About the Deck
The Minimalist Tarot, or just The Tarot, is a black and white deck by Dark Synevyr, a Ukrainian tarot publisher. I have deck 21/1000 from the first edition, which I picked up from their eBay for a bargain. I believe it was their first deck, from 2017.
The deck quality is not great, there are ink smears on some of the cards and they’re cut a little roughly, although their subsequent decks have improved a lot so don’t let this put you off them as a publisher.
The card backs feature a reversible geometric line pattern which sets the tone for the deck very well. The tuck box is a bit too big for the cards which I find irritating. There is a little white book with card meanings and spreads, but it relates to tarot in general rather than this deck specifically.
Favourite Cards
My favourite cards from this deck are all majors, I’m not very excited by the minors. The Magician card is illustrated with just the lemniscate that usually sits above his head. This is a good example of the approach taken by this deck, if there’s a small, iconic symbol typically found on a major card, that’s probably what’s used to illustrate that card.
Death depicts a scythe and three large drips, presumably intended to be blood. This is one of the busiest cards in the deck, I expected to see just the scythe on its own. The blood drops fill in what would otherwise be a lot of empty space on the left hand side of the card, but also reminds us that the death card is about pain and the end of life, as well as the cutting away symbolised by the scythe.
The Devil card features a triangle embellished with two horns, which looks like the typical horned or goat headed devil we’re used to seeing in tarot decks. The triangle is used as the symbol for the earth suit in the minors, and its use here links this card to that suit with its earthly temptations.
As all my favourite cards are majors, I’ve included an image of the aces to represent the minors. The rest of the minors simply repeat the the suit symbols the required number of times. I am not really a fan of these minors. Although it’s easy enough to distinguish which is intended to be which when you can see them all together like this, if you get just one or two in a reading it’s not necessarily apparent what they’re supposed to be. The little white book provides no help here either.
Final Thoughts
This deck is definitely not one of my favourites and I don’t reach for it when doing readings, because it’s just not clear enough at a glance which of the suits you’re looking at in the minors. I like the idea of the deck much more than its execution.
