I started with Thoth took simple meanings from the titles but had trouble stringing them together in a reading.
The RW pics on the minors helped me get a wider association to apply a card meaning with an event in someone's reading and I found I could string each little 'stage scene' in the RW minors together into a little play.
After a while I realised this was too specific to those images and it wasnt always applicable to the complexities in someones life and card reading. That was the stage I started to feel I had outgrown the need for visual clues and triggers. For me RW minors had an energy, that was translated into a visual scene with people and I related that ... or 'extracted' the meaning behind the card and applied it via the image on the card to the person in the reading .... but I kept having to modify it and look back to the original energy of the card (that generated the image) ... after a while I realised it was better to have an abstract image, and when I had learnt ( drilled actually - so the associations were embedded in the unconscious) the associations I didnt need a transitory RW image any more. Nowadays I can read cards just with a number on them; like a blank card with a 6 and the word 'cup' or XI . But with Thoth I like to re-read the symbols in a detailed reading ... I find them richer (especially in major cards) and overall more significant .
So I went back to Thoth and saw the whole thing in a new light, learnt a lot more about what the cards meant, there associations and correspondences and saw how all those things inter related to the associations with other cards .... then the deck 'opened up' to me like a giant crystal matrix unfolding.
Just put a tag on it " Dont steal a witch's bag with her tarot cards in it - you know what will happen ! "