The Apprentice Tarot!

MagicianMew

Hi everyone! I am about 70% done with my deck, and I was hoping I could get a bit of feedback on the pictures below.

I'm creating a minimalist tarot that can be a tool for new readers. The goal of it is to allow a new tarot reader to immediately be able to do basic readings without having to break the focus on their reading. It's no replacement for a good book or proper study. But it's essentially for those of us who picked up tarot at some point, and then put it down again for years because of the learning curve it has (or worse, never picked it up again!). A big reason that happens is because it's hard to just sit enjoy a reading in those early weeks and months of trying to learn the system. I'm hoping learners will be able to do that with mine, and quickly build up a set of associations.

My deck follows the Rider-Waite tradition pretty closely. I chose this system simply due to the sheer number of decks that are Rider-Waite-based to one extent or another, which will hopefully maximize the usefulness and translatability of my deck to other decks the reader may someday acquire.

I'm almost a bit shy to post my work here with all the incredible and intricate artwork I've seen, since mine is so simple! But that isn't the point of this deck; the point is for the images to be clean and memorable, and to compliment the other information on the card.

The Majors will have both a Roman numeral and numbers, in addition to definitions both upright and reversed.

The Minors have all of those things, plus each suit has a color, elemental, and keyword correspondence in the upper left corner.

Here's the Fool and the 3 of Swords side-by-side so you can sort of see the system. I've done my best to keep the cards from being cluttered!

What do you guys think?

Apprentice Tarot examples

I know this might not be the sort of deck a lot of people on this particular forum are dying for, but I am hoping it will help some people out. :)
 

gregory

There are other decks that try to fill this gap - but this is prettier than most I've seen. Good luck.
 

MagicianMew

There are other decks that try to fill this gap - but this is prettier than most I've seen. Good luck.

Thank you!

Yes, when I looked around, the few I saw were either out of print, didn't have enough information to really do a reading with just the cards (if you're a beginner who doesn't have anything memorized yet), or looked very cluttered and hard to read with. That's a big reason I really scaled down the art and decided to use semi-transparent layers as opposed to just having big blocks of text. I wanted it to not look intimidatingly busy, or just plain ugly.

I'm kind of surprised this doesn't exist already, really!
 

Arthurdubya

For doing a beginner's guide-deck, I'd more closely associate the artwork with the RWS.

Most people use the RWS as their beginner deck, and it's the most easily referenced and accessible. If your art looks so different from it, it seems pretty oddly disconnected that someone would use your deck, get used to it, and then move onto what should be the beginner's RWS and then say "hey, this doesn't look anything like what I was taught."

For instance, maybe you can include the basic core artifacts of the fool: A man happily walking off a cliff, a sunny day, a rucksack. Enough similarities that when someone does move onto the RWS, they can quickly recognize these core elements and say "oh yeah! I remember the rucksack meaning this, and the cliff meaning that".
 

MagicianMew

For doing a beginner's guide-deck, I'd more closely associate the artwork with the RWS.

Most people use the RWS as their beginner deck, and it's the most easily referenced and accessible. If your art looks so different from it, it seems pretty oddly disconnected that someone would use your deck, get used to it, and then move onto what should be the beginner's RWS and then say "hey, this doesn't look anything like what I was taught."

For instance, maybe you can include the basic core artifacts of the fool: A man happily walking off a cliff, a sunny day, a rucksack. Enough similarities that when someone does move onto the RWS, they can quickly recognize these core elements and say "oh yeah! I remember the rucksack meaning this, and the cliff meaning that".

I do know what you mean! The majority of my cards do use RWS imagery, but I've avoided using full scenery like that, and thus changed the cards where this is otherwise unavoidable, for a few reasons, a couple of which I suspect might be... particular? to newer readers, a lot of whom are coming to tarot in non-traditional ways.

One is that I think people are actually diversifying more these days with what deck they start with. The two most avid readers I know personally started with an Amanda Palmer fan deck, and the Wild Unknown, for example. I started with the Wild Unknown myself, as a matter of fact! (Well, the second time, anyway.) Before I started reading, of the half a dozen people I knew with tarot decks that I ever saw, only a couple of them were the RWS. So a lot of new readers actually don't use those associations anymore, and never even see them in their main reading decks.

Two is the clutter issue. Like I said above, every deck I've seen that's tried to get as complicated as including a full figure with a background plus all this information just looks unreadable, to my eye. This deck is really just meant to give you a basic outline to grab onto, not necessarily to get into all the many symbols that are in each card of the original RWS. The basic keywords and "vibe" will still translate to an RWS, I think.

Three is that I'm trying to avoid associations that many newer readers find off-putting or unrelatable, that get in their way of building intuitive associations. At the risk of getting discourse-y, I wanted a deck that someone could easily imagine themselves in, rather than people from feudal society, if that makes sense. I think that is a big reason why new, younger readers often don't start with the RWS these days, even if they are still starting with a deck that uses the underlying RWS system. Amanda Palmer is more relevant to their lives than the Pope, ya know?

I've tried to remove that impediment while still keeping the association itself as similar as possible, if that makes sense?

I do see what you're saying though. And of course, given that this is a deck meant to help people learn, I'll continue to mull that over.
 

Arthurdubya

Ahh okay! Your points make a lot of sense, and I can definitely see how RWS is being less and less common, with other decks being the "gateway drug" instead.

In that case, I suppose your card illustrations should be the "lowest common denominator" of the most popular beginner decks? If we take the Fool card again as an example, what do the Fool cards of the Wild Unknown/Amanda Palmer/Prisma Visions decks have in common? I guess what I'm saying is if I had bought this deck, I'd want the illustrations on each card to be very quickly relateable to another common deck I'd pick up, so the lesson I've learned on your deck quickly carries over. Otherwise it wouldn't be a learning deck so much as simply another deck.
 

MagicianMew

That's definitely one of the challenges! Finding clear imagery that's going to still apply reasonably well no matter which RWS-based deck the reader later picks up. It's hard to figure out exactly what to go with, given how different many of today's most popular decks are (of which the RWS is still one, just not necessarily the run-away obvious choice it used to be).
 

gregory

For doing a beginner's guide-deck, I'd more closely associate the artwork with the RWS.
I actually wouldn't. If you are learning on this deck, this is the deck you are working with. You can add more knowledge and symbolism later.
 

MagicianMew

I think I'm actually done! Well, more or less... I have a card or two I'd like to re-design, but the bulk of the remaining work I had was filling out the information on the cards. I had a crazy couple days of blitzing through it, and I think I'm pretty much there!

Instead of having a LWB or an extra card, I am thinking I will simply put a key pointing out where/what the information is on the card on the back of the tuck box, and the rest of it should really speak for itself? Or would that look weird? Should that be on a separate card?
 

MagicianMew

Can I please get some advice on card stock?

I just got a sample from a place, and the cards REEK of plastic. Like, cheap Chinese toys that have been shut in a bag for too long kind of reeking.

Is that... normal? They're plastic-coated, but most cards are these days, right? Do they always smell this bad when they're recently printed?