The Dungeons & Dragons Tarot Deck

I do not know anything about tarot cards or tarot reading. I don't have any other tarot decks or plan to use these for readings. I bought them because they're D&D branded, because they looked nice, and possibly as a game aid. Having written all that, let me give you my thoughts on this deck.

Starting with the box, the outside is nice looking and seems sturdy enough to last for years. The inside is fitted to the booklet and has a pocket for the deck with a nice ribbon to help extract the cards. The packaging is quite nice.

The cards themselves are a little on the thin side, but not bad. I'd have liked them to be a little heavier stock, but they do have a good 'feel' to them. I really like the art on the back of the cards and the art on the face is very nice. They’re giving us a 78 card deck and each card is fully illustrated. The style is different from typical D&D art, but is very nice and feels right. Because this is a D&D product, each card has an adventuring prompt in the accompanying guidebook, which is cool and useful. 

But because this is a D&D themed product, they’ve made some changes that, maybe, didn’t need to be made. They’ve replaced the standard suits (Wands, Swords, Cups, and Pentacles) with suits based on the games ability scores, but not all of them, just Strength, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Maybe it’s just me, but I’m not clear on the correspondence between the two suits, or if that is a thing. Based on contextual clues in the guidebook it may be Wands/Strength, Swords/Intelligence, Cups/Wisdom, and Pentacles/Charisma, but I may just be making that up. I’m not sure. It is the order in which they mention them, but that might mean nothing.

That would probably bother someone familiar with tarot more than it bothers me, but I would have stuck with the traditional suits. The other issue is that of illustrating the cards and these suits. How does one clearly differentiate the difference between the three mental attributes in an illustration? You put a sword or wand on a card, I get it. I found the only way for me to figure out the suit of these cards was to check the guidebook. Which isn’t great because there is no clear, unifying theme for each suit. Warrior swords, wizard staves, and clerical rods, are scattered all over the place and mean nothing other than that these are things in D&D. It feels haphazard. Maybe labeling the cards would have helped, but probably would have distracted from the art.

I’ll deal with it, but it’s not ideal. Overall, I think this is a very nice accessory for my game. I really like the adventure prompts.I’ll never use it for a tarot reading, but I may use it as an adventure generator, or maybe as some sort of variant Deck of Many Things. With its odd suits and ambiguous art, this deck is designed to be more of a D&D collectible than a proper tarot deck. And I have heard at least one card reader say as much on a podcast. But it is a quality product that obviously had some effort put into it. I like it. I’m just unsure how much use I’ll get out of it.