Man, when I first started using this Tarot XX deck, I truly thought I’d wasted my damn money. You know the feeling? It feels cold. It feels like the cards are just random pictures, not actually talking to you. I’ve been doing readings for ages, decades even, but breaking in a new deck is always a fight. You gotta beat it into shape, you gotta make it listen to your specific brand of chaos. It’s not about chanting or crystals; it’s about putting in the damn work until the thing starts bleeding your own energy and your specific life context.
I see people online talking about ‘spiritual cleansing’ with sage and incense. That’s fine if you like smelling like a campfire, but I needed results, not vibes. I needed this deck to tell me things I didn’t already know, and I needed it to stop being so polite. Polite readings are useless readings.
The Ugly Truth of Connection: Day One to Day Twenty
I didn’t treat this deck like a museum piece. If you treat it gently, it will read gently—meaning vaguely. First thing I did after opening the box? I immediately tossed the instruction booklet. That whole thing is just somebody else’s interpretation, and I needed mine.
I grabbed the entire stack and I shuffled. Not the nice little overhand shuffle. I mean violent, aggressive, casino-style shuffling until my hands hurt. I pushed those cards, I bent them a little, I forced them to get loose and stop sticking together. I needed the edges to feel my friction. For the entire first week, I kept them in my jeans pocket all day, letting them pick up the grime, the sweat, and the general mess of my day-to-day life. That embeds reality into the cards.
- I slept with the deck under my pillow for five nights straight. Yeah, it’s uncomfortable and you wake up with card dents on your cheek sometimes. But that forces your subconscious crap onto the paper stock. It makes the deck familiar with your mental noise.
- I handled every single card individually. I stared at the art, ignoring the traditional meaning completely. For the Hanged Man, I didn’t read about sacrifice; I looked at the knot and thought about feeling stuck in traffic. I wrote down my initial, rough, visceral gut feeling before I let myself look up the ‘proper’ meaning. You gotta teach the deck your language.
- I cursed at the cards that felt confusing. If the message wasn’t clear, I literally yelled at the inanimate object and demanded clarity. Sounds crazy, but it breaks the sterile energy.
The Interrogation and The Grind
The first actual reading I did wasn’t for myself; it was for the deck. The standard ‘Deck Interview’ spread. Total necessity, but you gotta treat it like an interrogation, not a friendly chat. I demanded answers to five things: What is your primary purpose? Where are you going to lie to me? What is the clearest way you communicate? What will be our greatest achievement together? And critically: What is the single biggest block in my life right now that you need to fix?
The answers were murky at first. Like pulling teeth. So I kept pushing. For the next four weeks, I committed to a practice that felt like torture: the daily draw, recorded in detail. Every single damn morning, before coffee, before checking my emails, I pulled one single card. I didn’t just look at it and vaguely think about the day.
I had to write down the question (What energy will dominate today?), the card, and then, crucially, at the end of the day, I had to write down what concrete, messy, real-world event happened that matched the card. I forced the connection. If the Tower came up, I looked for the smallest thing that crumbled—maybe it was the coffee machine breaking, maybe it was a massive argument with a client. If nothing crumbled, I forced myself to acknowledge a mental breakdown or a realization that shattered a belief. You gotta train your brain to see the message in the mundane.
Why the Accuracy Started Screaming
I know a lot of people skip the commitment part. They say they’re too busy for a daily draw. Bullshit. You know why I got so damn serious about drilling accuracy and practicality into this specific deck? Because I needed it to stop whispering helpful hints and start screaming survival information, fast.
Just last month, my cousin—the one who works in finance, the one who always looks down on my ‘woo-woo’ stuff—he called me in a panic. He’d invested a huge chunk of his retirement into this seemingly stable, long-term tech venture, but the internal vibes were suddenly rotten. He was losing sleep. He asked me, almost sarcastically, if my new ‘paper toys’ could offer advice.
I pulled the deck, demanding to know what he should do. The cards spit out the 7 of Swords (the sneakiness card) and the 5 of Pentacles, reversed (economic recovery/end of hardship). Normally, I’d read that as “someone is stealing, but things will improve eventually.” Too vague. But because I’d spent weeks forcing the 7 of Swords to equate to very specific white-collar, hidden details, and the 5 of Pentacles (R) to mean a sudden, messy extraction of funds, I focused on immediate retrieval.
I told him to stop asking subtle questions and to demand an emergency withdrawal of his principal immediately, even if it triggered penalties. I pushed him to threaten a legal audit based on the suspicion of misleading documentation. The deck had taught me that the 7 of Swords means you have to beat the thief at their own game. He acted on my advice the next morning. Turns out, the minute he made the aggressive withdrawal request, the whole investment structure started collapsing. He got out 90% of his capital just hours before the entire venture froze assets and declared bankruptcy. The other investors who waited? They lost everything.
That’s why the painful, consistent daily pull mattered. That deck knew the specifics of the financial structure were shady because I trained it for weeks to look past the symbols and into the transactional reality of my life. You want accurate readings? You gotta get messy with the cards. You gotta force them to reflect your ugly, complicated, financial, and emotional reality, not some smooth, idealized vision of the world.
