Chiriku
Most of the other threads on this deck are related to the US Games publication that followed the creator's self-published edition, so here's a thread for those who want to discuss the deck (presumably the mass-market USG edition) on its own merits.
I'm using it in the Deck of the Week group. I did a few exercises with is using the The Tarot Playbook .
I like handmade collage decks and I like decks that make use of classic artworks so this deck should be a home-run. It's a nice deck, but it suffers from a big "no-no" for me: the Majors, numbered Minors, and Courts are not sufficiently differentiated and all blend into one another.
They are all collages; they all contain artwork from the same 2-3 artistic eras. Collages of diverse pieces of art have a certain static, "this-is-art" feel that doesn't feel scenic enough for the numbered Minors, especially when compared to the icon-like Majors and portrait-like Courts they closely resemble.
The courts are also not sufficiently differentiated from one another by suit or by denomination/title. As an illustration of this: one of the Playbook exercises was to mix up the court cards and then randomly put together new "families" in which each family member came from a different suit, then to see what unites and differentiates them.
The exercise was largely moot/without benefit because the cards all resembled one another to begin with and, too, because most of the Pentacles courts do not have anything particularly "Pentacle-y" about them to begin with, most of the Cups courts do not have anything particularly "Cup-y" about them to begin with, etc. I think the King of Swords was the most emblematic of his suit and role; that was an effective rendering, showing a grimacing medieval knight bringing his sword down hard onto the flailing enemies (or victims?) below him.
I'm sure the clunkiness of the handmade pastiche, complete with some hand-drawn cartoony dragons and spiders, scimitars/swords, and fragments of typed text will be a turn-off for others, but that's not a big problem for me. As I said, I like handmade collage that does not try to camouflage its collage-ness (and much prefer it to the slick digitally-inflected work of many decks today).
Any one who has thoughts on the deck is welcome to weigh in.
I'm using it in the Deck of the Week group. I did a few exercises with is using the The Tarot Playbook .
I like handmade collage decks and I like decks that make use of classic artworks so this deck should be a home-run. It's a nice deck, but it suffers from a big "no-no" for me: the Majors, numbered Minors, and Courts are not sufficiently differentiated and all blend into one another.
They are all collages; they all contain artwork from the same 2-3 artistic eras. Collages of diverse pieces of art have a certain static, "this-is-art" feel that doesn't feel scenic enough for the numbered Minors, especially when compared to the icon-like Majors and portrait-like Courts they closely resemble.
The courts are also not sufficiently differentiated from one another by suit or by denomination/title. As an illustration of this: one of the Playbook exercises was to mix up the court cards and then randomly put together new "families" in which each family member came from a different suit, then to see what unites and differentiates them.
The exercise was largely moot/without benefit because the cards all resembled one another to begin with and, too, because most of the Pentacles courts do not have anything particularly "Pentacle-y" about them to begin with, most of the Cups courts do not have anything particularly "Cup-y" about them to begin with, etc. I think the King of Swords was the most emblematic of his suit and role; that was an effective rendering, showing a grimacing medieval knight bringing his sword down hard onto the flailing enemies (or victims?) below him.
I'm sure the clunkiness of the handmade pastiche, complete with some hand-drawn cartoony dragons and spiders, scimitars/swords, and fragments of typed text will be a turn-off for others, but that's not a big problem for me. As I said, I like handmade collage that does not try to camouflage its collage-ness (and much prefer it to the slick digitally-inflected work of many decks today).
Any one who has thoughts on the deck is welcome to weigh in.