Marseille Vintage Tarot

Before Rider Waite Smith, there was Marseille.

The Marseille Vintage Tarot is an antiqued reproduction of one of the most historically significant tarot decks ever created — based on the original work of Nicolas Conver, master card-maker of Paris, ca. 1760. The Tarot de Marseille tradition predates the Rider-Waite-Smith deck by over a century and a half, and its woodcut-style imagery — bold, symbolic, and stripped of the later pictorial elaborations — represents tarot in its most direct and archetypal form.

This edition reproduces Conver's original imagery with a deliberately aged aesthetic: warm parchment tones, distressed coloring, and a well-loved appearance that feels like a working deck pulled from a 18th-century Parisian cabinet de curiosités. For readers and collectors who appreciate historical depth, this is tarot as it was before the occult revival reimagined it.

The 127-page guidebook provides instruction on reading the Marseille tradition, which differs meaningfully from RWS-based approaches — particularly in the pip cards of the Minor Arcana, which carry symbolic weight through composition and number rather than illustrated scenes.

What's Included:

• 78-card Marseille Vintage Tarot deck — based on Nicolas Conver's original 1760 Tarot de Marseille
• 127-page guidebook for reading in the Marseille tradition
• Boxed set — 5.00 x 2.95 x 1.70 inches

Why This Deck:

• Historical source material — Nicolas Conver's 1760 Tarot de Marseille, one of the most significant surviving historical decks
• Authentic vintage aesthetic — aged parchment tones and distressed coloring throughout
• Marseille tradition — bold woodcut-style imagery, pre-RWS symbolism, distinct reading approach
• 127-page guidebook — covers the Marseille method for readers transitioning from or comparing to RWS
• Lo Scarabeo quality — published by Italy's most respected tarot house

Deck Details:

• 78 cards + 127-page guidebook | Published 2023
• Based on Nicolas Conver, Paris, ca. 1760 | Publisher: Lo Scarabeo / Llewellyn
• ISBN: 9780738775012

For serious tarot students, historical tarot collectors, Marseille tradition readers, and anyone who wants to understand where tarot truly began.