the enchanted tarot falls in the RWS school, the candyfloss is a roughly marseille inspired majors only deck. pinks and purples and whites, a mix of winter and valentine's day. regarding the candyfloss - i wondered if i could make a majors-only deck work and i still don't know. if i can, it wouldn't be this one. i love the feel of it as a handmade art object, but the visual style is not something i tend to read with. it's a cute deck. and visually i'm really drawn to both cute and goth stuff, but never end up reading with it. there has to be some... neutrality to the style. either realism or universality, i can't really explain it. candyfloss just doesn't have it.
i have a history with the enchanted tarot. i don't remember which edition mine is - the 20th or the 25th anniversary edition. the production value was very very bad, it took a lot of modding to be able to use it. i trimmed it down from its epic size, hoping a smaller surface will be less floppy. i covered the fronts of the cards with book foil so they don't dent as easily. i made a whole new box to match the new size and thickness of the deck. i love the images and really wanted to make them work. they feel like they belong with folk tales, they have that transportative quality. somewhere, someone is having a symbolic adventure encoding a people's wisdom...
alas, they're just too dark. i'm not sure what happened to them and when (i guess somewhere between editions). i recently saw someone showing the first edition of the deck and the images were bright and perfectly legible. with my deck there's a lot of squinting and i can't really make any use of it in the evenings. i can only parse the images in bright daylight. i did enjoy it in those moments. i definitely started to read "within" the images more, versus despite them, or just using them as a bonus. but i'm not sure it's a candidate for a forever deck, if i can't use it comfortably in the evenings (or generally in lower lighting conditions).
to sum up, both the decks were kind of a disappointment and i found myself doing far less with the cards compared to january. (although it might be january itself was an outlier?)
