Customer Reviews

The Royal Fez Moroccan Tarot Deck

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The Royal Fez Moroccan Tarot is a traditional 78-card deck with 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana, divided into four suits--Swords, Wands, Cups and Pentacles. It's made by A. G. Muller company, one of the major card printing companies of Europe, along with Grimaud or Lo Scarabeo, but it was done so under U. S. Games who distributes the deck. The booklet that comes with the deck is by Stuart Kaplan, one of the great scholars of the Tarot.

The cards are drawn in delicate pen & ink, with color carefully added--especially yellow, black, blue and red. The line drawings have a more serious feel to them than Pamela Colman Smith of the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, but the deck clearly derives from the RWS family, with illustrations for the minors that use many of the same general compositions as the RWS. This means that if we know the Rider-Waite-Smith deck, we can use this one right out of the box.

I prefer this deck to the RWS because the drawings are more delicate and careful; people I read for are drawn closer to the cards and lean right in to see the detail. And they do contain a great deal of detail. The overall tone of the deck is light, as if the images are slightly washed out. This imparts an older feel to the deck, reminiscent of fading due to age. The cards are framed in a pale yellow design that looks a little like a proscenium (the opening of a stage). Some may not like how the faces are rendered; the Minor Arcana are unnumbered; the Majors are unnamed.

Several of the cards, notably The Moon and the High Priestess, are quite striking. This deck was conceived by Roland Berrill, the founder of Mensa, in the 1950's, and 500 were printed. U. S. Games later reissued the deck, also.