Lo Scarabeo's Universal Tarot. I thought the idea sounded great - new illustrations based directly on Waite's descriptions of the card images - I'm always a fan of reinterpretations. LS also usually has appealing artwork, so I was expecting to like the images. And then I actually got it.
Just. No. Connection.
The illustrations were...okay, but nothing special. The colors were pretty bland. (Or I may just be remembering them as bland because they had no meaning for me.) They didn't seem to do much actual reinterpretation, most of them were almost exactly laid out like Colman-Smith's illustrations, just with a different art style.
What killed it was the toad-faced Queen of Swords. That's my significator and when it comes up in a reading, I want to think "Here's something important about myself" rather than "Ewwwwww!" I absolutely could not connect to that card, and if my significator doesn't work for me, the deck doesn't. I'm not saying everyone in a Tarot deck should be conventionally attractive - I prefer when they aren't, in fact - but downright ugly for a card that's so important to me? Nope.
