Deck Review: The Endless Tarot

I was very excited when the Endless Tarot launched on Kickstarter. I’m a big fan of the artist and creator Eric Maille’s previous work (see my review of The Ink Witch Tarot here), so much so that I even bought his Endless Oracle, despite not really being an oracle-kinda gal. So when he announced a full Tarot deck, set within the same ‘Endless’ universe, I was immediately in.

For Maille, Tarot is a tool for connection: a language of shared symbols that helps people access insight, emotional recognition, and a sense that their joys and struggles are not uniquely theirs to carry. He wants you to see yourself in the work, and to feel, however briefly, less alone. Maille writes that, at heart, his illustrations explore the human experience: identity, memory, connection, and the quiet ways we relate to one another and to our environments.

He’s particularly drawn to nostalgia, and to anemoia, “homesickness without a home”, that strange ache for a time or place that never quite existed – a concept that will absolutely resonate if you’re a bookworm or history geek like me who sometimes feels homesick for imaginary worlds. When you read how John Koenig (who coined the term) defines anemoia in his book, The Dictionary of Obscure Sorrows, you can see how well it fits this deck:

“Looking at old photos, it’s hard not to feel a kind of wanderlust. A pang of nostalgia, for an era you never lived through. 

Longing to step through the frame into a world of black and white, if only to sit on the side of the road and watch the locals passing by.”

Anemoia also reminds me of a term I’m familiar with from my work in Criminology around migration and climate change: solastalgia. Solastalgia describes the particular kind of homesickness people feel when their home environment is changing – through displacement, migration, ecological damage, or the slow creep of climate collapse – even though they haven’t physically left it. It’s the ache for a place as it was, or as it should be, while still standing inside it. The older I get, the more I think about that quiet, persistent grief of change: the way memory settles into the body as something almost tactile. That strange, low-level longing for versions of places, of people, of ourselves, that no longer exist. Anyway, I digress. But suffice to say this kind of beautiful grief, a pleasant kind of pain, haunts this deck.

One of the other distinctive features of the Endless Tarot is that it functions as a myriorama: any number of cards can be laid side by side, in any order, and they will always form a continuous panoramic scene. The landscape quite literally rearranges itself around the reading.

This is super cool! I also think it’s really clever, not just beautiful. Because the surrounding imagery shifts depending on what cards appear together, the narrative texture of each card subtly changes from spread to spread – the deck doesn’t just give you symbols, it gives you context. For me, that pulls into focus the storytelling nature of Tarot. The work of a reader isn’t to recite the rote, standalone meaning of each card like they’re reading out a glossary entry, it’s to weave them together into something living: a story, a narrative arc, a plot point that only makes sense in relation to the other cards in the spread.

Visually, the artwork is steeped in mythology, legend, and fairytale archetypes. Because it pulls so much from stories and images we already know, it leans into that sense of immediate familiarity – the feeling that you’ve seen these woods, these figures, this story, somewhere before. The illustrations are created traditionally in ink and watercolour, which adds to that sense of old-timey timelessness (y’all know I love a good oxymoron!)

Also, while I was reading about anemoia someone on Reddit said this song encapsulated the feeling, and I couldn’t agree more! So it’s now my Endless anthem!

The Deck: Look, Feel, and Finish

The Endless Tarot is a full 78-card deck (plus one extra special card, so 79 altogether), structurally rooted in the RWS tradition. It’s kinda a monochrome deck, but not quite. Everything is rendered in a blue-grey nocturnal palette, cool and shadowy, but punctuated with occasional pops of colour: golden yellows and vibrant reds, azure blues. The overall effect is atmospheric and slightly dreamlike – very much twilight fairytale rather than high-noon clarity.

