Statistics.
What: The Jonathan Dee Tarot Pack
Who: Jonathan Dee and Shirley Barker.
Price: Retails between $0.01 and $20.
Size: Deck is a standard size, cards are thin and matte finished.
Where: I purchased my deck at Barnes and Noble as a kit, here is an Amazon.com link and one for the Book.
Rating: ●●○○○
Upsides: The deck is a standard size, the cards are fairly sturdy resilient. They are packaged with a thin, hardcovered, book with various meanings and spreads. The layout is clean and simple, easily readable.
Downsides: Tuck boxes are not meant for the long-haul and this one practically disintegrated. The thinness of the cards means they bend very easily - though I think a well-worn deck is a sign of practice. The book is fairly pointless, and at one time it was wrapped in black paper and used as a shelf (on top of candle holders) on my altar. ;)
Style: This is a standard "tarot deck" in the Waite/Smith Style. The entire style of the deck appears to be a pallette knife-work painting. The back image is er... swords, or reeds or stalks on a block-printed-looking background. Faces are the same pallette knife styled art on a flat background of a bright color, depending upon the suit. The cards are titled outside of the image and there is a generous border all the way around.
The suits are Cups (White/Yellow/Blue), Swords (Red/Yellow/Purple), Pentacles (Orange/Green/Yellow) and Wands (White/Red/Orange). Minors are pipped on the number cards, with additions ranging from tiny portraits to pictoral scenes alongside them.
Tricks and Treats: It's a pretty standard deck.
Verdict: This deck has never read for me worth a damn, so I can't really deliver much of a verdict there. It's very, very, very inexpensive. The art style also annoys me.
Rating: ●●○○○
Loving these reviews Scylla. I don't really work with Tarot that much, but I do have a few decks, one I procured when I was 15 and first comming to Witchcraft through Wicca, a French deck that I adore, and a more recently purchased 'Halloween'deck that I bought solely for the artwork.
ReplyDeleteI can see why the artwork in this deck annoys you - Love heart on Chalice? NO!
I often wonder about all the different types of decks out there. Sometimes I'll pick one up in a 'New Agey' store and it will be like, 'The Angel Faery Sunshine Deck' and I'll think to myself, why? Why was this necessary? What has this brought to reading cards that wasn't there before?
Xx
I think the silly decks have their place as well. If you're VERY into Hello Kitty, you might pick up something in a HK deck that you wouldn't see in the Thoth deck.
DeleteThere's... er... SEVERAL more reviews coming up. It's at least some content in the otherwise dead space.
I've been trying to get blogger to post these itself on a schedule, but it won't (or I don't understand what I need to do to it to make it cooperate).