Anna K

Since 1998, when Anna Klaffinger first started working with tarot, the deck that became Anna K took years to reach the world: a first edition completed in 2004, a self-published release in 2008, and a second edition after that. That timeline, an Austrian artist spending roughly a decade with a personal deck before putting it into wider circulation, suggests a project driven by one sustained vision rather than a commissioned or licensed one. The Rider-Waite-Smith structure underneath keeps the deck legible to anyone who already reads tarot, while the illustration carries whatever is distinctly hers, a contemporary sensibility layered onto a system built more than a century earlier. It suits readers who like the reliability of Rider-Waite-Smith card meanings paired with art that clearly comes from one person's hand rather than a studio or licensed property. Readers chasing novelty in structure rather than style should look at a deck that breaks from Rider-Waite-Smith instead.