Customer Reviews

Ancient Minchiate Etruria

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

The Minchiate deck is a variant of the better known tarot deck, and differs in the major arcana - there are 41 cards, rather than 22, so there are 97 cards in the deck.

The extra major arcana cards include the 12 signs of the zodiac, the 4 elements, and the 4 extra virtues. Due to religious / political reasons, the pope, popess, emperor, and empress are replaced by the grand duke, eastern & western emperors.

I find the 18th century art very beutiful, and regretfuly cant give a URL to a site that carries a sample of scanned cards.

The deck comes with a small divination booklet, and nothing much beyond that. The only book I'm aware of that goes in details to the Minchiate deck is the one that comes with Brian Williams' Minchiate deck (which I highly recommend).

I read mostly with the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, with this being my next most used deck. I highly recommend it to tarot readers and collectors.

I love these cards. The images are lovely and 97 cards means greater variation in their readings than with a more traditional tarot deck. Because the cards are fairly small, the larger deck is easy enough to handle, as well.

If you do the Renaissance Faire or SCA, this deck is just out of period for Florence Italy, but looks period anyway. The Visconti deck is period, but the 4 cards that were recreated from scratch are not. The "Devil" card in the Ancient Minchiate deck is actually closer to what a "Devil" card would have looked like in period.

The biggest problem with this deck is that it does not have a good instruction book to go with it. It has a small booklet in several languages, but the meanings given for the cards are very limited. If you want to try out these cards or others to see how they look and how well they work in a tarot reading.[...]
Here you can try several decks and see interpretations for reversals as well as for upright cards. I know of no other website or book were you can view the meanings for reversals in the Minchiate decks.

By the way, if you decide to buy this deck from an Amazon Marketplace seller, do not use Movie Mars! They waited 2 weeks to ship. When I got my deck there were a bunch of cards missing and duplicated. I tried to return them for a replacement deck, but they never contacted me to say if or when the replacement dack had shipped. When I finally contacted them, they told me they were back-ordered. Yet, they were still offering the same deck on eBay under the store name of "Book Mars".

I have loved this deck from afar for many years now, and I was so excited to have found it on Amazon, the seller was so sweet, she sent me another rare deck for free! I will cherish this deck forever and the cute little collectable pink elephant is really thoughtful too. The Minchiate is my favorite deck of all time and I feel grateful to have it now.

This is a poor remake of a beautiful old deck. The images are everything when using the Tarot for insight. This deck was a disappointment.