Melanie Gendron made this deck for U.S. Games Systems in 1997. It’s been out of print long enough that clean copies are hard to find, and this one is clean. The cards are in mint condition and look like nobody ever shuffled them. If you’ve wanted a Gendron you can actually read with, without babying a fragile collector’s copy, this is the one.
What you get
- The Gendron Tarot: 78 cards, 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana
- Cards measure about 2¾ x 4¾ inches
- Original booklet by Melanie Gendron
- Original U.S. Games Systems box, with light wear at the top flap
- Cards printed © 1997 U.S. Games Systems, Inc.
- Pre-owned. The cards are mint and appear unshuffled. The box shows its age.
About the deck
Gendron calls herself a visionary surrealist, and she built these cards in layers. She started from her own paintings, drawings, fashion designs and photographs, scanned them, and finished each card with digital painting. That’s why the art is so dense: there’s a lot on every card to find in a reading, and more turns up the longer you sit with it.
Under all that, the deck follows the familiar tarot structure. The numbered Minor Arcana use the Rider-Waite pattern, so if you learned on Rider-Waite you can pick this up and read it right away. The court cards are King, Queen, Prince and Princess. The Prince and Princess take the places of the Knight and Page, so the court lines up with a household instead of a battlefield. Every Major Arcana card has a full title bar, and the Fool is numbered 0.
Provenance and tradition
The whole deck is built on the Sacred Feminine. Gendron draws on cultures, peoples and spiritual traditions from around the world, and goddess and animal energies run through all 78 cards. She trained with Amber Jayanti at the Santa Cruz School for Tarot and Qabala Study, and you can see that training in how tightly the deck holds its classic structure under the surreal art. U.S. Games reissued the deck in 2004, and Gendron put out a longer companion book that same year. The cards in this set are printed with the 1997 copyright line and come with the original booklet. They don’t include the later book.
Where it shines
This deck is great for readers who want lots of symbols to work with, and for anyone whose practice centers on goddess work or the divine feminine. It’s also a strong second deck for Rider-Waite readers who want new art on a structure they already know. The Major Arcana are beautiful enough to stand on an altar or anchor a meditation, one card at a time. And for anyone collecting out-of-print U.S. Games decks, a copy with mint cards, the original booklet and the original box is worth adding to the shelf.
