Forty of the fifty-six minors run Ace to Ten across four suits. Learn what each suit is about and most of a card’s meaning arrives before you have looked at the number.

Wands — drive

Fire. Ambition, energy, enterprise, the itch to start. This is the suit of people who move first and think on the way, and it is genuinely good at what it does. Momentum solves problems that planning cannot.

Its failure mode is five projects at eighty per cent, or a week of adrenaline spent on something that never needed it.

Cups — feeling

Water. Love, friendship, grief, intuition. Everything that happens between people and inside them. The most generous suit in the deck and the least practical.

Its failure mode is wanting a situation to be something it is not and reading the wish as evidence. Cups will happily tell you what you came to hear.

Swords — thought

Air. Reasoning, truth, argument, decision, and the damage all four can do. The pictures are the harshest in the deck and beginners flinch at them, which is a shame, because this is not a suit of punishment. It is a suit of clarity, and clarity is frequently unpleasant.

Its failure mode is thinking a problem to death instead of touching it.

Pentacles — the material

Earth. Money, health, property, craft, study, slow reliable progress. Least dramatic suit in the deck and the one people are most relieved to see.

Its failure mode is security bought at the cost of everything else. Hoarding. Drudgery. A life you can only describe by what it produced.

Read the balance first

Count the suits before you read individual cards. Four Swords in a five-card spread means the situation is being argued about rather than lived. No Pentacles at all in a reading about a job means the money is not the question, whatever the question said.