The card backs feature a path (or maybe a river?) leading away from you into the distance. As Benebell Wen writes in her review of the Endless Oracle, “as you flip each card over, you’ll see where that winding path leads… the card backs exemplify what this deck will be to you: a pathfinder.” Maille himself explains that “the element that I felt was important for me… was the pathway. You’ll find that the Endless Tarot is full of paths and roads. After all, Tarot tells us the story of our own personal journeys. What better symbol is there for that than a pathway?”

The cards are standard Tarot size (2.75 x 4.75 inches) and printed on 157gsm art paper with a matte lamination. They’re fairly lightweight, but nicely elastic – not too slippery, not too powdery. In practice, they shuffle beautifully. If you’re a riffler, you’ll be absolutely fine.

The book is thoughtful rather than perfunctory. Each entry covers the traditional meaning, the card’s significance within the panoramic/myriorama context, and the creator’s specific notes on his interpretation. You can also watch Maille’s own walkthrough of the deck here.

Oooh, and the ‘special’ card is ‘The Story’ which is just perfect for this deck. The deck as a whole is a bit like you’re watching a story unfold around you. It’s kinda the opposite of decks that put you in the centre of the action, like the Tarot of Oneness, or the Out Of Hand Tarot. Here, you’re not necessarily the protagonist, instead you’re arriving at a scene mid-motion. The energy is already alive; you’re simply encountering it. So instead of being the star of the show, you’re more like a flâneur. The “passionate spectator” who wanders without urgency, observing the world with a kind of attentive detachment.

As you flick through the deck you’ll notice this is a recurring theme, that many of the cards position us, the reader, not in the centre of the action, but just slightly to one side of it: standing at the mouth of a path, looking across a clearing, watching figures move through a landscape. Instead of being in the scene, you’re witnessing it. The panoramic structure only heightens that effect – the world stretches beyond the single frame, inviting you to stroll along its edges. It feels less like being handed a fixed meaning and more like being asked to wander, to notice, to piece together what unfolds. It makes me think of Eliot’s famous invitation to be a flâneur, to wander through the city at twilight and see where the night takes us:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half-deserted streets,
The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one-night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurants with oyster-shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
To lead you to an overwhelming question …

Oh, do not ask, “What is it?”
Let us go and make our visit.

From ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’ by T.S. Eliot

If you really were out wandering woodland paths at night, eventually you’d stumble across something already in motion, so this central conceit works really well. And as much as I love the immediacy of first-person POV decks, there’s something deeply relaxing about reading Maille’s deck in this gentle, slightly abstracted way. It’s less confrontational, less “you are this”, and more like entering a story in which the main character encounters these scenes as they unfold, and you, the reader, can learn from them at a safe distance.

At times you almost feel like a voyeur, peering through branches at moments not quite meant for you, but it’s a gentle voyeurism; thrilling and immersive, but also reflective. You become a curator of fragments: gestures, glances, half-caught conversations. Not the hero, not even the sidekick, more like the omniscient narrator drifting quietly through the set of some vast immersive theatre production, the actors moving in and out of scenes as if unaware of your presence.

The strongest analogy for me is that fleeting moment when a train passes at night and, for a split second, you see into its lit windows: passengers reading, talking, staring into space, sleeping. Entire lives in miniature, briefly illuminated, unaware that you’ve witnessed them. That strange, almost electric flash of connection.

night train
the briefly lit lives
of others

Mark Gilfillan

Greatest Hits: My Favourite Cards from the Endless Tarot

The Endless Tarot opens very strongly, with this wonderful Fool. Maille writes: “The Fool is the first card in the deck. For many readers, it will often feel as if the Fool appears in readings to represent you. I liked the idea that the cliff on this card could allow us to look out at the journey ahead of us, and that the pathway could take us down that road.” And yet, for me, because it feels like we’re watching the Fool, following along behind him, trailing just a few steps back – it almost feels not like a choice we need to make now, but more like hindsight. It’s still us, but we’re seeing ourselves from the outside, looking in at the choices we once made and the paths we once took.

