Filled with snails, cakes, fly-traps, and octopus, this deck is a modern and colourful twist on the traditional Tarot de Marseille. The Squid Cake Marseille is a 78 card deck where you'll discover Knights riding creatures, quirky faces and a delicious colour palette! Bring a little light-heartedness to your readings while dishing out the cold hard truth ... with a side of humour! Regardless if The Chariot is being pulled by two snails instead of horses, or The Hierophant is giving advice to two pink birds rather than people, the message is still the same.
Engage your creativity and be inspired to think outside the box. Let the images of this deck tell you a story.
The Squid Cake Marseille Tarot is available now from Rockpool Publishing. You can see the unboxing and flickthrough vidoes on tiktok.
My third Rockpool deck! This one is a pip deck, which traditionally I've found harder to use, but the art and explanations in this deck are really good.
This is a standard type box with the lid fitting down over it from above. As with other Rockpool decks I've tried, the cards are a little smaller than standard, but I love the size - they sit really nicely in my hands. When I used a more standard deck recently I was surprised at how big and unwieldy they felt in comparison!
The LWB starts out with an intro by Jess, who explains some of the history of the Marseille deck and a couple of its peculiarities; for instance, the Magician is the first card in the deck while the Fool sits behind the World, and the Death card has no title on it. As a Marseille deck, Justice is at 8 and Strength at 11, and the Minors are Cups, Batons, Swords and Coins. Jess then suggests a couple of spreads to use with the deck before moving into the meanings. There's no mention at all of reversals.
Each card has two pages, one an image of the card with keywords, one an explanation of the meaning. For the Minors, the second page also discusses the visual appearance of the cards, showing how to read meaning into what seems like a strange pattern. The explanations are clear and easy to follow, but I did notice that sometimes the meanings don't follow the ones I'm familiar with from RWS. Some quick research shows that usually the meanings align, so the explanations here are unique to this deck. I mostly used the meanings I'm familiar with and the deck still worked fine.
The cards themselves! As I said, they're a little smaller than average. They have orangey-pinky spredges and this lovely, reversible design on the back;
The images on the Majors and Courts are slightly on the comical side, which was part of the aim of the deck; to show that tarot can be fun while still being insightful. The figures are vaguely reminiscent of the old cartoon Doug, which I enjoyed! Majors have their name across the bottom, apart from Death, and their number across the top in Roman numerals. One thing to note is that instead of, eg, IV for four, the Emperor has IIII. The Sun is not XIX, it's XVIIII. I discussed this with someone who studied Roman numerals in school and their opinion was that while this is technically not incorrect, it's very unusual and most people would take a while to adjust to it. This doesn't affect your readings at all, of course, it's just something I noticed.
I love that all the characters, including the Emperor, Hierophant and Courts, are depicted as fairly young! They're often shown as older people and it's nice to see that the meanings can apply to young people as well.
Here is a sample of Majors, Minors and Courts (remember you can see the whole deck in the flickthrough above):
In readings, I found that this deck doesn't sugar coat; it will tell you exactly what it thinks, no messing around. It's a great deck for your daily check in or for that problem that's been niggling at you, but you need to be willing to accept what it's saying! This is a great deck to stretch your understanding and I'm really enjoying working with it.
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