hearts, Clubs as that seems to go well with Wonderland and its various card-suited court personalities, and the card soldiers. Cups and Wands could seem like a layer brought in from somewhere else, but this card works so well. Maybe not having the actual object in there helps. Cannot wait to see more of these.
That's an interesting point Myrrha. Our thinking, in sticking with the RWS suits (although we're still not sure if we'll use "pentacles" or "coins") is that the only suit you actually see in
Wonderland is the Hearts, so we didn't feel any particular need to bring in Spades, Diamonds or Clubs, though of course you're absolutely right, they're the traditional suits used in England. The other reason is that we're also using
Through the Looking Glass extensively, and so to switch to English suits felt as though it might make
Wonderland seem too dominant.
We're doing Hearts=Cups, which means that, for instance, the Queen of Hearts becomes the Queen of Cups. Which is a long way from the traditional RWS Queen of Cups. Mapping this whole deck has been quite challenging, for these sorts of reasons, and the result will be a deck that's based on RWS, but in many places will differ from it significantly.