And then there’s that slightly unsettling dark splot in the starry sky. A dark moon, watching. It’s like the hole in a pinhole camera, or the viewing lens on a Mutoscope, that tiny circle you press your eye against while the world flickers inside the box. Which makes it feel less like a celestial body and more like an aperture, a reminder that this scene is being observed, perhaps replayed. Nostalgia, anemoia, solastalgia – every beginning, already inside a mechanism of memory.

Love the Magician here, in his robes knelt in front of his runestone. Maille writes that he “wanted to show the Magician’s connection to nature and to the arcane,” and so the traditional tools (the wand, the cup, the sword, the pentacle) appear not laid out on a table, but etched as runes into stone. This card feels less like a stage performance and more like you’ve stumbled across something older, some half-forgotten sacred rite. Instead of sleight of hand, we get something rooted, an ancient magic. Delightfully eerie.

The Empress here feels like the magic within nature. Everything is slightly twinkling, the sky dusted with stars, the fruit glowing against the dark foliage. It’s that moment when you wake up and realise the tree outside your window has burst into blossom overnight, as if some invisible hand has passed through while you were sleeping.

I love the Emperor. The ram stands watch at the edge of the path, almost as if guarding the way to the distant city. It feels protective rather than authoritarian; strength as stewardship, not domination.

The Hierophant can be a card that people struggle with, given its classical depiction as a Pope-like authority figure and its obvious links to organised religion. Here we have the cathedral in the background, keeping that spiritual vibe, but the forefront of the card is the figure reading on the steps of the statue, flanked by the great crossed keys. The emphasis isn’t blind obedience; it’s learning, study, initiation. “Know thyself”, but also heed those who have come before you. Tradition as inheritance rather than dogma. Standing on the shoulders of giants, or at least sitting at their feet, lol.

The Lovers captures a beautiful moment, two figures perched together on a tree branch, framed by water and starlight. But there’s a sadness in it, too, isn’t there? We’re witnessing someone else’s love from afar. Again, that ache, that quiet nostalgia for something you once had, or almost had. For me, it brings back that hindsight vibe I spoke about in the Fool, it reminds us of the importance of choosing and committing to things that feel right for us even if other people tell us we’re stupid or wrongheaded or reckless for doing so. Because sometimes the real tragedy isn’t choosing badly, it’s letting something pass you by entirely. And knowing you may not get another chance.

It reminds me of this beautiful poem of longing by Carol Ann Duffy:

Somewhere on the other side of this wide night
and the distance between us, I am thinking of you.
The room is turning slowly away from the moon.

This is pleasurable. Or shall I cross that out and say
it is sad? In one of the tenses I singing
an impossible song of desire that you cannot hear.

La lala la. See? I close my eyes and imagine
the dark hills I would have to cross
to reach you. For I am in love with you and this

is what it is like or what it is like in words.

‘Words, Wide Night’ by Carol Ann Duffy

The Hermit here stands on his bridge, lantern blazing, almost startlingly bright against the night sky. It really emphasises the idea of a light that guides. However solitary he may appear, a lantern is never just for the bearer; it is visible to all around. Light is not private, it guides. Paul Foster Case makes this point beautifully: “although the Hermit seems to be alone, he is really the Way-Shower, lighting the path for [others].” Case goes on to explain that the Hermit stands in darkness, because the true nature of the Divine (or: whatever lies behind our ideas and images of it) is something our minds can’t fully comprehend; “yet he himself carries his own light, and holds it aloft for the benefit of those who toil upward toward him.” 

Taken together, a number of these cards from the Endless Tarot remind me of one of my favourite poems, Hunt The Thimble by Dannie Abse, which circles around the impossibility of fully describing whatever it is that underpins life, death, eternity – that great baffling ineffable something. The poem stages a dialogue between the searcher, representing limited human reason, and the other, anonymous, perhaps omniscient, voice. It feels very similar to Tarot. We get glimpses, snatches of wisdom and guidance, a flash of lantern-light on a dark path. But the whole remains out of our grasp. We are still, in the end, wandering, wondering, making the best sense we can of something we will never fully understand.

