Deck Review: Tarot of Oxalia

I started this blog as a way to scrapbook my own Tarot journey, but it’s been super rewarding that other people have engaged with it (no (wo)man is an island!) And given the frankly terrifying amount of money I have thus far spent on my Tarot addiction collection, another very nice side-effect has been the occasional offer of a free deck in exchange for a review.

I’ve been a bit circumspect about that, though. I already have a hefty backlog of decks bought with my own hard-earned youngmoneycashmoney, and I don’t want this space to turn into a conveyor belt of things I wouldn’t have chosen for myself. So I decided I’d only say yes to decks that really spoke to me. So far, only one has made the cut.

And it’s this one! The Tarot of Oxalia by Art of Play

Created and designed by the artist and tattooist Kelly Thorn (continuing my ongoing love affair with tattoo artists who create Tarot decks, first ignited by the wonderful Jamie Sawyer), the Tarot of Oxalia is a beautiful deck that builds on classic RWS imagery.

This makes it genuinely approachable and easy to read with for beginners, while still offering plenty of depth for more experienced readers. Thorn weaves in elements of Ancient Greek mythology and science fiction, creating a world that feels both archetypal and intriguingly strange. The suits, for example, are reimagined as part of an imaginary galaxy, each mapped onto its own planet: the Blades of Aeranthos (air is our mind), the Cups of Fontinalis (water is our heart), the Coins of Terrella (earth is our home), and the Wands of Banksia (fire is our body). My one small reservation once I actually had the deck in my hot little hands is that I found myself wishing the sci-fi elements had been pushed a little further, either in the imagery itself or in the guidebook, as it feels like there’s a lot of fascinating potential there that isn’t quite fully explored.

The card art feels both fresh and quirkily old-fashioned. It’s a very gentle deck, and I definitely feel that Thorn’s interpretation has softened some of the RWS imagery. That said, the cards are still complex and deeply evocative artworks, and I really enjoy the simultaneous sense of connection and other-worldliness they create. This might sound a bit contradictory (oxymoronic, even 😜), but it’s something I’ve always loved about science fiction more broadly: sometimes it’s through imagining other worlds that I feel most tenderly, and most fiercely, connected to our own beautiful, singular Earth.

“People often believe tarot is about predicting the future, but it can also help tremendously to understand the present and the past. Once you let yourself be led by the cards, a conversation between you and the tarot begins, and you can fully understand where you’re coming from and where you might go.”

Kelly Thorn

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The deck consists of 80 cards, plus a guidebook, and comes housed in a sculpturally embossed tuck box. The textured detailing on the box (which I was very taken with in the promo images!) is genuinely lovely in the hand, but it is still, ultimately, a tuck box, and therefore subject to the familiar Tarot-reader annoyance of being a bit of a PITA to open without slowly destroying it.

The card stock itself has a linen finish and feels pleasantly flexible and elastic, though it is on the thinner side. It’s a bit more slippery than I personally prefer, but I know that’s a feature rather than a bug for some readers, as it does make for extremely smooth, well-lubricated shuffling ;-). The silver gilt looks beautiful out of the box, though, as ever, it’s worth assuming that it will chip a little over time with regular use.

The deck comes in a beautiful ceramic curio box finished with a matte bisque glaze (a word that, until this deck, I associated exclusively with soup – but which I am now fully committed to using in a design context at every available opportunity 😊). The curio box is genuinely lush, though I confess I’m already slightly paranoid about breaking it, which perhaps limits how relaxed I feel about actually using it.

This is one of those decks (the Sinagtala being another) where I can absolutely appreciate the beautiful bells and whistles, but can’t help wishing that a little more of the budget had gone into the part I’m going to spend the most time with: the deck itself. I’d happily trade some of the accoutrements for a slightly lower price point and beefier cards.

The guidebook is very brief, offering fairly generic meanings for each card. I found myself wanting more: more lore, more world-building, and especially more insight into Thorn’s specific interpretive choices where the imagery diverges more noticeably from the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition.

