The Four Suits of the Minor Arcana

Most of a tarot deck is made of ordinary suit cards. They are the link between tarot and the playing cards in a kitchen drawer.

Fifty-six suit cards

The Minor Arcana are the suit cards of a tarot deck. Decks derived from Latin-suited packs typically have 56 of them, 14 in each of four suits. Historically each suit had ten numbered pip cards, from ace to ten, plus court cards.

Wands

Also called batons, staves or clubs.

Cups

Also chalices or goblets.

Swords

Also blades.

Coins

Called pentacles in the Rider–Waite–Smith deck; also disks or rings.

The court

The court cards originally consisted of king, knight and page. Some early decks added female ranks; today four court cards are common in tarot: page, knight, queen and king. Ordinary French-suited playing cards dropped the knight and kept three courts, jack, queen and king.

Pictures on every card

In most older decks the pip cards showed only an arrangement of suit symbols. Illustrating every Minor Arcana card with a scene was a convention popularised by the Rider–Waite–Smith deck, whose minor cards were drawn by Pamela Colman Smith.

The same suits in a modern deck

The Rider–Waite–Smith suits line up with the French suits of a modern 52-card pack: wands with clubs, cups with hearts, swords with spades and pentacles with diamonds. The tarot suits are, in effect, a cousin of the deck used for most card games played today, from patience to poker. If you know tarot imagery but not the card games, a good bridge is a plain explanation of how those four suits and their ranks are used in play, such as this Traditional Chinese beginner's guide to Texas hold'em rules and hand rankings (德州撲克規則與牌型大小); set it beside a tarot pack and the shared ancestry of the suits becomes easy to see.

Card games involving money are regulated and age-restricted in most countries. This site discusses cards as history and design only.

Revised 2026-10-22