Saturday, August 15, 2015

Ace of Wands: Ascension Tarot Deck

Ace of Wands for the Ascension Tarot Deck created by Ted Puffer
Ace of Wands

This is going to be the starting point for the tarot deck I am creating.  For a long time, and I really mean a LONG time, I've thought how great it would be to have a tarot deck designed that could be easily used for card games.

Everyone who has handled a deck of tarot cards before knows that the suits and numbers of tarot match very well with the standard poker deck.  The obvious thing to do next is to play card games with tarot cards because they are more fun to look at and are more exotic than the usual hearts-and-club suits.  In fact, almost all games can be played using tarot cards instead of Hoyle.

The difficulty arrives when the cards are held in the hand.  Standard playing cards have the number and suit markers in the upper left corner, so that when the cards are fanned out in the hand they are all immediately identified.  This makes matching very easy.  Tarot cards are designed differently.  In addition to being a longer and thinner dimension than standard cards, the suit indicators are normally at the top or bottom.  In short, playing card games with tarot cards isn't as intuitive.

This difference rules out tarot games because of ease of use.  If you can't tell immediately what the cards in your hand are, matching and playing becomes more difficult and less fun.  So towards that end, I'm creating a deck using standard sized cards and normal suit markers.  Yes, the symbol will be different as in the pictured example above, but seeing what suit you are holding is easy.  Fanning the cards in your hand is just as simple as normal and the only difficulty facing me so far is coming up with all the artwork for such a large deck!

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