Hi everyone - this isn't really a review, but just some thoughts after receiving the Golden Art Nouveau Tarot Deck. It's a very personal view, and I appreciate not everyone will agree. It's also not an attempt to criticise or blame. Please take it in the spirit of positive critique of two very beautiful contemporary RWS-family decks. 🙂

So, it's been a little less than a week since I received my copy of the Golden Art Nouveau Tarot deck, an impulse buy having seen its gorgeous art online. I almost never buy tarot decks; the Golden Art Nouveau deck is my seventh deck ever, in more than forty years of reading and studying tarot. My working deck for the past 3 years has been the beautiful Radiant Wise Spirit, which I'm still a great fan of, despite certain shortcomings (see below). Before that, I used mostly the Sacred Rose Tarot, with an occasional foray (and back!) into the Thoth. 

My first impressions on receiving the Golden Art Nouveau Tarot were unfortunately a bit disappointing. The artwork is indeed spectacular, gorgeous, very original. It's also a very faithful (to 95%+ fidelity) representation of Pamela's original RWS illustrations in a more three-dimensional, art nouveau style. There's a lot of gold leaf, some beautiful illustration, and the artwork is highly attractive. 

At the same time, I felt the deck was inferior to the Radiant Wise Spirit. My reasons for thinking that shed light on just how well crafted the original RWS is, probably why it's survived so long as the world's favourite tarot deck, and why the modern clones (including the Radiant Wise Spirit) are standing on the shoulders of a real giant. 

But to get into more detail...

My first negative impression with the Golden Art Nouveau was the physical flimsiness of the cards. They're thin. They feel very much like a standard deck of playing cards you might find in a bar or a dime store. The beautiful artwork already has a border of art nouveau tracery (think Moët et Chandon), but the cards have an additional white border around that. This serves to make the actual artwork on the cards smaller. This is a shame, because the GANT deck cards are already quite small in width; they're about the same height as the Radiant Wise Spirit, but about 80% of the width, a good 10% of which is the two borders. My guestimate is therefore that the GANT artwork is about 75% of the size of the Radiant Wise Spirit artwork. As they're trying to fit in the same detail, it feels a little crammed in. The Radiant Wise Spirit is already borderless, and has a larger, heavier, more rigid cardstock, so the whole thing feels bigger and more substantial in comparison. 

The second negative impression was that the GANT cards look pretty similar. There are some attempts to put highlights in the borders to differentiate between the suits in the minor arcana, but by and large all the cards use broadly the same narrow palette; golden hues, whites, browns, yellows, with occasional other colours. It gives the deck an artistic unity, but at the same time actually makes it quite difficult to differentiate between the cards at a glance. With the RWS, and the Radiant Wise Spirit, each card is remarkably distinctive; you can tell at a glance, and at a distance, what card you're looking at, which you can't with the GANT. This makes the Radiant Wise Spirit much easier to read and interpret; I found myself having to really "look at" a GANT card to figure out what it was. For me, it simply wasn't as user-friendly. 

There were other minor quibbles in the illustrations. The GANT has chosen (I assume deliberately) to leave out certain details that are present in the RWS. I found this a little annoying, as for me the RWS decks are all about visual cues, mnemonics, esoteric details, what-have-you, and not to see them in an RWS clone was disconcerting. Here are a few examples:

• in the 10 of Swords, the Lord of Ruin, the prone figure is no longer making the hierophantic gesture with his right hand. 
• in the 4 of Swords, the Lord of Rest From Strife, the three swords on the wall are no longer positioned over the supine figure's chakras, and the word PAX is no longer visible in the stained glass window.
• in VI The Lovers, the man is no longer looking at the woman, and the Archangel Raphael now appears female. 
• in the 4 of Wands, the Lord of Perfected Work, all symmetry of the four wands structure is gone, and indeed the art nouveau border is actually covering most of one of the wands, so that only three of them are easily visible. 
• in the 6 of Pentacles, the Lord of Material Success, the bandages on the head of one of the beggars are gone. 
• in the High Priestess, the Priestess's neutral, almost trance-like expression is gone, replaced by something that appears quite like haughty disdain, even condescension. There's also no longer the tiny glimpse of what lies beyond the veil between the two pillars. The High Priestess has always been my favourite card, but here I found it quite cold and unsympathetic.
• in the Knight of Pentacles, the Knight's horse is no longer stationary, but indeed appears to be in mid-gallop (or at least mid-trot), which runs counter to the general concept of the Knight of Pentacles being the most immobile of the knights. 

The GANT isn't all bad, of course! As well as being artistically gorgeous, I very much appreciate there being no text on the court cards, making it easy to apply one's own titles. I did, however, found the undeniable male-ness of the Pages to be a bit of an untimely decision; it's very hard to imagine those blokes as "princesses". They also don't look terribly youthful; the Page of Wands, indeed, looks downright rough (and a bit dodgy).  

On the whole, I appreciated the artwork in the GANT much more as artwork than as tarot card illustrations. Some of the symbolism choices seemed odd, and didn't give me a whole lot of confidence that the designs were done with a keen occult eye. Finally, I found the card backs a little underwhelming, and surprisingly unsymmetrical; for me, that's not a thing, but I know people for whom it is. It would have taken little to make the card backs indistinguishable for reversals. 

Finally, for balance, I feel I should call out some of the negative things about the Radiant Wise Spirit. For me, it's currently my go-to deck, and the best I've found for my purposes. I love the heavier cardstock, and the fact that it's borderless, as well as its beautiful colours. But there are weaknesses. Here are some of them. 

• first, sometimes the line work is frankly sloppy. In the worst cases, it looks like the originals have been traced over with a way-too-thick felt tip pen, and that obscures Pamela's fine linework and elegant illustrations. A particularly egregious example is the Eight of Cups, Abandoned Success, whose linework should never have made it through proofing. I would happily buy a new version of the Radiant Wise Spirit where this particular deficiency is fixed; it shouldn't be that hard to correct. Another example is the Queen of Cups, who frankly now looks just a bit pissed off.
• second, some of the colour choices appear to have been made without consideration of esoteric significance. A glaring example is that the "white hands" on the Aces have all gone, and have been replaced by flesh-coloured hands, despite Book T giving clear indications to the contrary. Likewise, all trace of haloes around those hands are gone; given that the actual number of rays in the hand haloes has esoteric significance, I consider this an omission. 

On the whole, though, my quibbles with the Radiant Wise Spirit are minor for me personally, and don't impact the deck's great effectiveness and usability. In contrast, my issues with the Golden Art Nouveau are more significant, and, at this moment, I don't think I'll be using it for readings. However, I must admit I'm considering whether it might be a good deck for pathworking, at least with certain cards (maybe I'll steer clear of the High Priestess...); their three dimensional nature may make them very effective for creative visualisation as long as you can deal with the occasional missing details and idiosyncratic vibes in certain cases. And, the cards really are very pretty, my above comments notwithstanding, and if you want some serious RWS-related eye-candy, I'd still recommend taking a look. For me, though, I would pay good money for a larger, borderless version of the Golden Art Nouveau deck, on heavier cardstock and perhaps (ideally) with a little attention and tweaking to the colour palette. That could well be a game-changer.