Do cards lie?

No — and that's not really a compliment to them. The deck is shuffled at random, so a card can't know anything about your week. It also can't lie, because it's not saying anything. What makes a reading feel accurate is the reader: the symbols in Rider–Waite are unusually good at catching ordinary human patterns — stuck, tempted, pretending, starting small — and those patterns are common enough that one of them will fit almost any situation on a given day.

So the honest split is: cards don't lie and don't tell; the interpretation can be wrong, and it's wrong in a recognizable way — it leans toward what you already fear or want, so it feels like confirmation. The safeguard isn't a better spread, it's a step outside your head that something in the world can answer.

If there's a specific question you're holding (a job, a relationship, a decision), say it and I'll draw three cards and read them with that caveat in plain sight.