I wanted to invent a divination system with tools that were cheap and easy for people to buy. My previous book had involved normal six-sided dice, so playing cards were an obvious choice as well. However, the magic of the cards very quickly took over the process.
Card games and their history are an enormous part of world culture and every country has their own: Japan’s beautiful Hanafuda flower cards, the Egyptian and Middle-Eastern game of Basra, Vietnam’s two-colour Chess cards, and Greenland’s Voormsi, which uses 36 cards of the standard 52 deck. That’s before we even get to the folklore and power of American Poker in the Old West or the modern casino.
Playing cards were never going to be a blank slate for me (or anyone) to write on; they have their own character which cannot be ignored. They bring a power to divination that can’t be found anywhere else. This became obvious as soon as I started testing this system with friends, and they repeatedly asked for more readings “with that playing card deck you use.” Of course it wasn’t about the exact deck (a deliberately cheap mass-market plain deck of 52 cards with jokers) but the power of what the Clubs, Diamonds, Spades, and Hearts have come to mean to us all.
That said, there is no fixed system for playing card divination. A few such as Lenormand or Etteilla have been recorded historically but very few readers end up using the definitions precisely as written when performing kitchen table fortune-telling. Nearly everyone modifies their own (and each of the modern books in the Bibliography section say this too). So it has been an honor to ride the power of the cards while also adding new stories to them. I hope that many people will pick up their own decks and find great experiences in the shuffle.