Why Does Rider-Waite Have So Many Derivative Decks? The Story of Tarot's Most Influential Template

BY NICOLE LAU

Walk into any metaphysical shop or browse any tarot retailer and you will encounter a striking phenomenon: the vast majority of tarot decks available look, in their basic structure, like the Rider-Waite-Smith deck published in 1909. The same 78-card structure. The same illustrated pip cards. The same basic compositional approach to the Major Arcana. The same four suits with the same court card hierarchy. Hundreds of decks—from the whimsical to the scholarly, from the mass-market to the limited-edition artisan—all built on the same template.

Why? The answer involves history, copyright law, cultural momentum, and the genuine genius of Pamela Colman Smith's original design.

The Historical Reason: RWS Was First to Illustrate the Pip Cards

Before 1909, tarot pip cards—the Ace through Ten in each suit—were not illustrated with scenes. The Tarot de Marseille tradition, which dominated European tarot for centuries, showed pip cards as abstract arrangements of suit symbols: five cups arranged geometrically, seven swords in a pattern, three wands crossed. Reading these cards required numerological and elemental knowledge; they did not tell visual stories.

Pamela Colman Smith's innovation was to illustrate every pip card with a scene—to give the Five of Cups a grieving figure standing before spilled cups, to give the Seven of Swords a sneaking figure carrying stolen blades, to give the Three of Wands a figure gazing at ships on the horizon. This innovation made the deck dramatically more accessible: readers could interpret the cards intuitively, from the scenes, without prior esoteric knowledge.

This accessibility was revolutionary. For the first time, tarot was genuinely learnable by anyone—not just initiates with esoteric training. The RWS deck democratized tarot, and that democratization created the mass market that made the proliferation of derivative decks possible.

The Legal Reason: Copyright Expiration

The Rider-Waite-Smith deck entered the public domain in the United States in 1966—fifty-seven years after its 1909 publication. Once the copyright expired, any publisher could legally reproduce the original images or create derivative works based on them without paying licensing fees. This legal change opened the floodgates: suddenly, the most accessible and widely-known tarot template in the world was free to use.

The timing was significant: the 1960s and 1970s saw an explosion of interest in tarot, astrology, and alternative spirituality in the United States and Europe. The copyright expiration coincided exactly with the moment when demand for tarot decks was growing rapidly. Publishers could now produce RWS-based decks without licensing costs, and they did—in enormous numbers.

The Cultural Reason: RWS Became the Standard

By the time the copyright expired, the RWS deck had been the dominant tarot template for over half a century. Generations of practitioners had learned tarot from RWS-based books and decks. The symbolic language of the RWS deck—the illustrated pip cards, the specific compositional choices, the color symbolism, the figure types—had become tarot's visual language in the popular imagination.

This created a powerful cultural momentum: new practitioners expected tarot to look like RWS because that was what they had seen. Publishers responded to this expectation by producing RWS-based decks. Teachers taught from RWS-based decks because that was what their students had. The standard reinforced itself, generation after generation.

The Design Reason: Smith's Template Is Genuinely Brilliant

Beyond history and law, there is a simpler reason for the RWS template's dominance: it works extraordinarily well. Smith's illustrated pip cards are a genuine design innovation—they communicate complex psychological and situational information through visual storytelling with remarkable efficiency. The scenes are specific enough to evoke strong responses but general enough to apply to a wide range of situations. The symbolic language is rich enough to reward deep study but accessible enough to read intuitively from day one.

Deck creators who want to make tarot accessible to new practitioners naturally gravitate toward the RWS template because it is the most effective design solution to the problem of making 78 cards readable without prior esoteric knowledge. The template's dominance is, in part, a testament to Smith's genius.

What the Proliferation Means for Practitioners

The existence of hundreds of RWS-derivative decks has both advantages and disadvantages for practitioners:

Advantages: Any skill developed with one RWS-based deck transfers immediately to any other. The symbolic language is consistent across the tradition. Books, courses, and resources written for one RWS deck are applicable to all. The community of RWS practitioners is enormous, making it easy to find teachers, study partners, and resources.

Disadvantages: The proliferation of derivative decks can create the illusion that all tarot is RWS-based—obscuring the existence of genuinely different traditions like Thoth and Marseille that offer different and sometimes more powerful approaches to specific questions. It can also create the collector trap: the sense that acquiring more RWS-derivative decks is equivalent to deepening one's practice, when in fact depth comes from sustained engagement with a single deck rather than breadth of collection.

Beyond the Template

Understanding why the RWS template dominates tarot helps practitioners make more intentional choices about their practice. If you are working with an RWS-derivative deck, you are working within a tradition with a specific history, a specific set of strengths, and a specific set of limitations. Knowing this allows you to supplement your RWS practice with other traditions—Thoth for esoteric depth, Marseille for historical grounding—rather than assuming that the RWS template represents the whole of what tarot can do.

For practitioners ready to understand the RWS system at a deeper level—how its 78 cards function as an interconnected whole rather than 78 separate illustrated meanings—78 Cards, Infinite Paths: A Systems Approach to Tarot provides exactly this systems-level perspective, revealing the architectural logic that makes the RWS template so enduringly effective.

For practitioners building a structured daily practice with their RWS-based deck, the 30-Day Tarot Practice Workbook provides a framework for developing genuine card literacy—the kind of deep familiarity with a single deck that no amount of deck collecting can replicate.

The practice of tarot journaling—recording daily pulls, tracking card patterns, noting how your understanding of the RWS symbolic language deepens over time—is the single most powerful tool for developing genuine fluency within the tradition. The High Priestess Tarot Journal provides a dedicated space for this kind of sustained practice documentation.

For those who feel called to deepen their journey with the cards, the 30-Day Tarot Practice Workbook offers a structured path to building daily card literacy, while the 52-Week Tarot Journey extends that practice over a full year of reflection. The Tarot Journaling Prompts provide the perfect companion for those journaling sessions, and the Shadow Work Tarot guide opens the door to the deeper, more introspective layers of the RWS system that Smith's scenes so masterfully depict.