Deck Review: Chaos Blossom Tarot

I’m working my way slowly&steadily through the backlog of decks I bought in 2025, and here we have the Chaos Blossom Tarot. A bit of a strange one, this. It’s a deck I found myself umm-ing and ahh-ing over when I first saw it on Kickstarter. On the one hand, it can feel a little… basic at times, like it’s drawing from a visual language we’ve seen in squillions of other Tarot decks. There’s a familiarity to it that doesn’t always push beyond the expected, which is fine but not that exciting when you already have a lot (ahem) of Tarot decks like MagpieBrain here. And yet. There are moments where it absolutely lands. Some of the cards (JUDGEMENT! OMG! OBSESSED!) genuinely stopped me in my tracks.

What initially made me indecisive: firstly, there’s something a bit unsettling running through the artwork. The faces, especially, feel just slightly off – a touch lopsided, a little misshapen, not in an overt or grotesque way, but enough to look a bit weird at times. It creates this low-level disquiet, something you can’t quite put your finger on. However, I do realise some folks *live* for weird wonky-faced art, so this will be a big plus for some readers :-).

Secondly, there’s some pretty rando design choices. If we take the Swords suit, for example, nearly every card features a human figure as its principal protagonist. They feature in fairly grounded scenes, all broadly in line with what you’d expect from a RWS-inspired deck. So far, so normal. Except, for reasons known only to the deck’s creators, the Two and the Seven suddenly veer off into full-on surrealism, giving us a giant anthropomorphised hamster and a pair of crows. In hats. With sword belts. And, I just… why? Why are these fully sentient, impeccably accessorised megafauna suddenly living among us? Why here? Why in Swords, of all places? I do not understand.

To be clear, it’s not that I don’t like animal decks, including Giant Mystical Animal Decks, or that I think Tarot can’t accommodate that kind of symbolism – it absolutely can. But because the rest of the suit plays things so straight, these two cards don’t feel like a deliberate stylistic choice so much as a moment where the deck suddenly slips sideways into another reality. Which, I suppose, might be the “chaos” in Chaos Blossom… but it does make you do a bit of a double take.

Finally, I couldn’t find much about the creators, which always gives me pause. There’s something a bit odd about not being able to trace the hand behind the art, especially in a medium like Tarot, where the relationship between artist and archetype feels so central. The only information I could find about the creators comes from the brand itself, X-Cat, which, from what I can gather, is a small creative studio. The name “X-Cat” (short for 超能猫猫 – something along the lines of “super-powered cats” 🦸‍♀️😸) apparently comes from the two founders’ shared love of cats, and their aspiration to channel that feline mix of independence, curiosity, and confidence into their work. The idea, I think, is that they – and by extension their decks – are a kind of kittish creative force: playful but also a bit mysterious.

According to X-Cat, the Chaos Blossom Tarot draws on Greek mythology, with additional influences from classical European literature and darker, more folkloric fairytale traditions. It positions itself as a kind of gateway to “mystical self-discovery,” which – fine, that’s fairly standard Tarot deck fare at this point.

I’m aware I’m veering a bit into Negative Nellie territory here, but this is a deck I genuinely like – just perhaps not always for the reasons it thinks I should! What I will say is that it’s a really solid option for beginners. It’s easy to read with, fairly straightforward in its symbolism, and sticks quite closely to the RWS structure, which makes it very accessible.

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

In terms of handling, it’s a nice deck to use. The cards have a matte finish that’s smooth and glide-y without feeling flimsy, and they shuffle easily straight out of the box – always a win! Size-wise, they’re a fairly standard 70 x 120 mm, printed on 330gsm black core card stock, so they’ve got a decent weight to them without being clunky. The whole thing comes packaged in one of those book-style rigid boxes with a magnetic closure – compact and robust.

The edges are holographic gold gilding, which does look pretty and ties in well with the overall aesthetic… but you know me, I’m always a bit wary of gilded edges. They will get bashed, they will chip, and I will notice.

And I just LOVE the card back design, so warm and bright.

You also get a small bilingual guidebook (English and Chinese). It’s fairly minimal, but actually quite thoughtful where it counts. The Major Arcana entries go beyond just rattling off standard meanings and instead link back to the mythological or symbolic ideas behind each card, which I always appreciate – although there are a few pretty major incongruences between certain Tarot archetypes and the myths used to support them… more on that later. The Minors, by contrast, are much more stripped back, just keywords really, but given the space constraints of a bilingual booklet, that feels understandable rather than lazy.

