tarot

Dragon

Specialty dragon-themed tarot with artistic symbolism and usability.

by Peter Pracownik · 1996

dragon-lorefantasyspecialtyartistic

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The Canon's read

Tarot Canon's own assessment, written for this catalog.

Peter Pracownik painted the Dragon Tarot as what the review honestly names a specialty deck: dragon lore across all seventy-eight cards, traditional symbolism deliberately traded for a complete draconic world, artistically unified and, the review confirms, still usable. Pracownik's fantasy credentials made the deck a nineties staple, and its trade-off is the specialty deck's constitution: readers fluent in standard imagery must translate, while dragon devotees receive a homeland. The catalog's dragon shelf now has both poles: the Toraldo-Baraldi deck's cross-cultural mythography and Pracownik's unified fantasy vision, scholarship and world-building respectively. Specialty decks earn keep by conviction, and this one's has held for decades of print. It suits dragon people first and completely, fantasy-art collectors of the nineties wave, readers who enjoy translating meaning into a coherent other-world, and anyone whose first symbolic language was scaled and winged. Realists are free to consult a deck with fewer treasures hoarded in it.

From the archive

An excerpt from a review at the Aeclectic Tarot archive, in the original reviewer's voice.

The Dragon Tarot, by nature, is a specialty deck. It will appeal to those of us who find dragons and dragon lore appealing. You won't find traditional visual symbolism here - but you will experience a deck that is artistically...

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