I personally always believed that for young children and beginners the waite deck was always easiest to start out with and which in the end makes it the more influential deck for most people. And like always there are the exceptions in which people started with different decks that touched them so deeply. The waite deck was my beginner and I still have it to this day for sentimental reasons. You get attached to them.
Comment made by R. on 2006-01-15 14:51:13
Hello!... The Pierpont-Morgan Visconti reprodution... the artwork is beautiful, they have a real mystique to them...
Comment made by on 2006-02-03 15:26:38
It really depends on how you interpret influential. To most people with a casual exposure to tarot, the Rider-Waite deck IS tarot. Just look at the numerous R-W clone decks published worldwide. I am quite surprised the Thoth deck was not a separate category, as it seems to be gaining strongly in influence. I love the Visconti decks for the glimpse they provide of bygone centuries, and the Marseille has a mystique and a lure of its own, but overall I have to stick with the Rider-Waite as most influential.
Comment made by W.N.V. on 2006-05-02 05:13:40
The Marseille is by far the most successful and influential of the iconographies. The RW is itself derived from the Marseille.
Comment made by Leonard Sonnecis-Moor on 2006-05-09 19:01:57
among all the Tarot cards available, the Rider-Waite is indeed one of the most accurate because it is very easy to interpret...the drawings are simple an yet, deliver enought information for the reading because of the deepness of the simbols printed in them.
True, the tarot of Marseille is the predesessor of the Rider-Waite, but this tarot cards have become an excelent first choise for readers arround the world...
In the end, the best cards are those that you can trully read, not thos that people says ARE the ones for you.
Comment made by r dtewart on 2006-05-06 03:36:43
the revelations tarot by zach wong ,
Comment made by Brock Johnson on 2006-05-20 12:54:19
I voted for the Rider Waite cards. Why? Because almost every tarot has some element of this easy to interpret deck. This is a classic. Almost every person that has anything tarot, has something that aknowledges Rider Waite by style or word.
Comment made by NightWing on 2006-09-04 19:18:35
Since its first publication nearly 100 years ago, the Rider-Waite tarot has been influential in introducing beginners to tarot in largely non-threatening way, and has been the source of a great number of versions, \"clones\", and derivatives too numerous to count. In America at least, more tarot readers began with the RWS deck than any other, and it still forms the standard from which many readers, artists, and deck creators have launched forth. The RWS is THE tarot deck of the 20th century; and now perhaps the 21st as well.
Comment made by John Smith on 2006-12-07 14:28:51
The Thoth is definitely the most influential deck. Crowley loaded his deck with occult wisdom more than any other deck even to this day and has therefore definitely had the most influence. His deck is more than just tarot, it is an introduction into each of the many occult systems that are incorporated into the machinery of the deck. This deck obviously holds the highest influence over its users. Waite on the other hand was more of a poser in the world of the occult. He didn\'t know too much and there\'s not really that much to learn using his deck. He might have influenced the highest number of clones, but this means nothing if you consider the meaning of the word \"influential\" and the many levels that it works on. These clones unfortunately have minimal occult value, just like their predecessor.
Comment made by Sideways Knight on 2006-11-08 06:38:46
I agree, at issue is the word \"influential\". I voted for Visconti because it is one of the first known decks to create a trump; this changes the 52 (or 56) card deck into a tarot, regardless of the particulars of the trumps being depicted, their order, etc. These early decks remain monumental in influence, by introducing still radical images of feminine power and the assent of a fool. These first decks solidified within them a late-Medieval cosmic/world view, accident Platonic, astrological and alchemical ideas; these threads have remained in every existing tarot deck, whether you’re a ‘Marseille purist’ or a nail-biter always waiting for the next, newly published deck to buy. Arguably, each of the multiple choice items has a case for importance and influence; just as all 78 cards gain power when held together a group, so do the lineage of all our tarot decks.
Comment made by Aria! on 2006-11-21 13:27:15
I voted for the Rider-Waite because it was the first deck encoded as soul development with a complete pictorial of the minor arcana which greatly expanded the comprehension of the former \"pips\". This gave a depth of meaning to how daily mundane life is the soul\'s movement through choices which either advance the return to WHO YOU TRULY ARE (expounded upon in the Major Arcana), or maintain one\'s dalliance with the dance of our separation diving deeper and deeper into our delusion of who we are not.
Even though the tarot has been misused for fortune-telling experiences, the RW deck help refocus the useage back to its original purpose as an unbounded book mapping our return HOME to spirit-in beings in the human form rather than as sinners hoping to be externally redeemed. Tarot opens the avenue to talk with your universal self for how to redeem yourself. I think this focus shift was a grand influence, indeed!
All to Love,
Comment made by Alek on 2008-07-14 16:47:22
I cannot afford the *real* ones, so I'm always looking for good reproductions.
They were designed, after all, for decadent card-playing, and there is nothing like sitting around with between 100 and 10,000 of your closest friends, in the clothing of the Middle Ages (note: I did not say 'costume') playing any of the old card games - I mean there were dozens of proto-bridge games using tarot cards (the difference is the Fixed Trump concept. The Magick aspect is a 19th Century thing, despite what Mr. Kaplan and others may claim.
Comment made by Lol on 2008-08-15 10:44:07
It's a pity that RW is so influential, it's too stylised and of course inaccurate in the fact that in trying to make the taro conform to the victorian ideal of a all encompassing occult system, two cards have been exchanged, cards number 8 and 11. I like RW because it's so pretty but at the end of the day it's the marseilles tarot that has influenced just about every pack produced since the 15th century.
Comment made by MythOS on 2008-09-24 19:55:07
I learned on a Marseille Deck, then graduated to the Thoth and eventually ended up with a number of RW clones. The RW itself does not appeal to me and the closer a deck tries to copy the RW style the more I lose interest. The symbolism of the RW is more accessible, hence its popularity, but I've always found Harris' artistic interpretation of the symbolism to be more provocative.
Comment made by Black Abyssians on 2009-04-01 14:39:40
Whether you like it or not (and I am not a fan of A.E. Waite), I consider the Rider-Waite the KJV of Tarot. Because it is the most common and usually the beginners deck for most users, it would have to be considered the most influential.
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