Artistically, each card began as a hand-drawn illustration (you can see some sketches on the Kickstarter page), with the Nameless Artist stating they drew on European illustration styles, classical oil painting techniques, and even Italian manuscript traditions. The aim was to create something that feels both ancient and modern, a kind of a “bridge between old-world artistry and contemporary divination.”

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Chaos Blossom Tarot

The High Priestess in the Chaos Blossom Tarot is shown scrying in a bowl of water, and I absolutely love the giant eye staring back at her from beneath the surface. There’s a real sense of mystery to the card, as well as that slightly creepy air you sometimes get around depictions of “true seers.” Not evil or anything, but uncanny – someone who sees a little too much.

I like scrying in imagery of the High Priestess, because, whether through mirrors, water, crystal balls, smoke, obsidian, or flame, the process is fundamentally about entering a receptive state. Not forcing meaning, but allowing images, impressions, symbols, and emotions to rise slowly to the surface. That’s very High Priestess energy. She’s not the Magician, bending reality through force of will; she’s not even the Hermit, actively searching for truth. Instead, she waits and listens. She receives.

There’s also something deeply Priestess-y about reflective surfaces specifically. Mirrors and dark water symbolise the unconscious in so many mythic and occult traditions. They distort, reveal, double, invert. They show truths sideways. That idea that insight comes obliquely rather than directly is absolutely the High Priestess’ domain. Plus, what I find especially interesting about her is that she’s not necessarily about literal psychic powers (though people often frame her that way). To me, she’s more about permeability, the thinning of the boundary between worlds. The recognition that intuition, memory, fear, archetype, dream, and symbolism are constantly speaking beneath ordinary consciousness, if we’re willing to sit quietly enough to listen.

The Chariot shows a figure (allegedly Hercules according to the guidebook?! But why is Hercules dressed like a soldier from a Jane Austen adaption?) steering a hot air balloon, surrounded by a flock of geese. Despite the Hercules weirdness, I really like the illustration, and I also find geese rich symbols for a card so bound up with movement and determination. The Chariot is frequently linked to travel, transition, and purposeful forward motion, and geese are famous for their vast seasonal migrations – those dramatic V formations overhead, honking like tiny airborne heralds of change.

Geese are also deeply tied to ideas of fertility, renewal, and cyclical return. In ancient Egyptian mythology, the world itself was said to begin when a Nile goose laid the cosmic egg that hatched the sun. And when geese return in spring, bringing longer days and warmer nights, they become symbols of endurance rewarded – proof that difficult seasons do eventually end if we just steer true and hold our course [NB the backwards writing isn’t a print error on the card, it’s WordPress being weird when I righted the image orientation!]

Strength is such a beautiful card (I’m a sucker for anything that links the foam of waves to galloping white unicorns – my childhood self found it impossible to stare out at the sea without imagining exactly this!) I love the mermaiden steadying and quietening the rampant mer-unicorn through her love and warm, gentle presence. The whole image feels soft and dreamlike, but there’s real power underneath that softness. And that, to me, is what the Strength card has always understood. It models a form of power that’s relational rather than dominating – persuasion through presence, connection, patience, and care. It’s a kind of strength traditionally coded as feminine, and often undervalued within patriarchal systems that reward control and aggression over empathy and emotional intelligence. BOO! But the Chaos Blossom’s mermaiden knows that sometimes true strength is all about remaining soft in a world that keeps demanding hardness.

In the Wheel of Fortune we see a masked noblewoman, exuding Louis Quinze-type decadence, spinning the wheel with an almost mischievous delight. One finger rests against her lips in a conspiratorial little shhhh. It’s like she’s saying we know the secrets of fate, don’t we, you and I? And the secret is you have to laugh at it. Because the feeling this card gives me isn’t dread so much as amused inevitability. A sort of well… here we go again energy. The sense that fate is chaotic, absurd, ridiculous, unpredictable – and that the only sane response is to laugh along with it.

Justice in the Chaos Blossom Tarot leans into fairly familiar Tarot imagery, drawing heavily on the symbolism of Ma’at – the ancient Egyptian principle of truth, balance, and cosmic order. Honestly, so many Tarot decks make this connection at this point that it’s practically become part of the card’s modern visual canon! In Egyptian mythology, when you die your heart is weighed against the feather of Ma’at: only a heart in balance, unburdened by unrepentant wrongdoing, could pass on to the afterlife. A heart that proved heavier than the feather met a far grimmer fate, devoured by Ammit, the monstrous embodiment of divine consequence. Justice, in this mythic register, is not about human law or moral tidiness, but about alignment: the quiet, terrifying question of whether a life has been lived in harmony with the order of the world. What I particularly love about this version, though, is that big, tufted strawberry heart balanced on the scales. It’s delightfully weird.

