Getting Ready

For a beginner's first deck, the one most important standard is this: the pictures speak clearly. The test is plain — flip to a few pip cards at random and see whether the pictures let you “guess” the meaning without a manual. RWS-family decks (the original Rider–Waite–Smith, the Universal Waite, and the many modern works redrawn on the RWS base) give every Minor Arcana card a complete scene — the Four of Cups is simply a person sitting arms crossed before three cups, instantly legible; decks like this are essential for building intuition.

The counterexample is just as intuitive: many decks whose art is ultra-minimal or merely arranges symbols — a pip card that just draws four wands, for instance — may look beautiful, but they push a beginner back onto the old road of rote memorization. Keep your distance from them during the first-deck stage; once you know the RWS grammar well, collecting such “advanced aesthetic” decks is not too late.

Next consider the feel and the size. Standard tarot cards are roughly seventy by one hundred twenty millimeters; if your hands run small, look for the mini editions. Smooth shuffling, no sticking, good lamination — these seem trivial, but they decide whether you will want to touch the deck every day. As for sayings like “only a deck gifted to you works”, they belong to folklore rather than traditional requirements — no need to be bound by them. A deck you chose yourself, with care, will only connect better.

The card library's images and meanings are all built on the RWS paradigm, so any RWS-family deck maps one-to-one onto the readings on this site. When picking a deck, walk through the checklist below item by item.

After getting a new deck, the worst move is to open a textbook and memorize card by card. The more effective way is to simply “look” first: spread all seventy-eight cards in order and walk from The Fool to The World, pictures only, no text meanings at all. Which cards win your heart at first sight? Which pictures make you uneasy? Why does the Hierophant sit between two pillars? Why is the Three of Swords a broken heart? Write down whatever you read directly from the pictures — rough or even wrong does not matter. This is your intuition building its initial archive.

After the first pass, return to the cards with questions and do a “detail scan”: what the figures in each card are doing, where they gaze, what they hold; what color the sky is, what objects lie on the ground. The RWS visual grammar is very regular — light from on high means guidance, a wall means boundary, a red cloak means will and zeal, a white robe means purity of motive. Look at enough and you will naturally compile your own “picture dictionary”.

The seven-day plan below breaks “getting to know a deck” into an actionable twenty minutes a day. Finish it, and your familiarity with the deck will far exceed what a month of card-by-card memorization would give you.

Many rules circulate about how to treat a tarot deck: wrap it in silk, let no one else touch it, only open it at the new moon... Most of these are personal style rather than hard tradition. Only a few care practices carry real practical value, and they will let one deck stay with you for many years.

The first is physical care: keep the deck dry and clean; if your hands carry hand cream or water, wipe them before shuffling; when not in use, put the cards back in their box or a cloth bag, away from sun, heavy pressure, and bending; promptly rotate out cards whose laminated edges are fraying — don't let one curled card slip into the deck and spoil the feel of the whole. The second is care of your own state: build a fixed ritual that belongs to you.

A fixed ritual means: begin every reading with the same actions — wash your hands, sit quietly for a moment, mouth the question silently in your mind. Its function is not “magical power” but state switching: gathering scattered everyday thoughts into the focus a question requires. The content is entirely yours to define; the only requirement is that it is the same every time, so it becomes a reflex switch.

Whether to let others touch your cards, whether to “cleanse the energy” periodically — these fall under personal belief, and doing or not doing either way does not affect the quality of a reading. The view on this site is simpler still: the cards are a tool, and the best care for a tool is regular use.