I have a small stack of decks on the shelf above the reading table. Some of them I've worn the corners off. Some of them I've barely touched in years. Each one taught me something different about reading, and looking back, I can map most of what I know about tarot to the deck I was holding when I learned it.
The Rider-Waite-Smith was my first deck. It was a Christmas gift from a friend who'd watched me eye one in a bookstore for months. The RWS taught me grammar. Pamela Colman Smith drew every minor arcana as a full scene — a person doing something, in a place, with weather — and that turns the deck into a kind of language with built-in sentences. The Three of Swords is a heart with three blades in it under rain. You don't need a book to read that. The Eight of Cups is a man walking away from a stack of cups under a waning moon. You don't need a book for that either. Everything I learned about reading by image first — by looking at what the card is doing before remembering what it means — came from RWS. If you only own one deck for the rest of your life, own this one. It's the deck the language was built on.
The Marseille came later. I'd been reading RWS for two years and I picked up a Marseille deck because I'd read that it was older, and I was curious about older. The Marseille is a shock the first time. The minor arcana are not illustrated as scenes — they're pip cards, like a deck of playing cards, just arrangements of swords or cups or coins. The Four of Cups is four cups. That's the whole picture. No man under a tree, no apparition offering a fifth cup, just four cups in a square. I almost put the deck back in its box. Instead I sat with it for a winter, and it taught me to listen to color. Without the scenes to lean on, all I had to read with was the count, the suit, and the way the colors were arranged. The Marseille minors are read by number — the structure of three, the balance of four, the chaos of five — and by what suit is doing what to what other suit. It's geometry instead of theater. It taught me that the RWS scenes were a particular reading of the cards, one that Smith and Waite layered on top of an older, sparser structure. After the Marseille, I could read RWS scenes more lightly. I knew the bones underneath them.
The Thoth deck was Crowley's, illustrated by Lady Frieda Harris, and it taught me geometry in a different way. The Thoth is dense — every card has astrological correspondences, Kabbalistic correspondences, alchemical correspondences, and a name layered on top of the traditional name (the Five of Cups is "Disappointment," the Two of Wands is "Dominion"). When I first opened the Thoth I thought it was overdesigned. I came back to it a year later and realized it was a deck that demands you read the card as a system rather than a story. The art is geometric, almost mathematical — angles, planes, color fields. The Thoth taught me that a card is a position in a network of meanings, not just a picture. It also taught me that names matter. "Disappointment" sounds different than "Five of Cups." The name does work on the reading.
I have a couple of modern decks too. I won't name them all because the relationships are personal, but one I'll mention. The Wild Unknown is a black-and-ink deck where most of the figures are animals or plants instead of people. I picked it up during a hard year. I'd been reading RWS for almost a decade and my readings had started to feel a little stale, a little too practiced. The Wild Unknown stripped the human figures out and forced me to read the energy without the human face to anchor on. The Four of Cups in the Wild Unknown is a frozen lake under a single star. The Eight of Cups is a luna moth flying away from a candle. The deck taught me that the figures in RWS are training wheels. The cards are about energies, not people. Once you can read the energies, you can read any deck.
If you're early in your practice and you're wondering whether to buy a second deck, here's the order I'd recommend. Read RWS for at least a year — long enough that you can pull the Six of Cups and not need to look it up. Then get a Marseille and read with it for a season — long enough to understand that the scenes are not the cards. Then, only then, buy whatever modern deck has been calling to you. The modern deck will be the one you fall in love with. But you'll only know what it's doing because the older decks taught you the grammar.
A few things I've noticed across all of them. Every deck has cards that read easy and cards that read hard. The hard cards in one deck become the easy cards in another, because the art shifts what's emphasized. The Hanged Man in RWS is a man hanging upside-down from a tree, blissed-out. The Hanged Man in the Thoth is a man hanging upside-down from an ankh, drowning. Same card. Different teacher. You learn the card by holding both. Every deck eventually becomes the deck you trust most. It's usually the first one you bought. Sometimes it's not. Don't fight it when a new deck moves into the front of the stack. Sometimes the cards just want a different hand to hold them.
The deck on top of my stack right now is the same RWS I got in 2014. The corners are soft. The Three of Swords has a coffee stain on it. Every time I shuffle, the deck remembers more of me. That's the real thing decks teach you — that a tool you use for ten years is no longer a tool. It's a friend. And friends, like cards, get older with you.