Then a really beautiful, moody Moon with its watery lunar eye reflecting back from the fish-filled waters.

Right, I picked this Hanged Man card because I really liked the visuals, and the symbolism that I perceived was going on. But the guidebook makes it all a bit weird. Here’s what it has to say:

“The golden-haired Oedipus hangs inverted from a great tree, day after day in deep meditation. The lower half of his body has slowly merged with the sturdy trunk, yet he remains undisturbed, his expression serene. A white lamb kneels beside him, gently licking his chin, but he does not respond. His righthand hangs naturally, fingertips straining toward a red key upon the ground. Oedipus once sought to escape his fate. Time and again he chased and resisted, only to sink deeper into despair—until he finally released his grasp on everything. In letting go, he broke the chains of his own soul. No longer fearing stagnation or constraint, he has found wisdom and hope.”

And… what? Like, this has nothing to do with the Oedipus myth, and y’all know that one of the things I love about the Tarot is its relationship with archetype – with the way our minds frame feelings and life events through consistent metaphor: stories, art, music etc. So when something goes so wildly off piste it jarrs me! The guidebook is essentially treating Oedipus like some kind of enlightened mystic voluntarily embracing suspension, contemplation, surrender, and spiritual awakening… when the actual Oedipus myth is one of the bleakest “you cannot escape fate” tragedies in Greek literature. Like, yes, there is technically a visual/art historical precedent for Oedipus being hung or suspended by the ankles as an infant, but he was literally a newborn baby when that happened. According to the story, after an oracle warned King Laius of Thebes that any son he fathered would one day kill him, the terrified king ordered the baby Oedipus put to death. His ankles were pierced and bound together (the injury that would later give him his name, roughly translating to “swollen foot”) and he was taken to the mountains to be abandoned. In certain tellings, the servant tasked with the deed couldn’t quite bring himself to kill the child outright, and instead left baby Oedi hanging upside down from a tree by his bound ankles. A shepherd eventually discovered and rescued him, a moment that appears in several later artistic depictions of the myth. But the guidebook then seems to completely abandon the emotional and symbolic meaning of that particular hanging story and replace it with generic Hanged Man keywords about serenity, acceptance, and transcendence. Which… Oedipus is not. At all.

If anything, Oedipus is the opposite of the traditional Hanged Man lesson for most of his narrative. He actively resists fate, tries to outrun prophecy, keeps pursuing truth even when warned not to, and ultimately discovers that all his attempts at control only fulfilled the destiny he feared. The tragedy is built around catastrophic knowledge and the impossibility of escaping ordained structures. It’s Wheel of Fortune stuff; in fact I discussed the Oedipus connection in my WoF deep dive!

I guess weirdly, the very last stage of Oedipus’s journey does approach something vaguely Hanged Man-ish. After the horror of finding out he shagged his mum and murdered his dad, after stabbing his own eyes out with his dead mother-wife’s brooch pin, after the loss of identity and status, he becomes a wandering exile stripped of illusion and ego. There’s a kind of tragic surrender there, a relinquishing of control. But that’s very different from the guidebook’s oddly peaceful “he found wisdom and hope ☺☺☺” framing.

It feels like what happened here is the artist/designer found the visual motif of suspended Oedipus compelling for Hanged Man imagery, and they then retrofitted standard Tarot meanings onto it without fully grappling with the myth’s actual emotional logic. Which taps into my broader feelings about this deck: genuinely interesting ideas, occasionally undermined by slightly random or superficial execution.

That said, despite all my bafflement about the Oedipus framing, I actually found the card itself incredibly compelling, which is why I chose it here. What I love most is the sense of complete surrender into the tree. Waite famously describes the Hanged Man’s gallows as “the tree of sacrifice… living wood, with leaves thereon,” and this card leans hard into that idea. ‘Oedipus’ is not merely hanging from the tree, he is gradually becoming part of it. The slowness and serenity it implies, to have allowed yourself to become one with the tree, to melt into it over time, to not fight the infinitesimally slow advance of the bark over your skin. It’s a vision of surrender so complete it almost ceases to feel human.

