Welcome to Tarot Tuesday, this is a new segment on my blog where I discuss all things tarot/oracle including deck reviews. Tarot is a big part of what I do and I decided what better way to express that than sharing. Today will be the first of many segments and if you would like me to discuss a certain topic or review a specific deck, let me know. If I can get a copy of it I will.
That being said, this idea came out of a busy day as usual. I pulled my daily cards and it hit me…why not make this an entire series here on The Bibliophagist. Let’s get started than shall we?
Soul Cats Tarot 
Author: Leeza Robertson
Illustrator: Adam Oehlers
Published: March 8th 2022
Publisher: Llewellyn
Rating: ♥ ♥ ♥
Buy the book: Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Llewellyn
Disclaimer: I was given a copy of this Deck from the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This in no way impacts my review.
When beginning a review of a tarot deck, the first thing I always look at is the box and presentation. This deck comes in a nice, sturdy, magnetic closure box. I really enjoy when a deck comes in something like this. This box is sturdy enough for me to carry the deck with me and not have to worry about possible damage to the cards themselves.
After opening this beautiful box, we next come to the guidebook. I really love how Llewellyn makes their guidebooks. It is a high quality and the pages are thick, almost as if they are magazine pages, glossy finish and all. It begins with a basic introduction typical for any tarot deck. It talks about cleansing your deck, activating it, shuffling, etc. Moving from that, the book goes in depth into the major arcana. I love how the image for each card is enlarged and covering the entire left page. This allows those learning the deck to really get a good look at the small details. There is information about interpreting the cards as guidance or protection readings. Of course, the minor arcana come next. In this guidebook each suit is grouped together, making each card easy to find.
The cards themselves are gorgeous! Cats have always held a important role to many spiritualists so it is nice to see such beautiful drawings. The card stock is nice and pliable, easy to shuffle. Looking through the cards, there are some typical RWS (Raider Waite Smith) symbolism while others deviate, thus making this a great deck for those who wish to test their intuitive reading skills a little more. This is where the book becomes most useful, if you are used to a RWS deck, this gives you some of that but also brings the creators interpretations.
I will mention that the devil card does have small human figures that do appear nude. I wanted to be sure to mention that because I know some people do not like nudity in their tarot decks. As I review decks and other items on my blog, I will always keep in mind what may trigger people. For example, nudity, blood, etc.
The tower card was great, cats are always knocking things off counters etc. What a lighthearted way to represent this card. There are many cards that I really enjoy in this deck but there is one card specifically I look for in every deck I purchase…nine of swords. When I bought my first deck, I was told that one should look through the cards in depth and find one that really calls to them. For me, that was the nine of swords card. In this deck that card is very typical, we see a cat in bed with the swords behind them. This is a very common depiction so it is nothing extremely special but it does a good job at exuding the emotions of the card. 
All in all, this deck is nice for those who love cats, or simply prefer animal decks over those with people in them. There are a few cards that depict cats with mice in their mouths etc but that is a natural order and some people may not be comfortable with that. For those who are new this might be a good deck if you are able to pull on your intuition and read some of the other signs while relying on a few standard symbols from the RWS system.