Twenty-Two Keys of the

Susan Kay Topa made this deck, listed simply as Twenty-Two Keys, on her own and outside any publishing house, growing it out of an illustration project in 1999. The archive's own write-up reads like an origin story rather than a critique: walking into an occult bookstore that year knowing next to nothing about tarot, looking for a deck that could serve an illustration assignment, and coming away instead with a first and formative encounter with the cards. Self-published, independent-system decks like this rarely reach a wide readership, and this one's reputation rests on its origin rather than on any wide circulation of the cards. What survives is that origin, illustration work turning into tarot practice, a common enough route into deck-making but rarely told this directly. It suits readers drawn to outsider and personal-project decks, majors-only collectors, and anyone curious how an illustrator's day job can turn into a tarot practice. Readers wanting a deck with a following behind it should look to the published systems.