Fairy Ring

Anna Franklin and Paul Mason had already made the Sacred Circle Tarot when they built this sixty-card oracle, and the follow-up's founding decision is the one worth noticing: no pretty Victorian fairies. The Fairy Ring draws on the older, stranger fairy lore, the mischievous and morally ambiguous spectrum the folklore actually records, rather than the gauzy flower-fairy register the deck's shelf neighbors default to. Llewellyn published it in 2002, and it remains one of the more folklorically serious fairy decks in the catalog. Sixty cards puts it well past the standard oracle count, enough room to give the fairy court its full range of temperaments. Read it as folklore in card form: these are beings with their own agendas in the source material, and the deck respects that instead of domesticating it. It suits readers who come from the folklore side, pagan practitioners working British and Irish traditions, and anyone who found the Victorian fairy aesthetic too sweet to trust.