Do protection spells always work?

No — and more usefully: nobody can tell you, including the cards.

A few honest layers:

Tarot doesn't cast. A Rider–Waite deck has no spell in it. The images sit in a 78-card system about situations, motives, and what tends to follow from a choice. It can't install a ward, and it can't report back on one. If a spread "confirms" your protection, what's actually speaking is the deck's ordinary grammar — the Fool's optimism, the Chariot's sense of control — read as if it were a status report. That's projection, not evidence.

Spells specifically belong to folk magic, hoodoo, folk Catholicism, Wiccan-style practice — different systems with their own rules. Tarot's honest position on them is neither "they work" nor "they don't": that tradition claims effects; material science has no mechanism to test them; and no method anyone can run will separate a spell's effect from coincidence, timing, and the belief itself doing work.

So what *is* checkable? Two things, and both are real:

1. The felt effect. If carrying the charm makes you calmer, you sleep, you check the door less, you go to the appointment — that's a genuine change in the world, operating through you. It isn't proof the spell fired; it's proof it did something.
2. The actual risk. Whatever the charm is standing in for — a break-in, a stalker, a landlord dispute, a health worry, a creditor — has a concrete counter. Locks changed, a document filed, someone told who would come if you called, a clinic appointment made, a number saved in your phone.

Those are the only two things a card can't supply and you can verify this week.

The part I can't do is tell you whether something outside the observable world is true. If you want that answered, the honest route is whatever tradition you're in and its own clergy or teachers — not a deck.

So: what is the protection actually for? Name the situation, and the practical step usually turns out to be shorter than the charm.