Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot Deck by Pamela Colman Smith

From the publisher, U.S. Games Systems: the Smith-Waite Centennial Tarot Deck is a faithful reproduction of the original deck created by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909 under the direction of Arthur E. Waite. It features full pictorial scenes in the muted colors chosen by Pixie herself, and was first issued in 2009 as part of the Pamela Colman Smith Commemorative Set. This standalone version lets collectors keep their commemorative sets pristine while still reading with the deck. The 84-card deck includes the full 78-card tarot plus bonus cards reproducing samples of Pixie's non-tarot artwork.

Pamela Colman Smith (1878-1951), nicknamed Pixie, was a Jamaican-British artist, illustrator, and member of the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn. Long under-credited for her role, she is now widely recognized as the creative force behind the world's most influential tarot imagery.

It is hard to overstate the influence of the deck Pamela Colman Smith illustrated in 1909. Before it, most tarots left the Minor Arcana as plain arrangements of suit symbols; Smith gave every one of the 78 cards a full illustrated scene, a person, a moment, a story, and in doing so made the tarot legible to anyone. Nearly every modern deck descends from her work, and nearly every tarot book describes her images.

For a long time the deck was called simply Rider-Waite, after its publisher and the man who directed it, while the artist who actually drew it went largely unnamed. Restoring Smith to the title, as Smith-Waite or Waite-Smith, is part of a wider effort to honor her enormous, once-overlooked contribution.

To read with this deck is to work with the foundational language of modern tarot. The Major Arcana trace the soul's journey, the four suits map the textures of daily life, and because the imagery is the reference point for a century of tarot scholarship, whatever you learn here will carry over to almost any other deck you pick up.