Medici

Londa Marks completes her trio with the Medici: twenty-two majors under the most loaded name in tarot's actual history, the Florentine dynasty whose banking-and-patronage world overlapped the courts where carte da trionfi were born. Marks's range, the digital Crow's Magick, the operative Alchemist's Spell, here the Renaissance register, sketches an indie maker trying the tradition's doors in turn. The name does historical work regardless: a Medici deck gestures at tarot's true origin story, princely commissions and humanist allegory, the trumps as court pageant before they were occult curriculum. Majors-only suits the gesture; the trionfi were the invention, the pips mere inheritance. It suits Marks completists assembling her trio, Renaissance-history readers, majors-only collectors, and students of how indie makers reach for the tradition's founding glamour. The Renaissance decks with real scholarship behind them, Estensi and kin, hold that shelf; the Medici name, as ever, opens doors on reputation alone.