The artwork itself is very feminine: there are no male or non-binary figures here, and everything from the colour palette to the drawing style leans unapologetically goddessy. Lush bodies, long flowing locks, BOOBS, softness, abundance – it’s a deck steeped in femininity. I’m a big fan of that, but I do think it’s the sort of deck you need to be in the right mood, or headspace, to read with; it has a strong, specific energy that won’t suit every moment or every querent.

Stylistically, the art is simple, bold, and almost blocky, yet at the same time very fluid and organic. It reminds me strongly of Henri Matisse and French Fauvism more broadly: confident shapes, expressive colour, and a sense of movement that keeps the images from ever feeling static or flat.

Another big visual theme running through the deck is a recurring tulip-like flower motif, which weaves its way through many of the cards. Sometimes these appear as full, joyful blooms, brimming with life and abundance; at other times they’re more like weedy, entangling vines, holding figures back or creeping into the edges of the image. I really like this ambiguity – it gives the deck a strongly organic, earthy feel, where growth is never purely benign and nature is always capable of both nourishment and constraint.

Greatest Hits: My Favorite Cards From The Tarot of Oxalia

I love this Fool. The cliff beneath her feet appears to be melting like icecream, dissolving into the same fluid, organic shapes that run throughout the deck; a really nice visual shorthand for the Fool’s liminal, in-between energy. Everything here feels in motion, unstable in a generative rather than threatening way.

Instead of the traditional little white rose, this Fool trails her fingers along one enormous tulip, its scale tipping the image firmly into the symbolic rather than the literal. There’s something very gather rosebuds while ye may about it: a sense of pleasure, curiosity, and sensuous attention to the present moment, rather than blind recklessness. Thorn’s guidebook frames the card as an invitation to “embrace and foster curiosity, and to let adventure find you in order to find yourself,” which feels exactly right for this version of the Fool: open, exploratory, and gently enticed forward into the leap rather than pushed.

Loving the Hierophant‘s big moth antler brows! Very Cara Delevingne ;-). Moths are more often coded onto the High Priestess, but in a deck this feminine (where the original Tarot’s gendered ‘roles’ are largely dissolved), the symbolism works beautifully for the Hierophant too. Like moths, the Hierophant is a liminal figure: a mediator between worlds, standing between gods and humans, heaven and earth, just as moths hover between night and day.

That liminality feels especially apt given the Hierophant’s pre-Christian roots. Long before he became the Pope-shaped authority figure of later decks, the Hierophant was the chief priest of the Eleusinian Mysteries in ancient Greece – the one who revealed sacred knowledge rather than embodying it. In that sense, this card pairs elegantly with the High Priestess: where she represents direct encounter with the divine or unconscious, the Hierophant is about making meaning from that encounter, translating mystery into something we can live with and through. Those sweeping moth-antler brows (as well as just giving good face card!) feel like the perfect emblem for that role: attuned to the flicker of sacred light, but grounded enough to carry it gently back into the world.

Justice here is unmistakably about balance, and I love how the image visually enacts that principle: the composition split into equal and opposing fields, colour mirroring colour, form counterbalancing form. Even the face feels held between two energies: light and dark, warm and cool, without either side dominating.

The Two of Cups and Four of Cups are both very Pippish in this deck, but, despite my love of MORE DETAIL MORE MORE!, I really enjoy the overall emotional tone they create. In the Two, we see liquid flowing from my cup into your cup into mine again, a visualisation of reciprocity that feels genuinely hopeful. In a true partnership, we can give and give and give without depletion, because the other pours back into us in turn. Love and trust are both infinite resources.

The Four of Cups, by contrast, feels drained. Everything has been poured out. There’s an exhaustion to it, the kind that comes from giving all we have to give to the endless, gasping mouths of other people’s cups, like hungry chicks demanding more. What begins as generosity tips into depletion. It’s not rejection so much as fatigue: the apathy that settles in when we realise our emotional reserves aren’t, in fact, infinite if the flow only goes one way.

The Eight of Cups in this deck goes hard. Instead of Colman Smith’s subtle little eclipse tucked into the sky, we get a full-on MASSIVE comet blazing its trail across it – there’s nothing tentative about this departure. The figure isn’t just quietly slipping away from emotional comfort, she’s heading off towards something that looks, quite frankly, terrifying. Jagged hills, cosmic fire, vastness. But terrifying in the best possible way! The card captures that moment when staying feels smaller than leaving, even if the road ahead is wild and unknowable.

