Deck review: Tarot for You and Me by Gary D'Andre and Jess Vossetteig

Celebrate the strength of traditional tarot with this joyful, inclusive, and vibrant tarot deck and guidebook perfect for spiritual readers, inspiration-seekers, and modern mystics.

Created by and for people of the LGBTQ+ community who want to see their experiences, bodies, and lifestyles in tarot, Tarot for You and Me offers the queer, genderqueer, and non-binary audience and their allies a tarot deck that is as inclusive and emboldened as it is fun and full of joy. The deck is designed to infuse your life with greater awareness and higher insight, allowing you to manifest visible, truth-based happiness.

Tarot for You and Me follows the tenets of the traditional tarot, but reimagines the core elements to replace gendered, heteronormative language with inclusivity and reimagine the symbols that represent modern ideals. In the deck, cards of the Major Arcana that are historically gendered or use language rooted in imperialism are reimagined for today’s audience. Here the Magician becomes the Brujx, the Hanged Man becomes the Hanged One, and more. And further, the Minor Arcana suits of wands, cups, swords, and pentacles become lanterns, chalices, flags, and plants, respectively.

Pairing an updated vision of an inclusive tarot with joyful, dynamic art, you will truly see yourself—your life, your body, your vocabulary, your experiences—reflected in the cards and the future you can create from it.

You can see the unboxing and flickthough videos on Tiktok. I have posted two spreads using this deck, a deck interview spread and a full moon spread.

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I. First Impressions

The first thing you notice about this set is the colour. The images on the box are bright and bold, and the black background makes them stand out even more. The box is a standard Tarot style with a lid that closes down over it from above; the inside of this lid is decorated with a rainbow flag. The LWB (book of words), which is extremely chunky, sits just inside the lid, with the cards in a well underneath it. The whole package is sturdy and would stand up to being thrown in a bag or carried around.

The impression of brightness continues with the cards themselves. Bright, bold, blocky colours are the name of the game here; there's none of the sometimes fussy detail you can get on some cards. These are simple, straightforward images.

II. The Cards

The cards feature this back design:

It looks completely reversible, but there are tiny differences in the clouds - but you'd have to be looking very closely! If you're the kind of reader who doesn't want to know if a card is reversed or not, you'd be safe with this deck.

As is common in themed decks, several of the cards have been renamed. The Minor suits of Wands, Swords, Pentacles and Cups have become Lanterns, Flags, Plants and Chalices respectively. In the Majors, we have several renamed cards, such as the Brujx at #I, the Castle at XVI and quite a few others! These changes have been made to make the deck more inclusive and friendly and to remove some of the overtly religious references in the original names.

Other than the renames, the Major Arcana is quite normal, with Strength at #VIII and the Fool at #0. Images are inspired by the Rider-Waite Smith tradition, and mostly stick to it, though some cards are quite different. Majors have their numbers, in Roman numerals, at the top of the card and their titles, in a cute handwriting font, at the bottom.  

The Minor Arcana are fully illustrated in the same bright, colourful style. As well as each suit being renamed, the Courts have been altered; they now consist of Child, Sibling, Queen and Elder, though the meanings still correlate to the standard Court. The images are set against a background of a solid colour and they look amazing. Names are written, in the same handwriting font as the Majors, across the bottom of each card.

These cards are a joy to handle. They're standard Tarot size and have a lovely smooth texture. They shuffle beautifully without catching on each other. I usually overhand shuffle and these cards just glide from hand to hand.

III. The Guidebook

As I mentioned above, the guidebook is chunky at just over 330 pages! The author, Gary D'Andre, is a Queer mystic working in Brooklyn, and though he does occasionally slip into the 'mystic' style - the reader is addressed as 'earth angel' early on - in general the book is very readable and down to earth. Gary has many years of experience with Tarot and has used his personal understanding of the cards in the book. Throughout the instructions he points out that Tarot is about intuition as much as meanings and that readers should do what feels best to them; I love when a guidebook is low pressure like this.

I do have to mention, and I hope this is only my copy of the book; it started losing pages quite early on, first just one and then the surrounding ones as the glue loosened. I've essentially stopped using the book now for fear of more pages coming out, which is a real shame. But I sincerely hope this is just a gluing error with my copy; I haven't seen it mentioned in any other reviews.

Each card, Major and Minor, gets several pages here. There's a full page image of the card, then upright keywords and meanings and reversed keywords and meanings. The reversed tends to be shorter than the upright, but not by much. The meanings tend towards the happy and joyful, with the reversed generally being blockages or problems to overcome. Even the traditionally darker cards aren't scary here. For instance, the Tower, renamed to the Castle, focuses on rebuilding in the upright and on being afraid of change in the reverse.

One thing that wasn't in the meanings, which I would have liked, is a description of the symbols on some cards - I eventually figured out that they're zodiac symbols, but it would have been lovely to have them explained in the book! The explanations don't reference the artwork at all, which is sad - I always like to know why an artist made the choices they did, but I understand that's difficult when the artist isn't also writing the book.
The book also features three spreads; a standard one card, a three card (Past/Present/Future is the given pull but Gary says you can use any three questions you like) and a ten card inverted pyramid spread. I haven't tried it yet but I'm planning to once I have some time to sit down and really dig in!

IV. In Use

Generally speaking, the cards are based on the RWS tradition, although some stray a bit from that. Looking through them, I was struck by how well most of them embody their meaning - even the ones that stray from RWS still show their meaning very well. For example, the Judgement card, one of the most overtly Christian cards in a traditional deck, here has two girls gossiping about a third, who's ignoring them - a wonderful way to show that in the end, we're the only ones who can judge ourselves!

My Querents found these cards lovely to look at and very positive in readings. Some of the readings were very accurate!
A couple of times while doing readings with this deck, I had to pause, recentre and come at the cards from a different angle. Once I understood what they were saying, they always made perfect sense - I just needed some patience and to open my mind! Daily cards were always quick to make sense, but if you're doing a longer reading I'd give yourself plenty of time to study it.
As some of the cards don't follow RWS, I wouldn't recommend this for complete beginners, unless they plan to use only this deck. However it is a lovely, friendly, inclusive deck, so I definitely recommend it for the wider market!

V. Overall Impression

Traditionally Tarot has been white, Christian-centric, and it's great to see more decks on the market that celebrate the wondrous variety of humanity. The characters in this deck come from every race, gender and sexuality, and it's lovely to see them going about their everyday lives.

Strengths: 

• The deck is friendly and inclusive
• It's great for one card pulls
• The cards are bright and bold, lovely to look at, and feel great in your hand

Weaknesses:

• For me, they needed some time to interpret spreads
• My book started to come apart, but that may just be me
• The symbolism on the cards isn't explained in the LWB   

This is a great deck for any member of the community, ally, or anyone who loves great artwork! While I do think some of the images stray from RWS this isn't a massive stumbling block, as they're still very evocative and show their meanings very well. 

Tarot for You and Me is available now wherever you get your Tarot decks.