When a tarot deck gives you two versions of the same card, which one goes in the deck? Luminous Realm Tarot gives you that choice five times. If you know the Rider–Waite–Smith images well enough to name a card before you’ve really looked at it, those extra illustrations are a good excuse to slow down.
Put the two versions side by side
Pick one of the five alternate Major Arcana cards and find its counterpart. Before you reach for the guidebook, look at where your eye lands in each picture. Does one figure seem poised to act while the other seems to be waiting? What in the drawing gives you that impression?
Then choose which version to shuffle in. I’d start with one version of each card for a regular 78-card reading and keep the extras nearby. If you draw a card that has an alternate, pull the other illustration out afterward and see whether it changes the sentence you’d write about your reading.
How Wishworks uses color
Wishworks recasts the familiar Rider–Waite–Smith figures as women, and much of the movement comes from the hair, fabric and gestures. Look at the suits together and the colors do some of the sorting for you. Wands run warm, with amber and crimson. Cups turn to indigo and violet, while Swords have a sharper emerald palette. That’s something you can notice across a spread before you’ve read a single title.
Leave The Self on the table
The sixth extra is a card called The Self. One way to use it is to set it face up before you shuffle. Draw one card beside it and ask, “What part of this situation is actually mine to decide?” That’s a question you can take back into your day, even if you only have a few minutes to sit with the cards.
The Collector’s Edition comes with 84 cards, an English guidebook and a rigid box that opens like a book. The cards measure 70 × 120 mm and are printed on 330 gsm German black-core stock, with gold foil on the backs and gradient foil along the edges.
See the Luminous Realm Tarot Collector’s Edition at Stars Tarot.
