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Deck Review: The Magic Pantry Tarot
Beneath its playful surface, The Magic Pantry Tarot is smartly symbolic. Eggs, broth, mushrooms, and coffee map onto Tarot archetypes in ways that feel intuitive once you see them, though sometimes delightfully abstruse at first glance. Best suited to readers already familiar with Tarot, it rewards experience with wit, insight, and a lot of satisfying “aha” moments.
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Deck Review: Far-Out Tarot
This is a deck you don’t just read, you visit it. The Far-Out Tarot creates a sense of permission: to pause, to retreat, to be thoughtful rather than decisive. It won me over completely, offering Tarot as care, imagination, and psychological shelter - a place I genuinely want to return to again and again.
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Deck Review: The Ex-Lovers Tarot
This deck understands love as something that doesn’t simply switch off. The Ex-Lovers Tarot reframes heartbreak as part of the Fool’s journey, honouring connection, loss, and personal growth with warmth and clarity. Whimsical without being shallow, it invites compassion: for past selves, former lovers, and the imperfect ways we keep loving.
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Deck Review: Nigredo Tarot Deck
This is one of the most personal and emotionally resonant decks I own. The Nigredo Tarot doesn’t soften the work of shadow integration, but it approaches it with empathy and intelligence. Best suited to self-reflection rather than performance reading, it’s a deck that asks a lot - and gives just as much back.
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Deck Review: Figuratively Speaking Tarot
I’ve had the Figuratively Speaking Tarot by B. Miller for a while now, but Bee launching a Kickstarter campaign for her new deck, the Figuratively Speaking Mermaid Tarot, has prompted me to finally get round to doing a deep dive and a review! First things first: as is well documented on this blog, I have zero self-control when my weird little ADHD magpie brain decides it likes a deck and FIXATES <wallet releases muffled screams of pain in background>, so I bought LOADS of the booster packs for the Figuratively Speaking Tarot [FST], and then sorted out my ‘favourite 78’. So please don’t assume that every card I’ve selected below…
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Deck Review: The Alleyway Tarot
I own Publishing Goblin‘s first Kickstarter Tarot deck, The Alleyman’s Tarot, and, while it’s a bit unwieldy to work with, I still love it for reflection purposes, and for thinking about the ways different artists interpret the traditional card meanings. The guidebook is also a cracking read, as opposed to the normal fairly generic guff. So I didn’t hesitate in backing this new deck, The Alleyway Tarot, that follows the same principles as its predecessor. Each card in the deck is designed by a different artist, and the concept is that this is a ‘found’ deck, cobbled together with individual cards that ‘The Alleyman’ has magpied into his life over…
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Deck Review: Austin Osman Spare Tarot
One for the collectors and the Tarot-history enthusiasts is the Austin Osman Spare Tarot, which you can currently order via the publisher’s (Strange Attractor) website for £35. Being a skinflint Trying to control my Tarot addiction in a sensible manner, I only forked out for the deck when I backed the project on Kickstarter, so I didn’t get the accompanying book, Lost Envoy: The Tarot Deck of Austin Osman Spare, or the AOS Tarot Sourcebooks (How to Tell Fortunes by The Cards*, by Rapoza (1906), a key source for Spare’s Minor Arcana attributions, and The Tarot, by S. L. MacGregor Mathers (1888) from which he assigned his Major Arcana meanings). This…
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Deck Review: Grounded Wisdom Tarot
Another Kickstarter-backed deck that recently arrived with me is the gorgeously detailed Grounded Wisdom Tarot. The deck was designed and drawn by Gabby Morris, who takes a “polymathic approach*” to their projects, blending art and design with nature and ecological futures. (*My little ADHD magpie brain perked up at this inspired phrasing! My new goal is owning my own scattergun approach to knowledge by calling it ‘polymathic’! 💪) Morris’ website is full of really cool stuff from her Master’s project and subsequent work – it’s kinda chemistry-meets-cooking-meets-conservation-meets art & design-meets-am dram, and is well worth checking out. The deck not only has lots of crossovers with my own myriad interests…
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Deck Review: Fat Folks Tarot
I feel like I’ve been waiting aaaaaaages for this deck (its Kickstarter campaign finished on 01/02/23), so I’m very excited to finally have it in my chubby little paws. It is, of course, the second (and final) edition of the Fat Folks Tarot. The creating team note that, while Tarot is “meant to depict the entire realm of human experience”, many people have been left out of the imagery in traditional Tarot decks, including fat people. Historically, as one of the co-creators, Cassandra Snow points out, when we see fat people in Tarot they are associated either with “gluttony or motherhood”. And that’s it. That’s all we get. So here…
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Deck Review: Gourmet Tarot
One of the most recent additions to my collection is this little cutie, the Gourmet Tarot by Scribalist (with illustrations by in-house artist Gumeaw). I got it via backing the Kickstarter campaign, but you can pick it up for £55 via Etsy [edited to update dead links]. The deck aims to “blend… the timeless wisdom of Tarot readings with the universal language of food“, and I was immediately struck by the really thoughtful matching of traditional Tarot symbolism with foods from around the world. There’s definitely a South East Asian vibe to a lot of the foodstuffs (the creators are based in Bangkok), but with classical dishes from Italy to…