And then you have the lamb – at first glance it seems gentle, almost comforting, but the longer I looked at it the stranger it became. The way it nuzzles against his throat almost as if it’s feeding – vampiric, intimate, sacrificial. Which feels very fitting for the Hanged Man, a card so bound up with offering, martyrdom, suspension, and spiritual surrender. The lamb evokes innocence and sacrifice simultaneously: the lamb and the blood. The willing offering-up of the self.

And that the Hanged Man figure doesn’t even reach for the key to wisdom anymore, although it’s right there – as if he is no longer seeking wisdom as something external to seize or unlock. Instead, the card gives the impression that he is waiting for the key to open within himself. He has, in many ways, abandoned the material world entirely and turned wholly inward.

So, the tl:dr version is: love the imagery, not wild about the guidebook interpretation, lol!

At this stage I’ve pretty much abandoned the guidebook entirely and gone full rogue interpreter on the deck, haha. I really love this Tower card. The giant bloodshot eye glaring down into the hollow centre of the citadel gives the whole thing an atmosphere of surveillance, corruption, and looming catastrophe. Meanwhile, the strange plague-doctor-like beaked figure seems caught between cowering and sneaking, half-concealed behind the pillar as though it knows something terrible is coming… or perhaps helped cause it.

There are strong echoes of the Eye of Sauron here, I feel, that terrible sense of being watched by something vast, malignant, and impossible to reason with, a presence that reduces individuality into fear and obedience.

And then there’s Beaky McBeakface himself, who immediately made me think of the The Dark Crystal‘s Skeksis, who absolutely terrified me as a child, so much so I could barely sleep for weeks after watching that film. There’s something uniquely horrifying about the Skeksis: the combination of decay, greed, grotesque excess, and that constant sense of physical and moral corruption slowly eating away at the world around them as well as their own almost rotting looking bodies. In this fab review of the 2019 reboot, Aja Romano argues that the Skesis’ horror works precisely because they aren’t grand, unknowable cosmic villains. They’re petty, gluttonous, vain, constantly squabbling. The Skeksis ruin their world not through immense supernatural power, but through selfishness, corruption, manipulation, and endless consumption. They gorge themselves while the world around them slowly collapses. Which I think feels very Tower – if we look carefully, this card isn’t just catastrophe arriving from nowhere, even if it can feel very sudden. Often, it’s the moment hidden rot finally becomes impossible to ignore, the collapse of systems already poisoned from within. The revelation that the people in charge were never wise guardians at all, merely frightened, hungry creatures protecting their own power.

These connections really worked for me. The Tower archetype has always spoken to collective collapse as much as personal upheaval: empires rotting from within, truths breaking through propaganda, structures crumbling under the weight of their own corruption (oh hello there current world order!)

The Cups Minor cards are all fairly straightforward in their symbolism, but I really enjoy the artist’s character-driven take on several of them. There’s the slightly spoiled, petulant princess energy of the Four; the eerie, mystical stepping-stones-into-the-unknown atmosphere of the Eight; and the wonderfully indulgent “more wine please, waiter” decadence of the Nine. They don’t radically reinvent the meanings, but they do inject enough personality and mood to keep the suit feeling engaging.

The Knight of Cups letting his horse drink directly from his cup beautifully captures the best aspects of this card’s energy (The Black Tarot has similar take which I also love). There’s something wonderfully artless and romantic about it, this sense of emotional generosity so instinctive that it overrides convention entirely. He shares his cup freely, without worrying too much about status, decorum, or whether he’s “supposed” to. And that openness is both his blessing and his curse, he pours freely from the heart, sometimes without stopping to consider whether there’ll be anything left for himself.

The Four of Wands takes the traditional wedding canopy imagery and transforms it into something smaller and more intimate. Rather than a grand public celebration, we get what looks almost like a couple sheltering beneath a makeshift picnic blanket, hiding from the summer sun together in their own little world. It makes the card feel less about spectacle or formal ceremony and more about the quiet joy of building something shared and safe with another person. A private celebration rather than a public performance. The feeling of creating a small sanctuary together, however humble, and delighting in it.

Traditionally, the Four of Pentacles is framed quite negatively: hoarding, possessiveness, fear of loss, clutching too tightly to material security. The classic RWS image practically screams scarcity mindset, with its figure sitting rigidly atop their coins as though one unexpected bill away from complete psychological collapse. But this version doesn’t really feel anxious to me, and I like that. This figure looks calm, grounded, almost pastoral. Even the cow changes the atmosphere – cattle have long-standing symbolic links to nourishment, labour, sustenance, and steady wealth; dependable survival rather than flashy abundance. So instead of: ‘mine, don’t touch’, this card feels like ‘this is enough’.

