Do you only use RWS?

[Aeric]

I'm curious how many people here only ever read with Rider-Waite-Smith. Yellow Box or Blue Box, tarotee backs, 1970s to present, etc. Not even later clones like Universal or Smith-Waite Centennial.

RWS was your first and continues to be your only working deck. If you learned Tarot from books, they likely included Eden Gray and Waite's own Pictorial Key.

The vast corpus of other decks, as well as RWS clones, has never bothered you even after years of experience. You may collect other decks for artistic curiosity, but for both you and others, you only use RWS.

How many such people still exist after all these decades?

 

[greatdane]

Interesting question, Aeric

I consider any deck that I can read with an RWS type system as RWS (for example, I can look at, say the Eight of Pents from a deck and recognize easily from the imagery as Eight Pents). So within those parameters, yes, I only read RWS decks. But from your question, no, because I have the decks like the Anna. K, Universal Waite, Morgan Greer. I consider these all RWS TYPE decks though.

I am also curious who ONLY reads with RWS decks, like the Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative, which to me has to be one of THE RWS decks closest to the original source
that is mass produced (ok, minus the backs!).

 

[SerephinaB]

I tend to but only because I have found them more reliable for me.

 

[greatdane]

I can understand that, SeraphinaB

My GO TO deck is the Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative. I have gotten remarkable answers from that deck, so that is almost always the deck I use for myself even though I do get good readings and enjoy my other RWS based decks.

 

[schizandra]

I am not one of those readers, but something Aeric said made me curious. Is the Pamela Coleman Smith Commemorative/Centennial edition considered a clone? I've considered it a recoloring at most, with the line drawings unchanged. I was under the impression that it was closer, color-wise, to the original RWS... I sort of remember reading somewhere that it was later reprints of the RWS that introduced the headache-inducing colors which caused me to avoid it for so long.

 

[greatdane]

Lotusindigo

I don't consider the Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative by US Games a clone at all. I mean, sure the backs may be different from the "original," but my understanding it is about as close as a mass produced deck can get to the original images. Aeric? Do you consider it a clone?

 

[Aeric]

I leave the Smith Waite Centennial out because it's a comparatively recent addition to the line of RWS decks in 2009, as well as its own elements like a different back that set it apart from the RWS. Centennial has not replaced it outright.

I'm talking THE Rider-Waite-Smith Yellow Box, the "main" version of the Waite deck that has had decades of longevity, that continues to be sold alongside the Centennial and all other decks in an unbroken line, before and after the 1971 US Games copyright, even as its elements change like the international language font. Countless books have been written with it, countless lectures given with it, businesses formed around it. Such isn't the case for the Centennial.

I'm asking who continues to only use Rider-Waite-Smith even amidst the Centennial, the Albano, the Hoi Polloi, the Golden Rider, the Radiant, and other versions/clones/re-colourings/whatever.

 

[greatdane]

Thanks Aeric

I looked it up by THEME in Tarot Decks and see the one you mean. There were two listed, but one said it was paler and out of print. I don't even have the one you refer to.

 

[teawoman]

I'm on the opposite side of this tarot river! Don't like the RWS - it leaves me cold. But I do read with dozens of its many offshoots.

 

[DownUnderNZer]

I'm mostly a "Radiant RW" user.

But I do have quite a collection now of all kinds of decks and will give anything a go...even if just once.

Am partial to the Voyager which I like to read intuitively and it has its own cards like "Man of World" (I think) etc.

At least 95% of the time it is the RW though as am comfortable with it.