Skullgarden works with a professional playing card printing company for the printing of all of our divination decks.

Playing Cards
• All cards are printed on 300 gsm (grams per square meter) playing card stock paper. All cards have a smooth, non-textured, coated finish to them.
• The cards are not made out of wood!
• All cards are printed with full bleed (the image covers the full card with no border), and they are fully colored.

Tuck Box
• All cards come in a 300 gsm playing card stock tuck box. This box has a UV protective gloss finish.

About Tarot
Tarot is a series of cards typically split into four suits known collectively as the Minor Arcana, with each suit comprised of 10 number cards and 4 court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King), and incorporating a fifth grouping of 22 cards collectively known as the Major Arcana. Tarot is the ancestor of modern playing cards, and in fact originally began as, and can still be used as, a type of playing card deck.

In the world of the occult, divination, and pop culture, one of the most recognized tarot decks is the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot (1909). This deck gets its name from the publisher Rider Company, the instructor of the deck's particular iconography A. E. Waite, and the artist of the deck Pamela Colman Smith.

About the Wooden Tarot
The Wooden Tarot began as a project focused only on the 22 Major Arcana cards, as well as representations of the Ace cards for each suit. This project included a small booklet that told the story of the Fool journeying through the Major Arcana and encountering the other cards. This story was inspired by an idea suggesting that the Major Arcana reflected the Hero's Journey.

After the success of the original project, there was a lot of encouragement (and some flat out demands) to have a Minor Arcana be made to complete the deck. This was finished the following year.

Why is the deck called the Wooden Tarot? Are the cards made of wood?
The deck got its name from the fact that all of the original artwork was painted on wood panels. This name was initially only intended to be a placeholder, but by the end of the original project the name felt right.

The Suits of the Minor Arcana in the Wooden Tarot have been changed from the Minor Arcana that appears in the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot. These changes are meant to incorporate the elemental aspects of each suit

• Stones: Replaces Wands and represents Fire
• Bones: Replaces Pentacles and represents Earth
• Blooms: Replaces Cups and represents Water
• Plumes: Replaces Swords and represents Air

Additionally, because the Ace cards tend to be interpreted as representing all aspects of their given suit, I renamed them God cards.

The Happy Squirrel is a pop culture reference card based on an episode of the Simpsons in which Lisa gets a Tarot reading. When the cartomancer gasps at the card, Lisa asks if it's bad, to which the cartomancer says "possibly".

Because of this interaction, some people associate this card with Ratatoskr, a squirrel in Norse mythology that travelled freely along Yggdrasil delivering messages between the worlds. And, more importantly, Ratatoskr was often stirring up drama when delivering those messages.

As I mentioned, there is no companion booklet or guide for this deck, and I recommend that folks use another guide published for the Rider-Waite-Smith deck instead.

Over the years, there have been a few fan-made guides that have appeared on different parts of the internet. Some are no longer active, but one guide that is still active can be found on Oxbow.

There's also a long running fan-made Facebook group dedicated to learning the deck. You can find that group here.

The Wooden Tarot is shipped in a corrugated cardboard box. If additional divination decks or other items are purchased, they will be shipped together.

For more information about Shipping, especially what to expect and if we ship to your country, please review our Shipping FAQ page!