A standard tarot deck has 78 cards. Those split into two groups: 22 Major Arcana, which track the big, thematic turns of a life, and 56 Minor Arcana, which cover the ordinary texture of daily living. Nearly every deck you can buy today follows that structure, whatever the artwork on the front.
That’s the whole answer. But the number 78 is doing more work than it looks like, and if you’ve just brought a deck home and you’re staring at a stack of cards wondering what you actually own, the breakdown matters more than the total.
How does the tarot deck break down?
Here’s the arithmetic, laid out plainly:
- 22 Major Arcana — numbered 0 through 21, from The Fool to The World
- 56 Minor Arcana — four suits of 14 cards each
- 78 total
The Minor Arcana is where most of the deck lives, and it’s the part beginners tend to skip. Each of the four suits runs Ace through Ten, then adds four court cards: Page, Knight, Queen, King. Ten plus four is fourteen; fourteen times four suits is fifty-six.
If that structure feels vaguely familiar, it should. A modern playing-card deck is the same skeleton with one court card removed and the Major Arcana dropped entirely — 52 cards, four suits of 13. The Joker is the surviving ghost of The Fool.
What are the 22 Major Arcana?
The Major Arcana are the cards people picture when they picture tarot: The Tower, The Lovers, Death. They’re unsuited, individually named, and numbered in a rough sequence often called the Fool’s Journey — the idea that card 0 walks through the other 21 and comes out changed.
In order: The Fool, The Magician, The High Priestess, The Empress, The Emperor, The Hierophant, The Lovers, The Chariot, Strength, The Hermit, Wheel of Fortune, Justice, The Hanged Man, Death, Temperance, The Devil, The Tower, The Star, The Moon, The Sun, Judgement, The World.
One wrinkle worth knowing early, because it will confuse you otherwise: Strength and Justice swap places between deck traditions. In the Rider-Waite-Smith deck and its many descendants, Strength is 8 and Justice is 11. In the older Tarot de Marseille, Justice is 8 and Strength is 11. Neither is a misprint. If your deck disagrees with a book you’re reading, this is usually why.
And a note on Death, since it’s the card that makes people flinch when it turns up: in practice it is read as an ending making room for something else, not as a warning about anyone’s life. Tarot readers have been saying this for a century and it’s still the first thing anyone needs to hear.
What are the 56 Minor Arcana?
Four suits, each with its own territory:
- Wands — drive, creative heat, the thing you want to start
- Cups — feeling, relationship, what you’re attached to
- Swords — thought, conflict, the stories you tell yourself
- Pentacles (sometimes Coins or Disks) — money, body, work, the material floor under everything
Suit names vary by deck. Wands show up as Rods, Staves, or Batons; Pentacles as Coins or Disks. The meanings travel intact.
Within each suit, the numbered cards move from the Ace — a suit at its most raw and undirected — through to the Ten, which is that suit fully expressed, for better or worse. The Ten of Cups is a family in a doorway. The Ten of Swords is a person face-down with every one of them in his back. Same position in the sequence, wildly different weather.
The court cards are the part almost everyone finds hardest, and it’s worth saying plainly that this is normal. Page, Knight, Queen, and King can be read as people in your life, as parts of yourself, or as stages of getting good at something — the Page still learning, the King able to teach it. Most readers land on one of those readings and hold it loosely.
Why 78? Where the number comes from
Tarot did not begin as a divination tool, and knowing its actual history makes the deck easier to hold honestly.
The cards appeared in northern Italy in the mid-1400s as a card game — tarocchi, or trionfi, “triumphs,” which is where the word “trump” comes from. The Visconti-Sforza decks painted for the ruling family of Milan around the 1440s are the oldest substantially surviving examples. Players added a fifth suit of trump cards to an existing four-suit deck. That fifth suit is what we now call the Major Arcana, and the game is still played in parts of Europe.
The divinatory turn came roughly three centuries later. In 1781, the French writer Antoine Court de Gébelin published an essay claiming the cards preserved ancient Egyptian wisdom. He was wrong — the Egyptian story has no evidence behind it and was never more than an assertion — but it was enormously influential. Within a decade, Jean-Baptiste Alliette, publishing as Etteilla, released the first deck actually designed for fortune-telling.
