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Deck Review: Earthbound Tarot
Created using hand-foraged earth pigments gathered from the New Mexico landscape itself, Celine Gordon’s Earthbound Tarot feels less like a deck merely inspired by nature and more like something physically weathered out of the desert. Full of burning skies, strange celestial signs, fissures opening in the earth, and moments of profound human tenderness, it’s one of the most numinous-yet-materially-grounded Tarot decks I’ve ever encountered.
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Deck Review: Zoomies Tarot
The Zoomies Tarot is whimsical, tender, and often surprisingly profound - very much in keeping with Amber Fossey’s trademark ability to make a “cute” drawing suddenly hit you in the feelings. With her background as an NHS doctor working in psychiatry, Fossey understands the messy grey areas of being human, and that compassion runs through the deck. Her creatures are a little strange, a little scruffy, sometimes falling apart… but always worthy of love.
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Deck Review: Divine Channels
The Divine Channels Tarot is raw, tender, and gloriously intuitive. Created by artist and arts psychotherapist Harley Hefford, the deck blends hand-painted collage, poetic fragments, and emotional honesty to reimagine Tarot for modern life. It feels alive, imperfect, playful, and deeply human - less about rigid systems, more about paying attention, feeling things, and making meaning where you stand.
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Deck Review: The Bon Sequitur Tarot Deck
If the Bon Sequitur Tarot were music, it’d be acid jazz: exuberant, clever, and unexpectedly profound. Beneath the colour and humour lies a deck shaped by loss, resilience, and reclaimed pleasure. It doesn’t pull its punches, but it does offer joy - the kind that knows sorrow intimately and chooses delight anyway.
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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: The Journey Tarot Deck
I’ve been a big fan of The Journey Tarot Deck by Teagan Michael Turner ever since its inception (you can see me raving about it on Kickstarter here and here), and now it finally exists in the physical world (and in my collection :-)) it does not disappoint. I will say off the bat that this is a pretty pricey deck, probably one of the more expensive ‘new’ decks in my collection (we won’t mention the painful amount of money I’ve spent acquiring some rare secondhand OOP gems, looking at you Bonestone!) However, you can tell the money has gone on the excellent production values (the box really is a…
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Deck Review: The Lacuna Tarot
This is a weird little deck (N.B. I got mine through Kickstarter, but you can now buy it from the creator’s Game Crafter page). I definitely would NOT recommend it for novice or inexperienced readers, or folks who prefer a straight-talking, to-the-point, traditional-type deck. Hell, I feel I’m a reasonably experienced Tarot reader by now, and I’m not sure I’d recommend it for me! None of this is to say I dislike this deck: I like it. But it’s a very personal deck; it’s basically like wandering into someone else’s brain while they’re in the process of giving a reading. Everything is veiled and imprecise, like the thoughts that flash…
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Deck Review: The Twice Told Tarot
I fell in love with the Twice Told Tarot when I saw it on Kickstarter last year, and immediately backed it. Created by Travis McHenry, alongside artist David Scaglione, its quirky style really appealed to me. Unfortunately the Kickstarter was cancelled – boo. But then the deck was included as a possible add-on to McHenry’s next project, the True Oracle of Nostradamus – hooray! So I bought the TOoN just to get my hands on the Twice Told Tarot (as I thought that would be the only way to get hold of a copy). Turns out you can currently pick up a copy via the Bloodstone Studios online store –…
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Deck Review: Tarot of the Crystal World
One of the most recent Kickstarter decks to land in my hot little hands is this amazingly weird creation from the genius brain of Brooke Penrose. The creator describes the Crystal World as “the world reborn inside a fun-house mirror”, and that ‘beautiful-freak’ air permeates the whole deck. It really is just brilliantly odd. Part unsettling, part hugely up-lifting. The aesthetic is quite Country & Western (more than anything else, it feels like a deck a fortune teller would be using in one of my sadly missed favourite TV shows, Carnivale), and the colours are very muted. Almost sludgy; bruise coloured; the sky right before a storm – which I’m…
