As often happens, when I went to do an actual reading with the current deck, it got a bit more personal than merits posting here. I could either struggle to figure out how to word it in a way that's usual while still maintaining necessary privacies (and in the process, lose the purpose of the reading for myself), or keep it in my private journal and move on.
Moving on...
My thoughts on the Wonderland Tarot... it's readable. But not easily - I think this will remain more than anything a novelty deck for me. I enjoyed finding the literary references to the images on the cards, but it's not something I'd want to do often, nor was I able to get much from the deck on its own without looking to the stories themselves.
So... like Lewis Carroll himself... this can be a lot of fun with some surprises to offer, but sometimes it sounds nonsensical.
The next deck I'll be working with is its polar opposite - the Bright Ideas Deck by Mark McElroy. This deck turns tarot into a very modern, white collar worker's brainstorming tool. I actually love this deck (though I'd never want it to be my sole tarot tool), while feeling grumpy about the imagery which looks like power point clip art to me (appropriate but I had PowerPoint overdose a few years back I've not fully recovered from).
If I were to pick one deck to share with a cynic or someone nervous about Tarot who wasn't the sort of person to find the unicorn-and-sunshine 'lite' decks interesting, this might be the one. Its like a blast of astringent on the sometimes cloying nature much of what the current crop of Tarot decks has to offer.
In the Bright Ideas Deck, colored backgrounds distinguish the suits -
Purple for the Trumps (dealing with forces and influences)
Blue for Cups (feelings and emotions)
Green for Pentacles (practicality and physicality)
Yellow for Swords (decisions and logic)
Red for Wands (intention and action)
The minor suits are named for their color.
The other major variation in this deck is the way the Court cards are handled. They focus on the roles each court position plays - Pages are "Learning", Knights are "Doing", Queens are "Feeling" and Kings are "Controlling".
The result tends to make the cards usable as parts of speech with majors pointing to the surrounding influence, the minors to response and the courts to modes of action. And because of the modern working nature of the cards themselves, they lead to very grounded practical observations on 'real life'.
Mind you, they also lend themselves - too easily - to the sort of buzzword business retreat workshop type platitudes some of us have been forced into... but its worth digging beneath those similarities to look for meaning. If you're looking for solutions to dealing with your coworkers, it's just a lot easier to make sense of the answers with a deck that focuses on those types of relationships than it is to translate what the High Priestess is about when she's wearing a power suit.
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