Zyfe
As far as "traditional" goes - would it be within the realms of accuracy to say that the RWS is 'the traditional illustrated-minors deck'? Thus far, I've been content to leave decks with plain pips pretty much entirely out of my Tarot experience; they do nothing for me. Thus the RWS is certainly by far the oldest deck I use - I should think probably the only one created outside my own lifetime.
I don't think it was literally the very first deck I ever bought (quite honestly I can't remember), but it was certainly one of the first - I picked it up about the time I started learning tarot 'seriously' (before that I had a Swiss 1JJ that I think a family member picked up at a car boot sale, and one very inadequate booklet of card meanings). Most likely I only got it because I'd read somewhere that it is THE deck to learn with. And I disliked it quite intensely, found the art ugly and faintly repellent.
In a way, I think the very unattractiveness of it helped to sear the images into my brain! - it's certainly become a sort of touchstone to me. If I struggle with a reading I've done using another deck, I'll go look up the RWS version of the cards, sometimes recreate the whole spread with that deck, to see if its imagery clarifies things for me.
Eventually I realised that a very large part of its 'ugliness' was its colouring. When I lost my first RWS, I replaced it more out of a sense of obligation than anything - almost resentfully, really, with the feeling it was a necessary learning tool rather than something I wanted to own or use. Only this time, I picked up the Radiant RWS. The lineart is identical, the colour choices very nearly so (the biggest difference being that the original has a lot of white skies and yellow grass, while the Radiant uses blue and green); but the cards are coloured more richly, with smooth shading, which to me marks a huge improvement over the grainy, garish, newsprint-esque originals. (And I don't feel as though I'm betraying the creators' original vision or any such thing, since from what I can tell the grainy, garish scheme was selected to make the cards accessible according to the limitations of printing presses 100+ years ago. In fact I like to think that the Radiant version is closer to what both Waite and Smith would have liked to see.) Suffice to say that with the better colouring, I no longer find it ugly or terribly difficult to connect with.
As for reading with it... I think probably my impressions of it, and how I use it - the circumstances where I select it over all my other decks for a reading - are clouded by many years of seeing it primarily as a 'tutorial deck'. I generally use it for one of two things: when I'm trying out a new spread for the first [few] time, and I'm not quite sure if the positions I've assigned will work for getting the information I want; or when I'm feeling tired/unfocused, not in the ideal frame of mind for a reading, but having to make the most of the time I have. For me, this deck has a very straightforward, clear-cut, almost clinical outlook. No doubt I view it over-simplistically, and I suspect how I feel about it and how I use it will continue to evolve over time, but that's the stage I'm at right now.
I don't think it was literally the very first deck I ever bought (quite honestly I can't remember), but it was certainly one of the first - I picked it up about the time I started learning tarot 'seriously' (before that I had a Swiss 1JJ that I think a family member picked up at a car boot sale, and one very inadequate booklet of card meanings). Most likely I only got it because I'd read somewhere that it is THE deck to learn with. And I disliked it quite intensely, found the art ugly and faintly repellent.
In a way, I think the very unattractiveness of it helped to sear the images into my brain! - it's certainly become a sort of touchstone to me. If I struggle with a reading I've done using another deck, I'll go look up the RWS version of the cards, sometimes recreate the whole spread with that deck, to see if its imagery clarifies things for me.
Eventually I realised that a very large part of its 'ugliness' was its colouring. When I lost my first RWS, I replaced it more out of a sense of obligation than anything - almost resentfully, really, with the feeling it was a necessary learning tool rather than something I wanted to own or use. Only this time, I picked up the Radiant RWS. The lineart is identical, the colour choices very nearly so (the biggest difference being that the original has a lot of white skies and yellow grass, while the Radiant uses blue and green); but the cards are coloured more richly, with smooth shading, which to me marks a huge improvement over the grainy, garish, newsprint-esque originals. (And I don't feel as though I'm betraying the creators' original vision or any such thing, since from what I can tell the grainy, garish scheme was selected to make the cards accessible according to the limitations of printing presses 100+ years ago. In fact I like to think that the Radiant version is closer to what both Waite and Smith would have liked to see.) Suffice to say that with the better colouring, I no longer find it ugly or terribly difficult to connect with.
As for reading with it... I think probably my impressions of it, and how I use it - the circumstances where I select it over all my other decks for a reading - are clouded by many years of seeing it primarily as a 'tutorial deck'. I generally use it for one of two things: when I'm trying out a new spread for the first [few] time