The Pokemon Tarot is a standard 78-card tarot deck, featuring full-color illustrations of Pokemon characters. Each card corresponds to the cards in a traditional tarot deck, so you can use your existing knowledge of tarot to read from this deck! This project is a labor of love, the beginning stages of which occured in late 2014.
You can view the gallery of completed tarot cards here. Each card was hand-drawn, inked, and colored with alcohol-based markers on Borden & Riley marker paper.
Why take on a project like this? At the time of this project's conceptualization, I'd gone through some unfortunate things that left me with very little faith in my original ideas (don't worry, as of now I'm doing better) - and for me, when it comes to fanart, my favorite subject is definitely Pokemon! The first games came out during my last year of junior high and they were a defining part of my adolescence. I've remained an avid fan. In addition, I'm one of those really shy nerds that only opens up when I have a lot to say, so the fact that I like Pokemon has really helped me make friends in adulthood, too!
I've always loved tarot cards. They're an amazing tool for constructing narratives, which can be used as a tool to look at one's own life from a different angle, or even for crafting storylines for creative works. I like orderly things, so I love the story of the Fool's Journey present in the Major Arcana and the balance of the four suits, each with its own element and theme. So for a really long time I wanted to make a tarot deck, and one day I just started writing down my ideas, many of which became major arcana that you can see on the gallery page. I spent over a year before I actually illustrated anything in 2016, and made steady progress since.
Why this Pokemon for that card? I think that my way certainly isn't the only way to select Pokemon for these cards, but I did decide that since this became such a personal project, there wasn't anything wrong with selecting things that resonated with my personal views of some of the cards. This is why, for example, we have a calm and relaxing Nine of Claws (Swords) - I think people are split on the darkness of that card, but I've always found it to be a card that is, in the end, hopeful (especially following that dicey eight), so I illustrated it with bright pastels and some of my very favorite Pokemon.
How is this deck different from a standard tarot deck? If you're comfortable reading standard tarot cards, you can use this deck no problem! All of the cards are made to match up with a basic Rider Waite deck - though some of the illustrations are different, in some cases because I've chosen to illustrate different examples of the card's meaning than what's shown on a regular card.
A few cards have been renamed, most very minorly. Some of the major arcana are pluralized due to multiple Pokemon on the card, and I removed "the" from the titles, feeling that it helped abstract the concepts a bit and make them fit better with some of the Pokemon. "Lovers" has become "Love," "Wheel of Fortune" has become "Fortune," and "Hanged Man" has become "Sojourner" - because this card retains every other bit of the Hanged Man's meaning, but I just can't hang Regigigas from a tree!The suits are renamed to reflect held items from the Pokemon franchise. Each suit corresponds to one of the original tarot suits and retains its original element and theme:
Claws - Swords - Air - Thoughts, concepts, conversations
Scales - Cups - Water - Feelings, emotions, expression
Coins - Pentacles - Earth - Wealth, tangible objects, construction
Orbs - Wands - Fire - Passion, determination, creativity
Additionally, I've renamed the titles on the Court Cards, both to degender them (I wanted the deck to be as gender-neutral as possible, and there are only a few exceptions) and to make them fit the Pokemon theme.
Pages have become Trainers
Knights have become Leaders
Queens have become Elites
Kings have become Champions
Don't know how to read tarot? I currently have no plans to write my own resource, but here are a couple of sites I like using: