Mar 02 2009
My Favorite Cards
Hanson-Roberts Tarot Deck @Amazon.com
is easily one of my favorite decks of all time. Like many other professional readers, I was at first put off by the light-bright-cheerful colors and chubby-cheeked, cartoon-like pictures, but they grow on you. The cards are a comfortable size and feel like regular playing cards in your hands, making them very easy to shuffle and work with. The images are based on the Universal Rider-Waite deck, making them familiar to most readers, and the non-threatening images make this a very accessible deck for beginners.
Four of Wands from the Hanson Roberts deck is easily one of my top five favorite cards in any deck. The bright, clear colors and the air of celebration perfectly captures the celebration and homecoming and harvest aspects of the Four of Wands.
The Druidcraft Tarot @Amazon.com
is the most recent deck that I’ve acquired. The oversize cards make this deck difficult to handle and shuffle, but the artwork more than makes up for the defect. The colors are rich and pure, and the images are taken from Celtic pagan tradition. There are some differences between the Druidcraft deck and traditional decks - the Emperor and Empress have been renamed the Lord and Lady, Judgment has been renamed Rebirth, and Temperance, Key 14 in the Tarot, has been reborn as The Fferylit.
Temperance is the name I carry in another world, a name that I was given and found, at the time, rather distasteful. I would far have preferred Temptation or Desire or Indulgence, but Temperance it was, and over the years I’ve found that it suits me in ways I’d not expected. When I first saw The Fferylit, I recognized her immediately as the core and essence of the card Temperance - the alchemical blending of unlike ingredients to create gold, to combination of fire and water to strengthen steel, the essence of drawing out the qualities in each and everything around you that will support each and every other thing and show it at its best.
Morgan Greer Tarot Deck and Book Set (Deck&Book) @Amazon.com
was one of the first Tarot decks in my collection that was not strictly a Universal Rider-Waite deck, though it is informed by the Rider-Waite illustrations by Pamela Colman-Smith. Though the cards are larger than a standard deck of cards, the card stock is very comfortable and flexible, making them very easy to shuffle and manipulate. The drawings are very cartoonish, in clear, bright colors, and the card back is a deep royal blue sprinkled with stars. The Morgan Greer deck is very easy on the eyes, and an excellent beginner deck.
The Star is probably one of the most popular “favorite cards” in the Tarot, with its message of hope and brighter things to come. I have to admit that I have yet to find a Tarot deck that truly represents that message of dawning hope and a new day to come.
