Your First Tarot Deck: A Practical Guide to Choosing One and Studying the Major Arcana

Practical First Steps for Studying

Once you have your deck in hand, the best way to start isn't trying to memorize all 78 meanings at once — that usually leads to burnout and a quick loss of motivation. A few gentler approaches tend to work much better:

• Start with the major arcana, one at a time, looking at the image before reading any explanation. Ask yourself: what feeling does this scene give me? What moment in life does it seem to describe? Only afterward should you compare it with the traditional meaning.
• Pull one card a day as a reflection exercise, not a prediction one. The goal isn't to guess what's about to happen, but to use the image as a starting point for checking in on how you're feeling emotionally that day.
• Write down your impressions in a notebook or notes app. Weeks later, compare what you felt looking at each card with what the books say — that's how you build your own, more intuitive reading style.
• Explore cultural traditions to make studying more fun, like the custom some tarot readers follow of calculating a 'card of the year' by adding up the digits of the current year and matching the result to a major arcanum. It's a popular interpretive game, not a fixed rule, but it helps you grow familiar with the numerology behind the cards.

Over time, the minor arcana will naturally start clicking into place, especially if the deck you chose — like a Rider-Waite — already features illustrated scenes that help you sense the mood of each card even before you've memorized its name.

A Journey, Not a Race

Studying tarot is a cumulative, personal process: over time, every reader develops their own way of interpreting the images, blending tradition with intuition. There's no rush and no deadline for 'mastering' all 78 cards — instead, there's an open invitation to return to them again and again, at different moments in your life, and notice how the same arcanum can speak in different ways depending on what you're going through. Choosing your first deck wisely and letting go of myths that only get in the way are already huge steps toward starting this journey with ease — and with the desire to keep going.