And that does connect to the structure of the fours more broadly. Fours are stabilising numbers in Tarot. They create foundations, boundaries, shelter, containment, pause after expansion. In Pentacles, that stability can curdle into stagnation or fearful control because the suit is so tied to flow: investment, labour, growth, exchange – you gotta speculate to accumulate. So the Four often becomes the point where security starts solidifying into painful rigidity. But there’s another side to stability too: careful stewardship. Realising when you have enough and not constantly grasping for more. So I love that the Chaos Blossom’s Four of Pents almost feels anti-capitalist in its own strange little way 😂.

I like the tuber-like shapes of the pents in the Seven, as the figure digs them up to test if they’re ripe yet. And the King of Pentacles leans fully into the sensual pleasure of earned abundance. Rather than simply sitting straight-backed and formal upon a golden throne, he allows himself to trail his fingers through another kind of gold, the wheat of his lush, fertile fields, visibly delighting in everything he has cultivated through years of labour, stewardship, and care. The Pents royal family have never been afraid to get their hands dirty IMO! There’s pride in his act ofc, but also gratitude – an appreciation not just of wealth itself, but of the long process that created it.

But the connection feels a little… adjacent rather than fully integrated. The Fates tend to appear more naturally in Wheel of Fortune cards, where the emphasis falls on destiny, cycles, and the uncontrollable turning of fortune. Judgement, by contrast, has always felt less deterministic to me, it’s not “this is your fate,” but rather “wake up.” A card of resurrection, reckoning, reawakening, and answering a deeper calling – even of renaissance. And what gets me with the guidebook’s description is that this is a Chinese deck, and there’s already an incredibly rich thread-based mythology sitting right there within East Asian folklore that IMO fits Judgement far more organically than the slightly lukewarm Moirai framing.

In Chinese mythology, the “Red Thread of Fate” describes an invisible scarlet cord connecting those destined to encounter one another, regardless of time, place, or circumstance. Japanese versions of the legend similarly describe a red thread tied to the little fingers of those whose lives are bound together by destiny. The thread may stretch or tangle, but it can never truly break. And crucially, these connections are not limited to romance, but extend outward toward all the people who shape the story of our lives: teachers, friends, mentors, rivals, companions: “we are all part of a scarlet tapestry” Jack McClean explains.

And that feels waaay more Judgementy to me, because Judgement is ultimately a card about recognising the deeper shape of your life, about hearing your true calling in the wind and consciously answering it. About awakening into the person you were always meant to become, about finally hearing the trumpets of the gods and rising to meet them. The coexistence of destiny and agency, the sense that meaning was always there beneath the surface, waiting for you to claim it. My ‘Judgement representative song lyrics’ that have lived in my head rent free since I started learning Tarot are from k.d. lang’s ‘Constant Craving‘: “Maybe a great magnet pulls / All souls towards truth.”

Ironically, I think the artwork itself communicates this interpretation far more successfully than the guidebook does. The card already looks like souls being drawn toward awakening through invisible connections, and the giant cloud figures holding the threads feels less like the cold machinery of fate and more like a divine summons into purpose, transformation, and self-recognition.

I realise I’ve spent a fair amount of this review going “but… why though?” which perhaps makes it sound like I disliked the deck more than I actually did. Because I didn’t dislike it. There are cards in here I genuinely adore, and moments of symbolism that feel rich and memorable. Buttttttt… I also can’t quite shake the feeling that the deck exists in a slightly uncanny valley.

Some of that comes from the artwork itself – the subtly “off” faces, the inconsistent symbolism, the occasional feeling that cards are pulling from very different visual or conceptual worlds. And some of it comes from the broader presentation: the lack of a clearly identifiable artist, the slightly vague creator information, and certain guidebook interpretations, all contribute to a faintly dislocated atmosphere that, at times, feels oddly AI-ish. Not necessarily literally AI-generated, to be clear, but evocative of the same sensation: beautiful surfaces, intriguing fragments, occasional brilliance… but not always the deeper symbolic coherence that makes a Tarot deck truly sing.

But for others that strange, dreamlike inconsistency might add to the deck’s charm. “Chaos Blossom” is, after all, a pretty accurate description of the reading experience! You can buy the deck from the creators’ shop here for £52.

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