The deck most people picture came much later still: the Rider-Waite-Smith deck of 1909, illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith under the direction of A. E. Waite. Its real innovation was giving every Minor Arcana card a full scene rather than an arrangement of pips — the Three of Swords is a pierced heart, not just three swords. That single decision is why beginners can read the deck at all, and it’s why almost every deck sold since has copied the approach.
Smith was paid a flat fee and went largely uncredited for decades. Her name belongs on the deck, so it’s worth using it.
Do all tarot decks have 78 cards?
Most do. Some don’t, and here’s when the count changes:
Oracle decks are not tarot. They have no fixed structure — an oracle deck might hold 30 cards or 60, with whatever themes its creator chose. They’re a different tool. Nothing wrong with them, but if you bought something with 44 cards, you bought an oracle deck.
Some modern tarot decks add cards. A creator might include an extra court card, an alternate version of a Major, or a blank card for the reader to fill in. The Thoth deck, designed by Aleister Crowley and painted by Lady Frieda Harris, is 78 cards but ships with three different versions of the Magus in some printings, which trips up people counting carefully.
Some decks include a “significator” or title card. These aren’t meant to be read; they’re packaging. Set them aside.
And then there’s The Happy Squirrel — a card that doesn’t exist, invented as a joke on the television show Twin Peaks, which has been cheerfully adopted by enough deck creators that a few decks now genuinely include it. Tarot has a sense of humor about itself more often than outsiders expect.
How is tarot different from other symbol systems?
Tarot sits alongside a handful of other frameworks people reach for when they want language for something they can’t quite name — angel numbers, astrology, the I Ching. What they share is a fixed vocabulary you consult rather than invent.
What makes tarot distinctive is the 78-card constraint itself. You cannot get an answer that isn’t already in the deck. That sounds limiting and is actually the point: the fixed set forces you to sit with a card you didn’t want instead of scrolling until you find a reading you like. The limit is the feature.
Used well, tarot is a thinking tool. It gives you a prompt and a picture and asks what you make of it. That overlaps with how the more grounded manifestation methods work — externalizing something so you can look at it from outside your own head.
Used badly, it becomes a way to outsource decisions you already know the answer to. Both are available in the same deck.
How many cards do you use in a reading?
Far fewer than 78. Common spreads:
- One card — a daily focus. Genuinely enough, and the best place to start.
- Three cards — most often past/present/future, but situation/action/outcome is more useful and less fatalistic.
- Celtic Cross — ten cards, the classic large spread, and much too much for a first month.
Nobody lays out the full deck. If you’re new, pull one card a day for a few weeks and write down what you thought before you looked anything up. That habit will teach you more than memorizing 78 definitions.
Frequently asked questions
How many tarot cards are there in total?
78 — 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana.
How many Major Arcana cards are there?
22, numbered 0 (The Fool) through 21 (The World).
How many Minor Arcana cards are there?
56 — four suits of 14, each running Ace through Ten plus Page, Knight, Queen, and King.
How many cards are in each tarot suit?
14, in every standard deck.
Is tarot the same as a deck of playing cards?
Not the same, but related. Both descend from the same family of four-suited European decks. Tarot kept a fifth suit of trumps and a fourth court card; playing cards dropped both.
Do I need to memorize all 78 cards?
No. Most readers learn the deck slowly, through repetition, and keep a reference nearby for years. Starting with the 22 Majors is a reasonable on-ramp.
Does a bigger deck mean a better deck?
No. Extra cards are a design choice, not an upgrade. Pick a deck whose art you actually want to look at — that matters far more than the count.
Where to go from here
Seventy-eight cards is a lot to meet at once, so don’t. Shuffle, pull one, and let it be a question rather than a verdict. The deck will still be there tomorrow with seventy-seven more.
If you want somewhere else to wander in the meantime, the free tools here are a decent place to poke around.
Stay woke, stay soft. — Willow 🌙