30 Days of Tarot: Day Sixteen


30 Days of Tarot — Day 16: Do you ever use the Major Arcana without the Minor Arcana or vise verse?

I’m sure there is someone pointing out the heritage of modern (poker) playing cards and saying using playing cards for divination is using a Minors-only deck.

When I purchased the Dollar Tree Tarot, I found the deck had complete Majors but seemingly incomplete Minors. It was later I found that the Minors were configured for a Spanish style of playing card deck, known as the Baraja Española (literally: Spanish playing cards), used for both games and divination. While I did keep the Minors of the Dollar Tree Tarot, I wasn’t comfortable using them in the Baraja Española style, so they remain forgotten in a drawer somewhere.

The Dollar Tree Majors became an oft requested deck in my stable. I use them for broad overviews of a situation where the query asks about the theme or the general flow of a thing. The 22 cards are mostly all action and no subtlety so trying to do any reading beyond 3 cards is unkind to Querent and Reader both.

Because the appearance of the Dollar Tree Majors are off-putting to clients that equate the appearance of the deck to its effectiveness, I will sometimes pull out the Majors of the Universal Waite and use those in face-to-face readings instead. Unfortunately, that seems to throw the deck off until I’ve spent an afternoon shuffling the completed deck to set things right. I may purchase another RWS (or clone) deck solely to cannibalize for the Majors if the demand increases.


The 30 Days of Tarot Challenge was created by Ree of I Am Starstuff and can be found at the post: “30 DAY TAROT CHALLENGE“.

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