Carla
Ooh, this is new to me, never heard of this before... Carla, could you tell us what you think of it here?
Here are some extracts from my review:
I first read about this spreadcrafting tool months ago at AT, and thought the idea imminently practical. It's such a simple and obvious idea, it's surprising no one's taken the initiative to produce and publish something like this already. Well done to Tierney for doing it! The concept behind this set is simplicity itself: a set of oversized cards which serve as markers for a tarot spread. They underlie the cards in a spread, showing the name of each card position. Why would anyone need such a thing? Several reasons: 1) it saves the hassle of drawing out an original spread on a bit of paper and then having to refer to it repeatedly during the reading to remind yourself what the cards stand for, 2) it saves the embarrassment of forgetting a card position during a live reading (which does happen, particularly if you're doing many readings back to back and each person gets a different spread--trust me, you never want to be saying, 'Oh, did we say this card was Finances or Relationships?' The looks you get, oh dear!), 3) it saves you having to tell the querent over and over what the card stands for (if you do that sort of thing). And 4) if you're learning a new spread you've found elsewhere, it saves you having to refer to the screen, book or your notes repeatedly as you try it out. It's just a handy dandy little idea. ...
A couple of things I noticed right away about using this system:
1) Selecting card positions with aid of the Deck of 1000 Spreads set encourages me to throw in more card positions than I normally would. This is not necessarily a good thing to me. It's like how you take more M & Ms from a big bowl of them than you would from a small pack. You just do it because they're there, not because you need that many. Rather than looking through the deck selecting card positions that sound good, I believe it would be best to decide what card positions you want, and then find those in the pack. It's a subtle difference, but gives you more control over making the spread you actually want rather than having a sprawling layout based on things that you threw in because they sounded good when you saw them.
2) I am highly verbal and the giant white lettering at the top distracts me greatly from the tarot cards themselves. The card position becomes more important than the card. I decided to solve that by sliding the tarot card up to cover the heading, and if I need the label as a memory aid (the entire purpose of the set after all, at least as I see it), then I can always slide it down for a quick peek. ...
Verdict: Deck of 1000 Spreads is a great idea and a really handy tool for tarot readers, as long as you stay in control of it and don't let it control you. If you can deal with all your cards having gigantic, multi-coloured borders, I suggest you give it a try. It is not a tool I will use on a regular basis, but it's there if I need it, and that's great! Thanks to the deck creator for bringing us such a useful thing.
(I go into more detail with some images as well in my full review.)