The Seven of Swords (Blades) here is particularly striking. The hand reaches forward, but the blades are piercing it as it does so. There’s damage here. Blood. And yet the grasping continues. It still carries the trickster energy of the traditional Seven of Swords: concealment, manoeuvring, strategic self-interest, but Oxalia makes the cost explicit. This feels almost Five of Swordsy in tone: self-harm in the service of ambition, emotional pain brushed aside in pursuit of intellectual victory. What do we wound in ourselves when we act dishonestly? What parts of us bleed when we hide our true motives or manipulate a situation to our advantage? In this deck, “underhand” becomes ‘bleeding hand’. It’s a sharp reminder that deceit rarely cuts only one way.

The Eight of Swords (Blades) is a perfect example of how the deck’s recurring floral motifs can shift from lush to suffocating. Elsewhere, the flowers feel abundant and life-giving; here, they’ve become weeds, binding vines that entangle and restrict. They wrap around the figure’s body, recreating the classic Rider-Waite-Smith sense of imprisonment within one’s own thoughts.

The vines blindfold her, as per tradition, but they also seem to muffle her. This isn’t just mental confinement; it’s silencing. Thorn writes in the guidebook that “you have the tools to release your binds – even if that tool is simply the courage to ask for help.” Yet the image itself suggests something more poignant: a figure so tangled in her own internal narratives that she cannot see, cannot speak, cannot even imagine reaching outward. It captures that uniquely Eight-of-Swords feeling of being trapped not by external bars, but by the stories and the lies we tell ourselves, stories that grow wild if left unpruned.

The Five of Pents (Coins) has a lot going on. As the flowers wilt and bow, they release their treasure back into the earth; petals falling, seeds surrendering. There’s loss here, yes, but it’s framed as part of an inevitable cycle where decay isn’t meaningless but is instead generative. What dies nourishes what comes next. It speaks beautifully to the cards that surround it: the greedy, stagnant energy of the Four and the calibrated fairness of the Six. Pents, as a suit, is deeply concerned with the flow of resources, and it has very little patience for hoarding. This Five suggests that sometimes we must relinquish so others may thrive; that loss, while painful, can rebalance a wider ecosystem. There’s also an echo of the Five of Swords here too I feel, the uncomfortable truth that someone’s gain can coincide with someone else’s surrender.

The guidebook cautions against “harbouring a scarcity mindset,” and that feels exactly right. This isn’t a card of permanent deprivation, but of remembering that wealth, like water, like love, like all living things in this deck, is meant to circulate.

Readers of this blog will know that the Nine of Pents (Coins) is my joint-favourite Tarot card, and this is such a beautiful rendition of it. The bird perches delicately on her curled wrist, not tethered or restrained, but choosing to rest there. And then there’s the snake, twining confidently around her thigh, which, in a deck this conciously feminine, gives me Lilith vibes: a symbol of sexual autonomy, instinct, and the refusal to submit. If the traditional falcon can sometimes suggest discipline and cultivated control, the snake adds something wilder. This Nine of Pents doesn’t just possess wealth; she possesses herself.

This is a VERY pricey deck: £108 for the Amber edition (which is the one I have here) or £123 for the Opal version. It’s very clearly positioned as a collector’s item, and to be fair, the ceramic box really is lovely and genuinely unique. But it’s a lot of money to spend on a deck that, for most people, probably won’t become a daily workhorse (unless you have money to burnnnnn, baby!) I’d say it’s best suited to collectors, or to readers who feel a real, immediate connection to the art and want to invest in that experience.

I do wonder whether Art of Play might consider releasing a pared-back edition in the future – just the deck in a standard tuck box, without all the deluxe extras. At a lower price point, I think this could become a genuinely popular deck. It’s accessible without being simplistic, visually striking without being chaotic, and very easy to read with.

Overall, the Tarot of Oxalia is a lush, self-assured, unapologetically feminine reimagining of the RWS. It balances softness with sharpness and roots its symbolism in cycles of flow: love, loss, abundance, decay. It feels both timeless and distinctly of its moment: mythic, earthy, and defiant.

You can buy it directly from Art of Play here.

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