Hush now. You cannot describe it.

Is it like heavy rain falling,
and lights going on, across the fields,
in the new housing estate?

Cold, cold. Too domestic, too
temperature, too devoid of history.

Is it like a dark windowed street at night,
the houses uncurtained, the street deserted?

Colder. You are getting colder,
and too romantic, too dream-like.
You cannot describe it.

The brooding darkness then,
that breeds inside a cathedral
of a provincial town in Spain?

In Spain, also, but not Spanish.
In England, if you like, but not English.
It remains, even when obscure, perpetually.
Aged, but ageless, you cannot describe it.
No, you are cold, altogether too cold.

Aha-the blue sky over Ampourias,
the blue sky over Lancashire for that matter…

You cannot describe it.

… obscured by clouds?
I must know what you mean.

Hush hush.

Like those old men in hospital dying,
who, unaware strangers stand around their bed,
stare obscurely, for a long moment,
at one of their own hands raised-
which perhaps is bigger than the moon again-
and, then, drowsy, wandering, shout out, ‘Mama’.

Is it like that? Or hours after that even:
the darkness inside a dead man’s mouth?

No, no, I have told you:
you are cold, and you cannot describe it.

‘Hunt The Thimble’ by Dannie Abse

The Ace of Wands really channels that Magician energy, fire from above striking the earth below in true as above, so below style. The spark made manifest. Maille describes it as “a burst of inspiration, a surge of motivation… a bolt of lightning from a clear sky.” This wand isn’t gently offered by a hand from the heavens, it’s ignited. A sudden flash splitting the darkness, illuminating the path ahead for just long enough to say: this way.

Traditionally, the Three of Wands signifies foresight, expansion, and looking to the future. Maille explains that he left it deliberately ambiguous as to whether the ships in his card are casting off from shore, like in the traditional RWS image, or arriving, asking “does your journey begin when you set off to sea, or when you reach the land?” Whenever I look at this card (or its sister card in the Ink Witch Tarot) I always get that old Christmas carol playing in my head: I saw three ships come sailing in on Christmas day in the morning. It has in it that same sense of strangeness and excitement. Maille notes in the guidebook, “one thing Tarot often teaches us is that life is a cycle of endless journeys. One begins only because the previous one has ended. It seemed especially fitting for an ‘endless’ Tarot deck to emphasise that lesson whenever given the chance”. Every arrival is also a departure, every setting off contains the memory of a shore you’ve already left.

The Nine of Wands is a riff on the same card from the Ink Witch Tarot (where I also love it). The people with flaming torches looking off the bridge into the river (while the cat watches from the shadows) reminds me of my favourite ever music video (Personal Jesus by Depeche Mode: Stargate remix – seriously, watch this music video, I’ve popped it in below, it is GOOD!) It’s so moody and evocative. And just when you thought all was lost…

In the Ink Witch guidebook Maille explains, “even though your task is nearly complete, there are still dangers to confront… This card warns us that while we will make it out of this, we may be tired and even wounded when we do so”. The Endless takes a more positive view, and also reminds us that the “Nine of Wands is the last hurdle in a long journey; the last bridge to cross,” but for me it’s the ‘she’s an actual witch, back from the dead, and now she’s gonna rain down brimstone’ card haha.

On a lighter note, both the Four of Wands and the Three of Cups have that joyous ‘welcome home, friend!’ vibe and I love them both.

