Shuffle the Deck: How Queer Artists Are Redesigning Tarot From the Ground Up

Pull a card from a traditional Rider-Waite tarot deck and you'll find a very specific world looking back at you: European, largely binary, steeped in a visual language coded for a particular kind of spiritual seeker. The imagery is beautiful in its own right — but for a lot of people, it's also a world that doesn't include them.

That's changing fast. And the artists doing the changing are printing their own decks, funding them through Kickstarter campaigns that routinely blow past their goals in under 48 hours, and selling them on Etsy storefronts that function as both art galleries and personal manifestos.

This is the queer tarot renaissance, and it's one of the most visually exciting things happening in independent illustration right now.

The Archetype Problem

To understand why so many LGBTQ+ artists are drawn to redesigning tarot, you have to understand what the traditional archetypes were doing in the first place.

Tarot's Major Arcana — the 22 cards that form the symbolic spine of any deck — are essentially a map of the human experience. The Fool, The Tower, The Star, The World. They're archetypes in the Jungian sense: big, universal, supposedly applicable to everyone. But archetypes don't exist in a vacuum. They carry the assumptions of whoever designed them.

The original Rider-Waite deck, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith in 1909, was groundbreaking for its time. Smith herself was a fascinating, unconventional figure — a Black woman working in Edwardian England, a member of the occult-obsessed Order of the Golden Dawn, and almost certainly queer by the standards of her era. And yet the deck she produced, working under the direction of Arthur Edward Waite, reflected the symbolic conventions of its moment: heteronormative couples, gendered power dynamics, a European visual vocabulary that treated itself as universal.

For queer illustrators today, the project isn't to trash that legacy — it's to expand it. To ask: what does The Lovers look like when the lovers aren't assumed to be a man and a woman? What does The Emperor mean when power itself is being interrogated? Who is The World card for?

Drawing New Mythologies

Walk through the current landscape of independent queer tarot and the range is staggering.

Some decks center trans identity explicitly — figures mid-transition, bodies that refuse easy categorization, the kind of corporeal joy that mainstream illustration still rarely depicts. Others focus on community: chosen families, protest imagery, the specific textures of queer social spaces. A few take a more abstract approach, using color theory and geometric symbolism to suggest gender fluidity without depicting bodies at all.

Artist Mx. Carrow Elspeth, a nonbinary illustrator based in Chicago, spent three years developing their Liminal Arcana deck, which reimagines each Major Arcana card through the lens of queer liminality — the experience of existing between defined categories. "I kept thinking about how tarot is supposed to meet you where you are," Elspeth explains. "But for so long, the 'where you are' assumed by most decks was a pretty narrow place. I wanted to make something that felt like it was built for the in-between."

The Liminal Arcana Kickstarter hit its funding goal in 31 hours.

Kickstarter and the Microeconomy of Sacred Art

The platform question matters here, because the economics of independent tarot publishing are genuinely interesting.

Traditional publishing routes for tarot decks involve pitching to companies like Lo Scarabeo or U.S. Games Systems — a process that can take years, requires significant compromise on artistic vision, and typically results in the artist receiving a fraction of the deck's retail value. For queer artists creating work that explicitly challenges the mainstream, that path was never particularly welcoming to begin with.

Kickstarter changed the math entirely. A well-designed campaign with strong social media presence can fund a print run of a thousand or more decks without any publisher involvement. The artist sets the price, controls the design, writes the accompanying guidebook, and ships directly to backers. Etsy handles the ongoing sales. Artist collectives — often organized through Instagram or Tumblr, occasionally Discord — provide mutual promotion, shared printing resources, and community feedback during the design process.

The result is a microeconomy where a single artist can generate meaningful income from a project that a traditional publisher would have deemed too niche to touch. And because the customer base is specifically seeking out work that reflects their identities, the "niche" turns out to be a lot larger than the industry assumed.

"I made more from my first deck than I made in two years of licensing work to greeting card companies," says one illustrator, who asked to remain anonymous because they still do some commercial work. "And I got to make something that actually meant something to me. That's not a small thing."

The Illustration as Argument

What makes the best of these decks so compelling isn't just representation — it's the visual intelligence behind the reimagining.

The strongest queer tarot artists are doing genuine symbolic work. They're not simply swapping out characters while keeping the underlying grammar intact. They're asking what the underlying grammar was assuming, and whether those assumptions still serve.

Take the Death card — one of the most misunderstood in traditional tarot, representing transformation rather than literal mortality. In several queer decks, this card has been redesigned to depict gender transition explicitly: the shedding of one self, the emergence of another. It's not a stretch. It's actually a more precise rendering of what the card was always supposed to mean. The queer reading isn't a departure from the archetype — it's a clarification of it.

Or consider The Hierophant, traditionally a symbol of institutional authority and received wisdom. In queer decks, this card gets complicated in fascinating ways. Sometimes it's reimagined as a community elder — a drag mother, a longtime activist. Sometimes it's depicted as a figure being actively questioned by those around them. The power relationship isn't erased; it's made visible and interrogable.

Collectible Art, Personal Mythology

One thing that distinguishes the queer tarot movement from other corners of independent illustration is the relationship between artist and collector.

People who buy these decks aren't just buying art objects, though the objects are often genuinely beautiful — screen-printed, gold-foiled, packaged with hand-sewn pouches and illustrated guidebooks that read like poetry. They're buying into a mythology that was made with them in mind. Many collectors describe the experience of finding a deck that reflects their identity as something close to emotional.

"I've had people reach out after receiving their decks and tell me they cried," says Elspeth. "Not because the art is sad. Because it's the first time they've seen themselves in something that was supposed to be universal."

That's the real project here, underneath all the gorgeous illustration and the clever symbolic reinterpretation. It's the work of expanding what "universal" means. Of insisting that the full range of human experience — including the experiences that got edited out of the original archetypes — deserves its own visual language.

The cards are beautiful. But what they're saying is bigger than beauty.