Thanks Laura and Dee Ell for the nice comments. While I have both art schooling and craft self-training, I must confess that I didn't make this box from scratch. Which is good news because then you can more easily make your own if you're interested.
The box is a modified gift card box made by Punch Studio and sold at Barnes and Noble. I don't know if it's still available because I didn't see it listed on the B&N site, but perhaps it's sold in stores only.
Unfortunately the box isn't quite deep enough to hold the cards. So I stripped out the inner box part, leaving only the cover. Then I resurfaced the interior with
this paper and added a little spacer near the binding. Final touches were to add a ribbon to tie the covers together and paint over the bar code on the back cover.
If anyone is inspired to gild the edges... I've tried a number of gilding products - pens, pigmented inks, rubs - and they all come off with use. If you use the decks a lot, forget it.
Dee Ell, getting back to your original question about this as a first deck... Perhaps you should get two first decks. Another for basic tarot learning, and this for your first art deck. I see you're an artist too, so you might enjoy trimming the deck, fiddling around with it, and perhaps making your own box. Over and over I see people talking about how they bonded with a deck by doing this very thing. It might be a good experience for you.