Tarot de Marseille

Tarot de Marseille predates Rider-Waite-Smith by centuries and follows a different visual logic: the Minor Arcana cards (the equivalent of our Wands, Cups, Swords, and Pentacles) show a repeated pattern of the suit symbol — five swords crossed, seven cups arranged in a row — rather than a small illustrated scene. There's no picture telling you a story; the number and suit are the whole message, and the reader supplies the interpretation from tradition and training rather than the artwork itself.

That makes Marseille genuinely harder to learn from than Rider-Waite-Smith for a beginner, which is exactly why RWS became the more common starting point once it was published — but Marseille readers often value it precisely because it doesn't pre-package a mood the way an illustrated scene does.