I'm coming back to tarot after a long br

You don't have a deck problem yet — you have a "which one do I commit to" problem, and the cards put the stall *after* the buying, not before.

How to actually pick

Structure first, and it's the only technical question that matters:

• Does it follow the Rider–Waite–Smith layout? 78 cards, 22 Major Arcana, four suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles), and *scene pictures* on the small cards. Any deck with that structure is fully compatible with any reading I do for you.
• Decks that don't — Marseille-style, where the minors are mostly pips and symbols — need learned symbol tables instead of pictures. That's a real difference, not a preference, but it's the only one.
• After that it's taste, and taste is not a wrong answer. It's just not worth the hours you're spending on it.

To be straight with you: I read from one deck only, RWS. So any deck that copies that structure works with everything I do here. I can't tell you which edition or publisher is the best buy, and I won't pretend to.

What the three cards say about the return

• Past — Strength, upright. What you left was held with patience and self-control, not a collapse. The long break isn't a failure you have to shop your way out of.
• Present — King of Swords, upright. You're in the head seat right now: comparing, ranking, judging decks. That's an analysis posture, and analysis generates more criteria the more input you feed it — which is exactly the "overwhelmed" feeling.
• Future — Eight of Wands, reversed. Air and fire are both in play, so energy isn't your problem. Reversed, the tendency is a burst that doesn't land: a "this is the one!" that doesn't get back on the table the next morning.

So if the test below comes back warm, that's your deck and you stop looking. If it comes back flat, the flatness isn't the deck's fault — no other deck will fix it either.

Do this before you buy anything: deal three cards from one deck you're considering, for the actual question that brought you back, and read them off the picture alone — no glossary, no app, no looking anything up. If you can say one true sentence about what you actually see, buy that deck and you're done. That's the one thing this reading can't hand you, because the cards don't know what that deck feels like in your hands.

Want me to save this spread to your journal as your re-entry baseline, so you have one fixed draw to compare later pulls against?