In the Endless Tarot, the Six of Wands feels like the aftermath of the celebration we see in the RWS. The bunting still hangs, the wreath is still bright against the dark, but the procession is over and the villagers have gone home. Following on from the Four, it gives very “after the wedding” energy – that quiet, liminal moment when the fairy lights are still glowing but the music has stopped. It’s beautiful. But also…not sad, exactly, but threaded with that familiar ache that runs through this whole deck. Because you’re always slightly late, slightly outside the moment itself, drifting, observing, finding only the residue of victory and joy. But I feel this message is part of the point of the Endless Tarot: celebration is transient, garlands wilt, the path continues beyond the archway (‘Love is not a victory march / It’s a cold and it’s a broken Hallelujah‘). But what remains is the memory, the knowledge that something was built here, witnessed here, blessed here, acknowledged here. A kind of tender afterglow. The warmth left in the air once the fire of the Wands has burned down.

The Seven of Cups appears here as a many-armed genie, offering up his seven wishes – but we all know that genies are somewhat duplicitous! There’s always a catch. Maille notes that “the wishes they grant are sometimes twisted into curses,” and adds that he “wanted the card to be a bit more imposing than many of the other Minor Arcana; a potential distraction or illusion among the rest of the panorama that it appears in.” Something glittering and guileful, interrupting your path. It’s very be careful what you wish for. The Seven of Cups has always been about fantasy, projection, and overwhelm, but here it feels kinda dangerous. Though obviously the danger comes from within. Afterall, the genie doesn’t force anything upon you. He simply offers… and the rest is up to you.

And the Four of Pents is perfect as the dragon jealously guarding his hoard!

The Three of Swords is so sad; a hooded figure knelt by a cairn, mourning three fallen comrades. And in keeping with the tone of this deck, we are not inside the heartbreak, we are witnessing it from a respectful distance, which somehow makes it ache all the more.

The Page as a butterfly perched upon a hilt manages to capture both the sharpness of the Swords and the gentleness of the Pages. It also reminds me a little of the Arthurian legend of the Sword in the Stone. The teenaged Arthur able to draw Excalibur where grown men could not, not through force, but through rightness. Like Arthur, the Page doesn’t yet wield the sword fully – but they are chosen by it.

If you wake at midnight, and hear a horse’s feet,
Don’t go drawing back the blind, or looking in the street,
Them that ask no questions isn’t told a lie.
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by.

Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark –
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Laces for a lady; letters for a spy,
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by

From ‘A Smuggler’s Song’ by Rudyard Kipling

And, for me, this card is the vibe of the Endless Tarot in miniature. You are not in the Chariot here, you are not steering, you are witnessing. It’s not exclusion exactly, not quite loneliness, but there is that soft ache again – that awareness that life moves whether you climb aboard or not.

The Endless Tarot is a beautiful, subtle little deck. Instead of demanding that you centre yourself in every scene, it invites you to wander, to notice, to drift at the edges of story and symbol and let things unfold without forcing them into neat conclusions. There’s a softness and a sadness to it, a hush, a sense that life, like the figures moving through these twilight landscapes, is always quietly in motion whether we are steering it or simply watching from the shadows. An awareness that every journey is both beginning and ending at once. If you’re drawn to decks that feel immersive, atmospheric, and quietly reflective rather than declarative, the Endless Tarot is something special. You can buy it from the artist’s online store for $55 (about £41), it’s also stocked by a few indie suppliers across Europe.

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Also, the whole deck reminded me of Neruda, but I was also aware this review was already crammed fully of poetry! But I’m gonna drop it in here for those of you who enjoy gorging on poems, lol:

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.

Write, for example, ‘The night is starry and the stars are blue and shiver in the distance.’

The night wind revolves in the sky and sings.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
I loved her, and sometimes she loved me too.

Through nights like this one I held her in my arms.
I kissed her again and again under the endless sky.

She loved me, sometimes I loved her too.
How could one not have loved her great still eyes.

Tonight I can write the saddest lines.
To think that I do not have her. To feel that I have lost her.

To hear the immense night, still more immense without her.
And the verse falls to the soul like dew to the pasture.

What does it matter that my love could not keep her.
The night is starry and she is not with me.

From ‘Tonight I Can Write (The Saddest Lines)’ by Pablo Neruda, translated by W.S. Merwin