Royal Tarot
So, I bought this deck, like most of my purchases, on a whim, just to see what the artwork was like. It was relatively cheap, and very colourful, maybe even garish, which is what really caught my eye. One aspect of the cheapness of the deck was that it appeared to be a mass-produced deck, with an inferior card stock and package, and another aspect was the fact that the pip cards were not illustrated, which, as I've already mentioned, is always a bummer when investing in a Tarot deck, although I did discover much later that a lot of early Tarot decks, based on the Marseille Tarot tradition, do not have specific illustrations on the pip cards.
Still, the deck is relatively easy to use, however, it does not follow the Rider-Waite-Smith tradition, as the Strength and Justice cards follow the “pre-Rectified” positioning that A. E. Waite utilised. While the lack of illustrations on the pips might allow the novice to get used to the Major Arcana and Court cards more quickly, it does detract from being able to fully use the deck, and will also spur interest in acquiring more detailed decks once this one has been mastered - so pros and cons all around.
Another interesting discovery was the re-use of images, such as the Queens shown below, where they are obviously the same image with slight modifications to distinguish the suit each Queen belongs to. Each of the Court cards suffers the same replication process. While this is most likely done to speed up development of the deck, it speaks more to an interest in generating a quick income than in producing a worthwhile work of art. I encounter this in other decks that I will describe later.
Details of the Deck:
Tradition: Golden Dawn
Major Arcana: 22 cards
Minor Arcana: 56 cards
Court Cards: Page, Knight, Queen, King
Fire Suit: Wands
Air Suit: Swords
Water Suit: Cups
Earth Suit: Pentacles
Designer(s): Unknown
Artist(s): Unknown
Publisher: Kuo Kau Paper Products Company, Taiwan. Date Unknown.
The art style utilised is a simple, almost comic book, design, in water colours, not unattractive, but also not very detailed, which means a lot of the symbology is missing from the deck, so not a very esoteric study for the would-be occultist. The colour palette used is also very bright, with mostly prime colours being used, which does kind of indicate a target audience in the late-childhood range, so maybe a school deck for wizard’s pupils? LOL
The deck is also cheaply produced, using light-weight card (somewhat less than 350 gsm!) and storage is a flimsy tuckbox - but then that matches some of the cheap shizzle that the major producers tend to push out from time to time!
Apparently, the deck is supposed to come with an instruction sheet explaining how to use the cards, but this was missing from the box I bought! Having said that, there’s not much to learning these cards anyway!
The deck was apparently produced in Taiwan by the Kuo Kau Paper Company, but I couldn’t give you a year.
Major Arcana:
0 - The Fool
1 - The Magician
2 - The High Priestess
3 - The Empress
4 - The Emperor
5 - The Hierophant
6 - The Lovers
7 - The Chariot
8 - Justice
9 - The Hermit
10 - Wheel of Fortune
11 - Strength
12 - The Hanged Man
13 - Death
14 - Temperance
15 - The Devil
16 - The Tower
17 - The Star
18 - The Moon
19 - The Sun
20 - Judgement
21 - The World