Yes, as you can see, the suits have been renamed from the traditional Cups, Swords, Pentacles, and Wands to, respectively, Primordialism, Dynamism, Pattern, and Questing in the style of the four Avatar Essences. This is a bit disorienting to someone accustomed to the Tarot, and since I've never liked the Mage "essences" in the first place I really dislike having to call the Five of Cups the "Five of Primordialism". Yuck. Fortunately, the art on the cards still suggests the original Tarot forms, so you can just use the original names once you get used to the often odd interpretations.

For example, in the suit of "Dynamism", the swords on the cards are represented variously as actual swords, daggers, nails, clubs, candles, axes, scissors, saws, and my personal favorite, hypodermic syringes. This works very well with the whole World of Darkness vision displayed throughout the deck.

I was very impressed with the careful work done on the cards to preserve actual tarot symbology, which is apparently mostly borrowed from the most well known of modern tarot decks, the Rider-Waite deck (Illustrated by Pamela Coleman-Smith). The similarities are most easily seen when examining the decks side-by-side. Poses, mood, and symbols are often (but not always) clearly derivative of the Waite deck, but are reinterpreted into the gothic-punk mythos. For example, the Knight of Pentacles rides a motorcycle instead of a horse, and the Hermit leans against a lamppost and carries a flashlight rather than a lantern, while managing to look even more desolate somehow then his earlier incarnation.

In general, male and female images are present with about the same frequency on the cards that don't seem to imply one or the other. For example, two of the Pages are female, one is male, and one is, um, unidentifiable.

This is a description of each suit, with my opinions of the art - you should certainly take this with a grain of salt, naturally, as your taste may vary.

Major Arcana:

Numbered from 0 to 21. Strength is VIII and Justice is XI, which is consistent with the Waite-Smith deck but not with some older "traditional" decks which have it the other way around. All of the card names are standard except for "The Moon" which is "Luna" and "The World" which is "Gaia", in keeping with WOD mythos. The art is very good, though human figures tend to be on the stylized side. There is nudity (male and female) depecited on six of the cards, if you're the type who cares about such things. Thankfully, the women seem reasonably proportioned, though all the characters shown are painfully, painfully thin (I can't look at "Lovers" or "Death" without wincing!). "The Devil" is represented by an evil Nephandish tentacled spiral enveloping a man in a suit and a werewolf. My favorites include "The Fool", "The Mage" (of course), "The Chariot" and "The Hermit", but all of the major arcana is well done.

Suit of Wands (or Questing, if you insist):

Overall well done, with more emphasis on shading then the last cards. They have a very "comic book" style. Since this is the suit corresponding to the Traditions, there is one card for each of them, including the Ahl-i-Batin, plus the four royal cards. Some of them, like the Verbana on a chopper, break the stereotypes a little. I think some of the royal cards depict WOD characters, but I wouldn't know. Careful examination of the cards is rewarding, as you can often find the runes for "Questing" and/or the Traditions associated sphere worked in somewhere surreptitious. You could build a character concept off of any of these cards. My favorite is the Queen of Wands- note the sunflower, cat and guitar and then compare this to the Waite version.

Suit of Cups (Primordialism):

Cobb's style is definitely the most unusual of the artists featured here, with a liquid, nightmarish quality and a repulsively ugly cast of characters. Personally, it's not to my taste, though it does fit best in the suit devoted to the Nephandi. The "cups" are represented by open-topped skulls in most cards. The best cards are the royals, featuring some truly unusual chaps in their natural habitat.

Suit of Swords (Dynamism):

I think the artwork in this suit is the best in the deck - looking at it now, every card sends a shiver down my spine. MacDougall uses a heavy emphasis on thick lines and a dark palette, and does an excellent job of conveying the insane world of a Marauder. The III, VIII, IX, and X of swords all are genuinely spooky cards. They are even more effective when you read the accompaning meanings in the included booklet.

Suit of Pentacles (Pattern):

This suit of the Technocracy has lot of good techo-magic flavor. The facial expressions are a bit on the bland side, but I suppose you can't expect much else from the soulless servants of science. The IX, X, and King of this suit all ooze sinister agents of the Paradigm. The creative side of the Conventions is particularly well depicted in the VIII and Queen of Pentacles.

Well, okay now you say, but what about GAME use? Well, the accompaning booklet tries, but it only devotes 24 actual pages to ways to put the cards in the game, and these are _really_ small pages - probably about 3 pages at most of full sized text. This includes three different card-reading spreads and a few very brief notes and examples of how to use random cards as a creative inspiration for character creation, paradox or other plot effects. The rest of the booklet is devoted to reprinting the cards in miniature form along with meanings and associations to WOD concepts. This is useful if you want to try and interpret an in-game reading, though you can probably do just as good making it up.

Which is basically what you'll be doing with these in a game, since the booklet is rather short of new ideas for you. But, honestly, the ideas for this product are contained in the cards themselves, with lots of fascinating details and interesting character ideas. Creative Storytellers can surely come up plenty of ways to use these to spice up a campaign.

At 25 US dollars, this deck is only slightly more expensive then a typical good-quality tarot deck. Still, that's about the same price as a full-sized game supplement, so you might want to think carefully about the value you'd get from these in your game. If you're a collector, however, of either White Wolf products or tarot decks in general, I highly recommend these.

Style: 5 (Excellent!)
Substance: 3 (Average)