Choosing a deck, and the three families you'll meet

There are thousands of tarot decks in print, and a shop shelf of them can make the choice look endless. It is much smaller than it looks. Nearly every deck you'll see belongs to one of three families, and the family matters far more than the artwork. It decides how much the pictures do for you while you learn.

The Waite–Smith family: a scene on every card

The deck in the pictures of this course was designed by A. E. Waite and painted by Pamela Colman Smith, and first published in London in 1909. It is often named after its publisher, Rider. We call it Smith-Waite, putting the artist first, because the pictures are the reason it matters.

What Smith did was new for the Minor Arcana. Almost every deck before hers showed the numbered cards the way playing cards do: the Seven of Cups was simply seven cups arranged in a pattern. Smith gave each of the forty numbered cards a scene, with people doing something, and the right number of suit symbols worked into it. She was not the very first. A fifteenth-century Italian deck, the Sola Busca, had illustrated numbered cards too, and several of her designs follow it closely. But hers was the deck that reached everyone.

That one change explains much of the deck's popularity. The writer Rachel Pollack points out that Waite himself barely seems to have noticed it, yet it is the drawings that made the deck. Most modern decks copy this approach, which is why the Waite–Smith pattern is the one most beginners' books teach.

For a beginner this is a real advantage. When you draw the Five of Cups you see a cloaked figure looking down at three spilt cups, with two still standing behind them. You do not need to remember what a Five of Cups means. The picture tells you most of it.

The Marseille family: the older way

Before Waite and Smith, the standard deck in France, and then across much of Europe, was the pattern now called the Tarot de Marseille. Its earliest surviving printed versions are from the sixteenth century, and one later edition, made by Nicolas Conver in 1760, became the model for many of the decks still printed today.

The Marseille Majors have pictures, and they are bold, simple woodcut designs in a few strong colours. The numbered cards do not. A Marseille Seven of Cups is seven cups and some decorative flowers. You read it from the suit, the number and the arrangement, not from a scene.

Marseille readers do not see that as a lack. It is a different discipline, closer to reading a language than looking at a picture, and the lesson later in this course on Marseille looks at how it is done. But it is harder to start with, because there is nothing on a numbered card to remind you what it means.

A small thing you'll notice if you ever compare them: the names are French, and two of the Majors swap places. As lesson IV said, Strength and Justice are VIII and XI in the Waite–Smith deck and the other way round in Marseille.

The Thoth family: the magical deck

The third family comes from Aleister Crowley's Thoth deck, painted by Lady Frieda Harris to his design during the Second World War. It was not published in full colour until 1969, more than twenty years after Crowley died.

Thoth cards are dense with symbols from astrology, the Kabbalah and alchemy, and they say so on their faces. Several cards are renamed: Strength becomes Lust and Temperance becomes Art, and the court cards use different titles. The numbered cards are abstract, like Marseille, but each carries a one-word title printed on it, so the Two of Cups is labelled "Love".

It is a beautiful, demanding deck. Many readers come to it after learning on Waite–Smith, because the system behind it makes most sense once you already know the cards.

Which deck to start with

Our honest advice is a Waite–Smith deck, or a modern deck built on its pattern. Not because it is the "real" tarot (there is no single real tarot), but because the scenes on the numbered cards make the next lessons far easier, and because most of what you'll read assumes it.

Beyond that, choose a deck you like looking at. You will spend a lot of time with these pictures. Size matters more than people expect, too: tarot cards are larger than playing cards, and if your hands are small a big deck is awkward to shuffle.

You may have heard that you should never buy your own first deck and should wait to be given one. That is a superstition, not a rule, and plenty of good readers bought their own. Buy the one you want.

Same card, different deck

Many modern decks keep the Waite–Smith structure but redraw everything. Here is The Star in the two decks we use for pictures in this course.

On the left is Smith's Star: a naked woman kneeling at a pool under a large star and seven smaller ones, pouring water onto the land and into the pool. On the right is the same card in Soul Partials, a contemporary deck that gives every card a new name. Here The Star is called The Guiding Light, and the four suits are Sparks, Flows, Voices and Pillars, which stand for Wands, Cups, Swords and Pentacles.

The pictures differ, but underneath it is the same card. It holds the same place in the deck and carries much the same meaning. A deck built on the Waite–Smith pattern can rename and redraw everything and still be read with what you learn in this course.

One more term you'll meet when choosing a deck for a reading: a deck family. We use it for decks that are versions of one deck, such as the three editions of the 1909 Smith-Waite we offer, which differ in their scans and colouring but not in their cards. A reading can draw each card from a different deck in a family, and because they are the same seventy-eight cards, you will never be dealt the same card twice from two editions.

What to take from this

• There are three main families. Waite–Smith gives every card a scene. Marseille is older and leaves the numbered cards without one. Thoth is a magical system written onto the cards.
• Start with a Waite–Smith deck, or one built on its pattern. The scenes on the numbered cards do much of the remembering for you.
• The card underneath stays the same. A modern deck can rename and redraw a card and keep its place and meaning.

Next, the Fool's Journey: the twenty-two Majors read as a single story.