Gilded Tarot Royale

Ciro Marchetti's digital style divides readers the way gilt frames divide gallery-goers: too much for some, exactly the point for others. The Royale is Marchetti's own second pass at his Gilded Tarot, the deck that made his name, reworked in 2020 with another decade and a half of craft behind it. The signature register survives intact, a carnival glamour of brass, clockwork and stage light, but the compositions are denser and the finish more luxurious, which is presumably what Royale is meant to announce. It reads as a full seventy-eight-card deck with a showman's confidence: every card is staged rather than sketched. That theatricality is the honest test for whether it belongs on your table. Readers who want quiet, woodcut interiority should look elsewhere in the canon; readers who want spectacle with their symbolism, or who are tracking Marchetti's arc edition by edition, are the audience this deck was gilded for.