the book that came with this started on page33. when we tried to contact them they never responded! DO NOT BUY FROM THIS SELLER!!! Amazon took care of the issue we had with them….thank you amazon!!!!!!!
Rating: 1 / 5

I had seen the Golden Tarot deck advertised here and there, and I had read the customer reviews in amazon.com. I was impressed, and decided to order a deck right away.

After I received the deck and did a few divinations with it, I felt humiliated that I had thrown away twenty-five dollars on it.

The only positive thing I could say about the deck is that the guilt edges are quite handsome.

On the minus side, however, I have several things to say. First, U.S. Games always offers its books and decks either separately or as a set. That way, when you wear out a deck or bend or lose a card and want to get a new deck, you can purchanse one without having to buy an entire book/deck set. The Golden Tarot is an unfortunate exception to this.

Second, the deck is almost impossible to shuffle. The cards are just slightly larger than the standard Rider deck cards, making them just slightly more difficult to handle. And, the cards are made of thick, stiff cardboard. It is quite difficult bending back each half, and then trying to let the cards riffle cleanly off the thumbs. Most often, the cards interleave in clumps, making thorough shuffling quite difficult. The deck measures 1 1/8 inches thick, making it the thickest Tarot card deck in existence anywhere. This unprecedented thickness just adds to the difficulty of handling it.

I had previously heard about the magnificent artwork of the cards, and how the creator, Kat Black, had used numerous paintings of the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance periods to create nice montages whose images approximated traditional renderings. The stiff cardboard that the cards are printed on, however, seem to be of a low-grade quality that creates low-contrast renderings of the original artwork. The pictures on the cards, in other words, are dull and muted in their coloration. There is no color saturation or aesthetic sparkle to any of them. The colors are not vibrant at all, but tend to be monochromatic.

I was also put off by Kat Black’s comment in the Introduction portion of her instruction book that she personally uses the Tarot as a guide to “personal insight” rather than as a means of fortune-telling. The implication is that fortune-telling is somehow beneath her, and that “personal insight” and fortune-telling are somehow two different things. The vast majority of the people I do readings for ask me divinatory questions of the fortune-telling type. And through these fortune-telling divinations, these people obtain valuable “personal insight” about their problems. I find it both inexplicable and offensive that Kat Black tries to put down this most common and useful kind of divinatory questioning.

I do not see how this Golden Tarot deck is going to stay in print very long. No one but the most masochistic is going to want to try to shuffle the deck more than two or three times. Then they will put it in their dresser drawer where it will stay forever. Not too many people will want to admit they wasted twenty-five dollars on this deck, but I sure did.

Rating: 2 / 5

After reading the reviews about this tarot deck, I purchased it as a gift for a friend. She keeps raving about how beautiful the art is and how it makes her feel comfortable in using it because it’s so beautiful and not scary looking. I rated it 4 stars only because I haven’t personally used the deck myself.
Rating: 4 / 5