Ravyness Drakon Tarot
Beth Seilonen · Schiffer / REDFeather · ISBN 9780764362392
What you get
- 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana with full courts
- Card size: 3½ × 5 inches
- 176-page companion guidebook
- Rigid box with magnetic closure, 6 × 5.3 × 1.5 inches
- Shipping weight approximately 1 lb 10 oz
- Complete and ready to read out of the box
The outer box is solid. The internal card well is lighter-weight than the shell around it, so a deck bag is a sensible purchase if this one is going to travel in a backpack.
About the deck and the art
Beth Seilonen draws in colored pencil and ink, and the linework carries most of the weight. Backgrounds fill with dense, repetitive mark-making, and the color sits in translucent layers on top of it. The result looks more like illustrated storybook plates than flat digital art.
Two characters recur across all 78 cards: Ravyness, a raven, and Drakon, a dragon. Their relationship runs as a continuous thread through the deck, the two of them moving apart and back together, each one pushing the other toward becoming more of what they could be. The cards sit on Waite-Smith structure underneath the story, so the Ten of Swords is still the Ten of Swords and a reader trained on RWS can pick this deck up and work with it immediately. You can read it cold with no interest in the narrative at all, or you can follow the story and let it inform the spreads.
The emotional register is warm. Seilonen's stated aim across her work is to sit honestly with the dark parts rather than dress them up, and this deck does that while keeping the tone encouraging. If you want a deck that goes for the throat, look elsewhere on the shelf.
Provenance and tradition
Beth Seilonen has been making tarot decks since 2006, starting with the Theban Tarot, and has produced close to a hundred since. Most exist as small independent editions, so the handful that reach wide trade distribution are the ones most collectors can actually get. This is one of those. She holds a BA in fine arts and art education from the University of Maine at Orono, and she built this deck out of her classroom work with high school students on choosing their own direction.
Who this is for
Corvid people and dragon people. Readers who want RWS structure with fresh imagery. Beginners, because the guidebook actually teaches. Anyone doing relationship readings, since a deck built on two beings negotiating their differences gives you unusual traction there. The publisher aims it visually at young adults and up, and it holds that line: nothing in it is inappropriate for a teenager who's asked for their first deck.
