After I bought my two big decks, I saw this listing on eBay. And I figured, what the heck? It’s about three bucks. It’s called either Destiny Tarot or Secret of Destiny Tarot, depending on which part of the box you read.
If the whole deck had been like the minor arcarna, I probably wouldn’t have bothered. They’re essentially pip cards. the pictures don’t mean anything. The whole suit of swords have swords, and the Ace, King, Queen, Knight and Page of Cups have cups, but none of the Wands or Pentacles have symbology. They’re just anime girls, not posed to be anything other than pictures of girls.
Why I bought this deck? The major arcana. The listing didn’t even have pictures of the whole deck, but those major cards I could see and identify? I loved. See The Hanged Man? How she’s hanging, but in a delicate cradle of roots or branches. And the Sun, Moon, and Star? The Star is my card. And I looked at that eBay listing with a picture of that tiny, spiral galaxy in a bottle… I bought the deck on the strength of that card alone.
As you can see, especially from my first post, it’s tiny! The cards are literally half the size of my Celtic Dragon Tarot. They’re significantly smaller than playing cards. The card stock is thin, but it feels nice and the printing is lovely quality. As you can see from the closeups, there’s a super subtle patterning of almost black on black like wallpaper behind all the images. And ignore the listing, this is a FULL 78 CARD DECK. Actually, it’s 80, because there are two cards with information on them of some kind, and a paper information booklet. No idea what they say, because they’re in Chinese, but comparing the page headers with the symbols on the cards made me able to sort out the major arcana, which, unlike the minor, didn’t have any English at all. The 22 cards, as far as I can tell are a standard Rider/Waite/Smith order, and range from fairly conventional depictions (Wheel of Fortune) to unconventional (Strength – Thor’s Hammer, The Chariot – a lightning charged snapping turtle with a clubbed tail).
Was it worth it? Absolutely. It was cheap. It’s portable. It’s got some lovely unconventional cards and it’s going to help me to learn how to identify my minor arcana just based on the suit and number rather than the pictures, and therefore interpret without that prompting. And as a bonus, they got to me about a month sooner than eBay thought they might. 🙂