How to Choose A Tarot Deck – A Guide for Writers

So, your curiosity is sparked, and you’d like to try adding tarot to your writing and creative practice.

What next?

If you’re looking to add a specific writing deck to your collection, look for two things:

1. A complementary theme

2. Art you like

The first deck I got specially for my writing was the Thoth deck. It’s deeply symbolic heavy with esoteric symbols, and his has a rather dark and serious vibe to it which comes, for me, from its creator, the infamous occultist, Alistaire Crowley. At the time I wrote darker fantasy, and it was a great match.

Now I write lighter fantasy blending romantic and some mystery elements over a variety of fantasy subgenres including contemporary fantasy, high cozy fantasy, and paranormal romance. There’s a lot of witches, a lot of goddess power. I rarely use the Thoth deck any more.

For most of my contemporary work, I use the Witches Tarot by Ellen Dugan and the Gilded Tarot by Ciro Marchetti, both modern decks, with vibrant colors and rich contemporary art styles. The Witches tarot suits particularly well for obvious reasons.

When my imagination ventures into the more mystical or mythical stories, I dabble with the Llewelyn deck, ancient welsh myths from Anna-Marie Ferguson, the same artist who created my beloved Legend deck. For medieval flavored inspiration, I use The Golden Tarot: The Visconti-Sforza Deck by Mary Packard.

At the time of writing, I’m dabbling with a Davide Corsi’s Ghost Tarot because there’s a ghost draft in the works.

I was recently gifted the Motherpeace deck by Karen Vogel and Vicki Noble. This unusual and highly stylized deck (the cards are round!) is drenched in feminine energy and goddess archetypes. I use it for finding deeper layers in my complicated women characters, and have also found it a beautiful addition to my personal readings (as a complicated woman character myself!)

These decks are thematic matches to the vibes I’m intentionally creating in my work.

You aren’t limited to tarot for this, remember. You might also consider oracle cards.

I really want to get a dragon deck, and there are many around, but I haven’t found one with art I really love yet. So for my dragon stories, I use an oracle deck – the Dragonfae Oracle by Lucy Cavendish.

If you’re writing fantasy, you might stick to a deck with these themes. There’s dark fantasy, plenty of Goth vibes, vampire tarot, and the list goes on.

For the lighter vibes of fantasy, you might look to one of the many fairy decks, or fairy tales. 

Do you write contemporary stories set in the real world?

You can get all kinds of decks to suit just about any theme of life. Knitting decks, parenting decks, housework, vehicles, alcohol, ferrets, cats, computer programing… And it goes on.

You might consider directly matching different elements from your stories to multiple decks, especially if you’re writing in a hybrid niche genre like vampire knitting, or paranormal pets for example. 

If you use multiple decks for the same stories, stick with using one deck per spread.

Like so much of tarot reading, the deck you choose for your writing all comes down to what feels good and right to you. 

Shop around for a deck that matches your art taste and your story themes.

Then spend some time examining the cards, thinking about your stories, but not asking anything of the deck yet, just enjoying the art and exploring the symbolisms at play.

This process in itself can be an excellent brainstorming session, so get ready to make notes.

When you’re ready to set the cards to work, start using some specific tarot spreads for writers and let the real creative explorations begin.