Your Favourite Historical Decks?

Chrystella said:

The purpose of this thread is purely selfish. I want to discover more awesomeness. Enabling is encouraged.

What are your favourite historical decks? And why? By historical, I mean pre-1900, but I'm flexible.

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Of the pre-1900 decks, for me it would be the Nicholas Conver in the lead, although the Pierre Madenié is fast gaining on him down the stretch. Of course, I do not like facsimiles, so my favorite Conver restoration would be the ISIS, and my favorite quasi-Madenié would be the TdM Edition Millennnium. The ISIS rules!

The Soprafino/Classical/Ancient Italian are sexy as hell, but they leave me cold when I try to use them.

The ancient Italian is my absolute favourite historical deck. To me it is perfect.

I also love the Vacchetta. I have the LoS Tarot of the Master version which I really love, but I hate the card backs, they have always rather spoiled the deck for me.

I would also like to mention the tarot Pellerin, a nice Tarot de Besançon (mid XIX century) with many interesting oddities :

https://www.sendspace.com/file/ake616

and the Edoardo Dotti, a beautifully colored milanese tarot (same period) :

https://www.sendspace.com/file/86v53w

That Dotti is lovely. I don't have a regional deck so that's something to keep in mind for the future.

Can't decide between:
1. Vieville
2. Tarot de Paris
3. Sola Busca

1JJ hands down. I also like my Grimaud Marseille. Sola Busca is nice, but doesn't do all that much for me, actually.

Believe it or not, I do NOT have one of the Visconti-Sforza decks. I need to fix that.

This thread is so enabling. ::sigh::

I'd really like to have a Vieville Tarot. There's something very bold about it.

The Vieville is on my list. It looks very quirky. I like the Tarot de Paris too and I love Sola Busca. I have the Mayer and Lo Scarabeo versions, but I don't read with either of them. Mostly I just look at them, admire its beauty, study it, and compare it to other decks. I'm not sure that I really consider Sola Busca a tarot in the traditional sense. I have Sola Busca Revisited so I'll give that one a whirl at some point.

Darkmage said:

1JJ hands down.

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I'd love to hear more about why you love this one. It's one of those decks I don't quite get.

I'm not sure *why* I love it. I just do. I like the steel engraving style of the 19th century, and I also love how it cleaves pretty closely to the Marseille style but it's a lot more refined than the crude woodcuts in the Marseille. The colour scheme is nice, too. And Jupiter looking terminally bored always cracks me up. Being King of the Gods isn't all it's cracked up to be from the looks of that card.

The cardstock is also nice and sturdy. I think mine is the 1974 edition. I know it's USG but I don't know what year. It has the two part box and the French card titles, though.

My Sola Busca is the 1996 LoS edition. I like it, but it just doesn't speak to me that much.

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Oh but really, just <i>all</i> of them.<br/>

I'm with Le Fanu on this one. Basically anything before 1950 thrills me, but Oswald Wirth's 1926/7 & 1889 decks are primo, as are all the Etteillas, especially antique printings. When it comes to those gorgeous Soprafino decks my fav is the Eduado Dotti version. Then there are the type 1 Marseille decks of course...