Would the Hermetic tarot be a good deck

Hermetic Tarot can work as a next deck, but the pull toward it right now is nostalgia, not structure — and if you start it while the current deck is still half-learned, it stalls.

Three cards, one for each step of the move:

• Past — Strength reversed. What you built so far you built by pushing past your own hesitation about it. Self-doubt was the tutor, and it got the job done.
• Present — Six of Cups reversed. The attraction to the Hermetic deck is currently emotional, not structural: it's the charm of the imagery and the promise of a fresh system, pointed at the deck you're leaving. The pull is real, but it isn't yet a reason — and it doesn't tell you the current deck is finished.
• Future — The Hanged Man reversed. The tendency if you keep the current pace is another stretch of "maybe next deck." Reversed Hanged Man is stalling with the suspension attached: the perspective shift you keep meaning to have, postponed until the deck in your hands feels finished, which it never quite does.

Here's what the Hermetic Tarot actually asks of a learner: it renames and reassigns the Majors (Fool as Air, Magician as Mercury, High Priestess as Moon, Empress as Venus, Emperor as Aries, Hierophant as Taurus) and drops the court cards entirely. So the real question isn't whether you like it — it's whether you can afford to relearn your Majors from the ground up and lose the courts you may still rely on.

If you check one Major you already know cold — pick the one you'd read fastest — against that deck's own written entry, and the Hermetic description still holds the card's meaning for you, then yes: the deck is a live key and starting it costs you a re-reading, not a blank slate. If it reads like a different card, the system asks more than you currently want to spend, and finishing the deck in your hands first is the cheaper road.

Before you buy it: take one Major you already know well, read the Hermetic Tarot's own entry for that same card, and compare. What comes back is the real price of the switch — that card is the sample, not the brochure.

Which deck are you on now? If it's a Rider–Waite or a Marseille, the answer shifts somewhat.

Want this spread drawn as a picture, or saved to your journal?