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

[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.