Thursday, 23 May 2013

Making a tarot deck

A rather curious way of being able to produce a tarot deck without buying one is as follows.
 I quote the following instructions from the RationalWiki.

You will need two decks of 54 standard playing cards with identical backs and different faces; in the US, a Bicycle Standard or Jumbo Index deck and a Bicycle Lo-Vision four-color deck will do. (This example is based on that combination.)[4]
Take the cards from the standard deck minus one joker (the other joker will be the Fool). Mix in the A->10 cards from the clubs (blue) and diamonds (green) from the Lo-Vision deck along with the Ace of Spades (black) and the jacks from all four suits; the clubs will be trumps 1-10, the diamonds (because a diamond's worth more than a stick) will be trumps 11-20, the big-index jacks will act as cavaliers,[5] and the ace of spades will be trump 21. You are now ready to play any tarot game using a standard 78-card deck, and you won't have to frustrate yourself with the artsy-fartsy markings on a cartomancy deck or pay obscene shipping charges to import a playing deck from France or Italy
------------------
4- Total cost approx. US$ 7, depending on supplier
5- You could also use three decks with three different index sizes, making the cavalier-jacks the middle-size index cards, but it's probably a waste of money to tear apart a third deck just for the jacks

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Tarot#cite_ref-1

To sum it up, Here is a little table which breaks down the deck's structure
 ( the Letters in colour represent the cards of the Lo- vision deck, the "C" stands for a knight )


Tarot
trump
Fool
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
Replacement
Joker
A
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10

Tarot
trump
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
Replacement
A
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
A
....
Plain Suits (Tarot)
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
J
C
Q
K
Replacement
A
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
J
Normal
J
(Big in-dex)
Q
K





However, In this blogger's opinion, isn't part of the joy in playing at tarot the beauty of the cards?

[Edited 23rd Dec. 2018, to cure formatting error]

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