Synesthesia Tarot — 1st Edition
A 78-card modern tarot deck by designer Jana Walker, built on a single idea: strip the traditional imagery down to clean line drawings and let color and symbol carry the meaning instead. Funded on Kickstarter in 2018, raising over $22,000, and printed to a spec most independent decks don't reach.
What you get
- Complete 78-card deck: 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana
- 350 gsm art paper
- Matte black card edging
- Silver foil accents on both cards and box
- Soft-touch matte coating on cards and box
- Sturdy magnetic-closure rigid box
- Card size: 2.75" × 4.75" (standard tarot)
- First edition
- Guidebook sold separately
- Shipping weight: 0.76 lbs
About the design
Walker designed the deck in Photoshop and Illustrator, and it looks good. Deep black backgrounds, restrained color-blocking by suit, spare white linework, hand-drawn glyphs. Each suit carries its own color, which turns out to be the deck's most useful working feature: you can sort a spread by element at a glance without reading a single title.
The card meanings are traditional. What's removed is the scene. Where a Rider-Waite-Smith Three of Swords gives you a pierced heart in a storm, this gives you the essential symbol and nothing else. Walker's stated intent is that you not be distracted by the picture — that the meaning and essence guide the read rather than the illustration.
Read this part before you buy
This is a deck for people who already know the cards, or who are willing to learn them from a book rather than from the images.
If you read by interpreting scenes, minimalist decks will feel like a wall. There's no narrative to decode. Experienced readers generally find that liberating — nothing in the art is pushing an interpretation at you — but a beginner without a reference will stall out fast. The guidebook is a separate purchase, and I'd call it close to mandatory for anyone under a year in.
On the production: 350 gsm is heavy stock, well above the 280–310 typical of mass-market decks. Combined with the soft-touch matte coating, these shuffle with real weight and resist fingerprinting, which matters enormously on a deck this dark. The tradeoff with matte black edging is that it shows wear as pale flecking rather than hiding it, so a bag or the magnetic box is worth using rather than leaving the deck loose.
Who this is for
Confident readers who want a deck that gets out of the way. Design-minded practitioners. Anyone whose altar leans black, silver, and geometric. Fast daily draws, shadow work, and readings where you want your own intuition louder than the artist's. It's also a striking object — first editions of Kickstarter decks tend to hold their value.
