Hi Ziev (and greatdane)!
It's not a bad deck... as far as I can tell it reads pretty well. There are just some things that are not totally right on with this deck... like perhaps there wasn't a broad enough perspective overlooking this thing as a whole by the end of it to make sure it all fit together and was "full" and complete.
For instance, take a look at the Owl card and the Dawn card. I like the imagery on the Owl card and I'm good with it. In the LWB for Owl, the author talks about how nearly all owls are nocturnal and carnivorous... how they have special feathers to hunt at night, and stealth. This all follows my own line of thinking about owls.
However, when you look at the Dawn card, there is a big owl in the picture in front of the sun flying across the landscape. It doesn't make sense to me to have an owl in this imagery, especially since she also paints the darker imagery of owls for the Owl card -- moonlit, dark, stealthy hunters, etc. Why did she put this owl on the Dawn card??? Why is it so prominent and visually competitive with the actual Owl card???
In the Dawn card, she brings up how dawn has its share of the mystical since many magical creatures had to return to true form or go away at dawn, and she gives the werewolf as an example. However, since there IS a Werewolf card in the deck, why not link it to that imagery? Why not show us a man 'back to himself' with tattered clothes, etc. walking back out of the woods/wilderness in the picture towards a town or something?
Then someone also mentioned the lady in Joy doesn't look happy; I agree. She looks sarcastically "Yay" or ritualistic with a very serious look and intent to perhaps create more joy in her life. I don't really know, but it doesn't feel joyful.
Then for "Invisibility" -- that is not exactly the word I would choose for the meaning of 'authenticity' -- it comes across as maybe she meant "Transparency" rather than invisibility. She starts describing a Ghost (of which there is a card in the deck).
Then there is a random Winter card that doesn't make much sense -- an Autumn leaf in a snowy landscape calling for a 'pause'. A random Forgiveness card that shows a flower in someone's hand which talks about 'reducing burden'.. and a kind of random Ancestors card that shows greenery DNA in front of a tree. The Mummy also, is perhaps just a smidge too Egyptian-looking here, rather than Halloween-looking.
Visually speaking, these cards are some of the better ones that I like:
Black Cat
Hearth
Jack-O'-Lantern
The Lamp
NightSong
Scrying
Spider
I actually like the LWB in design. It's short and sweet and not as tiny/thick as most others. It is long and wide to fit snugly inside the box, but flat. I actually don't like LWBs with a lot to read because I'm impatient and I like to get right to the cards as quick as I can (so this was an easy, quick read for me to go through before getting to the cards). Most of the little poems are nice and well-formulated; some aren't and I think could be better/more clever. I don't like that the cards themselves don't fit snugly into the box. It's probably a good thing I don't use this deck to play catch and it stays tucked away in a drawer, otherwise the cards may get banged up from a lot of movement and sliding around inside. The box itself is a simple/typical 2-piece enclosure that is rather durable.
It's NOT a bad deck; it's just not as well formulated and 'put together' as it could have been, I think.
I paid 20-something dollars for it, it seems like it has gone down in price since then. I would say that an adequate selling price for it is likely something more like $12-$15. I'm not aware of any better Halloween oracle deck (that is, not tarot and not Lenormand) so this might be the best option out there for a Halloween oracle card set. It's not a bad buy, and it reads okay... there is just some discrepancy in the design and 'put-togetherness' of the deck as a whole.
