Barleywine
I think I'm falling in love with the 3X3 square spread with central "focus" card. In the last couple of days I did them to look at the current "life situation" (no specific question) for two people: one a young man who is at a crossroads both romantically and professionally, and who can't seem to commit to anything (in fact, the Crossroads was right below him), and the other an elderly woman who has progressed to a stage of Alzheimers where she is facing a move to an augmented care facility that she can't afford to pay for. In the first case, the Man came up randomly as the focus card, and in the second case it was the Woman. I'm no statistical wizard, but the statistical probability of that happening once looks like less than 5%, and twice in a row I can't even begin to calculate. It's an impressive initial validation for the relevance of the spreads.
The nice thing about this spread is that it has more "meat" than the simple 3, 5 or 7-card "line," while not trying to show everything at once like the GT. It seems perfectly positioned for a situational-awareness perspective while giving enough detail to draw concrete conclusions from. Most of the issues I've been dealing with fall comfortably within this scope, although the GT is still my favorite.
The nice thing about this spread is that it has more "meat" than the simple 3, 5 or 7-card "line," while not trying to show everything at once like the GT. It seems perfectly positioned for a situational-awareness perspective while giving enough detail to draw concrete conclusions from. Most of the issues I've been dealing with fall comfortably within this scope, although the GT is still my favorite.