Dollar Tree tarot

[melannen]

Thanks to takemyrevolution's head's-up, I asked Santa to stick a Dollar Tree tarot deck in my Christmas stocking, and, wow.

It's not actually a bad deck - it's printed in three colors (red, yellow, black) on fairly flimsy, non-glossy cardstock, but I actually like the design that went into it, and I've been wanting a basic tarot deck that has non-pictorial pip cards.

But!

It is the weirdest deck of cards, tarot or otherwise, I have ever encountered. It has the full Major Arcana (unnumbered), and then it has suit cards numbered 1-7 and Page, knight, queen, king, and ace. If you add in the 8 'divination' cards (which go with the "mystic mat" as guides to doing a Celtic cross layout variant) it does in fact add up to the 'complete set with 78 cards' that the box promises, but, uh, not the cards I expected, and the explanatory pamphlet is... not very explanatory.

Has anyone seen a deck with those cards in it before, tarot or otherwise? I haven't. I checked Hoyle's and apparently there are some old rummy-type games (like Conquian) that use a deck of A-7 + J Q K, but even they don't have ones and aces. Is there somewhere in the world where this is the normal set of cards?

Comments

[ariestess]

I bought a couple of the decks to use for crafts or gifts. I haven't opened them yet.

[melannen]

Ooh, they'd probably work great for crafts! The designs are striking but close enough to Rider-Waite to be easily recognizable, and I think the stock they're printed on would be easy to do things with too. Now I'm tempted to go see if I can buy a few more decks for that myself.

I wouldn't give them as gifts, though, except to people I know will appreciate them for their inexplicability.

[ariestess]

I've a few friends who would accept them as gifts because of their collections of tarot cards. I may go back and get a couple more for that purpose now.

[melannen]

Yeah, for people who collect strange tarots it will be excellent! (I debated doing the same for some of my friends, except I decided that more crappy decks they will never use is not something to encourage them on. :P Especially since the art in this one isn't actually bad enough to be mockable, which is the main thing they look for.)

[ariestess]

*nods* Yeah, I can understand that. Most likely the decks I have will end up as some sort of craft projects :: bookmarks, decorating boxes/bags/cards, that sort of thing.

[all_adream]

Maybe facade.com or one of those would know...? I almost think I've heard of 'gypsy divination' cards (2,836,475,960+ versions pretty much), and that may be on the list of variants. Let us know when you find out, please--it's interesting!

[all_adream]

I might also research the printer/publisher to see if they have a site that tells you, although they may just be a mistaken deck printer overseas somewhere that isn't too into tarot--also Llewellyn has a site that may have talk about decks--could be worth a try.

[melannen]

The only credit on the box is Greenbriar International, which specializes in supplying cheap crap of all kinds to dollar stores and similar places. I suspect they function mostly as an importer & packager (and possibly are not entirely on the level...)

The booklet has a byline for D. Jon Michael Hilford and Jon Stetson, who by a quick google search, appear to be a pair of traveling psychics/stage magicians/new age gurus who do whatever sort of paranormal performances seem most likely to make them a living in a given place. Who know if they had anything to do with the deck itself, though. Searching those two names + tarot got me a few tarot forum threads discussing the Dollar Tree deck, but I haven't found one yet where anybody has figured out why it has the cards it does. I am still looking!

[all_adream]

Here's something I had no idea existed:

http://www.tarotpedia.com/wiki/Tarot_Decks:_Non-Standard

It might be of interest to all of us here, so I'm going to look at the site.

[melannen]

The Wikipedia "Playing Card" article is actually pretty good on different kinds of decks that are commonly used for game-playing. It turns out that the 1-7 + KQJ conquian deck is still the most common Spanish and Italian game-playing deck, with tarot-style suits, also used in much of Mexico and Latin America. But I still haven't found any decks that have both ones and aces, or that combine the Italian style deck with KQKJ face cards.

My current hypothesis is that somebody told a Spanish-speaking artist/manufacturer that they wanted a deck with the 22 trump cards and then "all the normal cards, plus knights" for the pip cards, so the supplier made a Spanish-style deck, and then at the last minute somebody realized there wouldn't be 78 cards, so the ones and divination cards were knocked up quickly.

[destinyislands]

I haven't encountered that before. And that kind of turns me off from wanting to buy it. That structure would really bother me. I'm headtilting at the need for ones and aces. And no nines and tens? Though I suppose reading with Majors and aces only, I could deal with that.

What exactly are these "divination cards" about? Do they actually serve any real purpose?

[melannen]

They seem to serve the primary purpose of turning it into a "complete 78-card deck". The deck comes with instructions and a paper "mystical spread mat" which gives the card positions and meanings for divination with a celtic-cross type layout that only has eight positions. The eight divination cards are just numbered 1-8 and labeled to match the eight positions on the mat (on a plain white background with black text in Arial) - they really do seem like an afterthought, like the deck-makers were told at the last minute that they needed 78 cards, and the booklet doesn't reference them. I suppose it could be interesting to play with them to come up with semi-randomized layouts or something, though.

(The trumps actually have divinatory meanings printed on them, but they are specialized to work with the layout on the 'mat' and mostly don't match any of the common meanings that I know offhand.)

[destinyislands]

Huh. That's weird. I kind of want to see it just for the oddness of that. But I don't really see the reasoning behind restructuring the deck that much. It just seems like...why not just leave the cards how they typically are? Hmm. I suppose it could be interesting if the book went into more detail with possibilities, but ah well.