How to Choose Your First Tarot Deck
Walk into the tarot aisle of any decent bookshop and you'll understand the problem immediately: forty, fifty, sometimes a hundred boxes, each cover more hypnotic than the last. Nobody warns you that the hardest part of tarot isn't learning the cards. It's surviving the gift-shop wall long enough to pick one.
Here's the good news: almost any deck will teach you tarot. The bad news is that the wrong deck for you — one whose art you find cluttered, whose color palette you can't stand staring at, whose symbolism feels foreign — will sit in a drawer after week two. So this guide isn't about finding the "best" deck. It's about finding the one you'll actually pick up on a Tuesday night when you're anxious about something and want an answer.
Start with the family, not the artwork
Almost every tarot deck on the market descends from one of a small number of symbolic systems, and knowing which family you're looking at tells you more than any cover image will.
Rider-Waite-Smith (RWS) and its descendants
Published in 1909 and illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith, this is the deck that set the template for modern tarot — fully illustrated Minor Arcana (every card, even the Three of Swords, shows a little scene rather than just three swords arranged geometrically), a Hanged Man, a Wheel of Fortune, a Star. If you've ever seen a tarot card in a movie, it was almost certainly RWS or an RWS-style deck. The overwhelming majority of decks published since — including most of the "aesthetic" decks you'll see on Instagram — are RWS clones with new art layered over the same scene compositions. This is the family to start with if you plan to use any tarot book, YouTube walkthrough, or app for reference, because nearly all of them assume RWS imagery.
Thoth
Designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris, the Thoth deck is denser, more astrologically and kabbalistically loaded, and genuinely gorgeous — but it renames several cards (Strength becomes Lust, Judgement becomes The Aeon) and expects you to already know a fair amount of esoteric structure. Wonderful second deck. Rough first deck.
Marseille
The oldest surviving tradition, with non-illustrated, pattern-based Minor Arcana (the Four of Cups is genuinely just four cups, arranged just so). Marseille readers lean more on numerology and intuition than on "reading the scene," which some people find far more freeing and others find far harder to start with.
Independent / modern original decks
Decks that keep the 78-card structure and general meanings but build an entirely new visual world — botanical decks, decks illustrated with animals, decks built around a specific culture's folklore. These can be a beautiful second or third deck once you know the bones of tarot well enough to translate; as a first deck, the disconnect between "unique new artwork" and "the meaning I'm trying to learn" can slow you down.
Card stock and size matter more than people admit
A deck can have perfect artwork and still be miserable to use if the cards themselves fight you.
- Size: Standard tarot cards run larger than playing cards, which is lovely for the art and terrible for shuffling if your hands are small. If you've ever fumbled a deck of cards, look for a "slim" or "small" edition before committing to a full-size deck.
- Stock and finish: Thin, glossy card stock feels cheap and is genuinely harder to shuffle (the cards stick together with static). Thicker, matte-finish stock — often described as "linen finish" — shuffles more smoothly and holds up to years of handling.
- Corners: Rounded corners survive daily use far better than square ones, which fray and bend within months of regular shuffling.
The "does it look back at you" test
Beyond the technical specs, there's a genuinely unscientific but reliable test experienced readers swear by: flip through images of the deck (most sellers show all 78 cards, or at least a generous sample) and pay attention to your gut reaction to the court cards and the Tower. The Minor Arcana numbered cards are usually pleasant in every deck. It's the harder cards — Death, the Tower, the Devil, the Ten of Swords — that reveal whether a deck's art style can hold difficult material without either sanitizing it into meaninglessness or tipping into artwork so grim you'll dread pulling it. If those cards still feel resonant and honest to you, you've probably found your deck.
You don't need the guidebook that comes in the box
Most companion booklets that ship with commercial decks are thin — a sentence or two per card. That's fine. The booklet is a courtesy, not the curriculum. Pair any RWS-family deck with a proper reference (a well-regarded tarot book, or a card-meaning reference like the one in this site's own tarot table) and you'll get vastly more out of it than the included pamphlet.
One deck is plenty to start
It's tempting, once you've caught the bug, to want a deck for every mood. Resist that for the first few months. Learning tarot is largely about building a relationship between you, the 78 archetypes, and one consistent set of images. Switching decks constantly early on just means relearning the visual vocabulary every time. Get comfortable with one deck for at least a season before you let yourself collect.