Tarot Tuesday: Eugene Vinitski's Kabbalistic Tarot 5781

[lebateleur]

This one arrived yesterday, and is my final Kickstarter deck of the year. I was pleased and surprised by how quickly the entire process was from pledging to receipt, especially considering that the artist is based in Switzerland.

This is another concept deck; each card has a basic image (for the Major Arcana) or pip (for the Minor Arcana) in the Marseilles style, along with its elemental, astrological, and Kabbalistic correspondences; they're basically illustrated flashcards. (And yes, Tarot cards are themselves flashcards, but this particular deck strips away pretty much everything but the concepts.) Overall, it works pretty well. This would have been a super useful deck to have when I was trying to puzzle my way through the Golden Dawn and Harris Thoth decks.



The box is well designed and includes a properly bound, illustrated book alongside the cards, which is a rarity for most Kickstarter decks.




The images are definitely inspired by Marseilles-style decks; the Major Arcana give the card titles in both English and French.




Here's the Wheel of Fortune. The gilding on the Tree of Life diagrams is really nicely done; as usual, my photos aren't doing it justice.




And here's The Moon. Unlike a lot of Kickstarter decks, I don't think this one was printed in China. The quality's pretty nice: the stock is midway between matte and glossy, and has a little texture to it. It's by no means flimsy, but has enough give to make shuffling easy.




The Minor Arcana are color coded by element.




The suit emblems on the Minor Aces are a bit more detailed than those on the rest of the pips.




I really like the marbling in the colored background on the pips. The print quality is just really good on these cards.




Compare the coin here to the one on the Ace.




And here are some court cards.




One thing that's neat about this deck is that despite the overwhelming Marseilles influence, Vinitski uses Smith-Waite deck positioning for the court figures in a fun visual reference to that design tradition.



これで以上です。

Comments

[ambyr]

I am amused by the comments about Chinese printing because my partner recently got an extremely pornographic tarot deck (I mean, it's literally photos of porn stars) that was, yep, printed in China. The quality of the printing is fine (in fact, the card stock is almost too heavy for me to want to use), but the Chinese censors apparently object to penises, so all penises were very hastily and belatedly covered with extremely obvious photo manip objects. It's not a deck I would ever have been able to read with even without those last-minute edits, but with them I cannot look at it without cackling hysterically.

[lebateleur]

Yup, decks from China come on very distinctive card stock. It's great for resisting wear-and-tear, but along with the dimensions of a standard deck, makes them almost impossible for me to shuffle.

But more importantly, that is a marvelous story. Was it also an indie deck? (Because if so, I'd have loved to have been a fly on the wall when the artist had explain that one to his backers...)

[ambyr]

Oh, yes, it's a Kickstarter deck, and many of the backers are not amused. They want their penises!!! (And that doesn't get into the politics of which of the trans porn stars included at which stage of physical transition did or did not upset the morals of the Chinese censors.)

[lebateleur]

Yeah, that is not pleasing on multiple levels. And as someone who devoted a fair amount of effort back in the day to finding BL volumes featuring actual penises and not cones of light, I can sympathize.

In the meantime, though, perhaps Cyberpunk 2077 might be of interest to them? 😉