The original bordered printing of Deviant Moon Tarot. 78 cards measuring 2.75" x 5.13", on the slick, heavily laminated stock U.S. Games uses across their tarot line, boxed with Valenza's companion booklet. Overall package runs roughly 5.2" x 2.9" x 1.4".
What you get
All 78 cards — 22 Major Arcana with the Fool at 0, Strength at 8, Justice at 11, and four suits of Cups, Swords, Wands, and Pentacles with King, Queen, Knight, and Page in each. The deck also carries two non-tarot extras: a title card and a card about Valenza and his background. The booklet gives a description and both upright and reversed interpretations for every card, and includes the Lunatic Spread, a ten-card layout arranged in a circle to echo the full moon. Card backs are reversible, printed with crescent moons on a dark ground, so a reversal never announces itself before you turn the card.
About the artwork and this edition
Valenza's method was drawing first, then photographic manipulation. Each card began as a finished drawing, scanned and then layered with photographed texture. The garments across the deck — capes, boots, hats, trim — were built from photographs of nineteenth-century tombstones, digitally bent and reshaped. The architecture came from photographs Valenza took at an abandoned institutional building on eastern Long Island; rotted doors, windows, and walls became the castles, factories, and cities standing in the middle distance. The figures are drawn flat, in a deliberate playing-card idiom, with heavy shadow modeling, and Valenza has cited ancient Greek art as the influence on how he stylized them.
This is the bordered printing, which is the one to buy if you want the card titles. Each image sits in a frame with the card name below it, exactly as the deck was originally published in 2008. A borderless printing also exists that enlarges the art to the card edge and drops most of the titles. The bordered version is the more practical reading deck of the two, and the one that most of the deck's long reputation was built on.
Provenance & tradition
Full 78-card structure descended from Rider-Waite-Smith, with RWS-based scenes in the Minor Arcana. Valenza takes real liberties with composition, and a fair number of Minors resolve to imagery of his own rather than a Pamela Colman Smith staging, so standard tarot references apply without applying cleanly. You can learn from this deck. You will occasionally have to meet it halfway.
Its standing is worth mentioning: Aeclectic Tarot's readership voted Deviant Moon the top tarot deck of all time, and it has held a cult following since release. That is a popularity result, not a quality proof, but it tells you the deck has been read seriously by a lot of people for a long time.
One honest note on content. The deck's imagery is surreal, institutional, and bodily distorted by design, and Valenza's own account of its making includes photographs from an abandoned psychiatric hospital. The title leans on the older sense of lunatic, moon-struck. Some readers find that framing productive for shadow work and some find it unwelcome.
Who this is for
Shadow work, dream journaling, grief, and readings that need to tell the truth rather than soften it. Suited to readers with some tarot under their belt, though the printed card titles make it far more workable for a newer reader than the borderless printing. Collectors will want this edition for the original framing. It reads especially well in the dark half of the year.
Not a first deck, and not a surprise gift.
