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One card from the 78-card tarot deck. 22 Major Arcana, 56 Minor Arcana. Each equally likely.
A standard tarot deck holds 78 cards divided into two groups. The 22 Major Arcana (numbered 0 through 21) represent archetypal themes: The Fool begins a journey, The Magician channels willpower, and The World completes the cycle. The 56 Minor Arcana spread across four suits of 14 cards each: Wands (fire, creativity), Cups (water, emotion), Swords (air, intellect), and Pentacles (earth, material). Each suit runs from Ace through Ten, then Page, Knight, Queen, and King.
Tarot began as tarocchi, a card game in 15th century northern Italy. The Visconti-Sforza deck, created around 1440 for the Duke of Milan, is among the oldest surviving examples. The 22 trump cards (Major Arcana) served as permanent trumps in the game, outranking all suit cards. The symbolic and reflective use of tarot emerged centuries later, gaining structure through the work of Antoine Court de Gébelin in 1781 and Arthur Edward Waite's influential 1909 deck illustrated by Pamela Colman Smith. Today the cards serve as creative prompts, storytelling frameworks, and tools for structured self-reflection.
Drawing one card from 78 gives each card a 1/78 probability (approximately 1.28%). Drawing a Major Arcana card specifically has a 22/78 probability (28.2%). For a three-card spread, the number of possible unique combinations is 78 × 77 × 76 = 456,456 ordered draws, or 76,076 unordered combinations. The combinatorial richness of the deck means that even with daily draws, repeating an exact three-card spread is extraordinarily unlikely.
Tarot cards make excellent creative writing prompts. Draw three cards from /tarot/3 and ask students to write a short story connecting the three themes. The randomness forces creative connections that students would never make deliberately, exercising lateral thinking and narrative construction. For a probability lesson, have each student draw a card from /tarot and tally Major versus Minor Arcana across the class. The empirical ratio converges toward 22:56 (28:72 percent). The tool requires no accounts, collects no student data, and sets no cookies.
Send this link. They draw their own cards from a freshly shuffled deck.
Daily Inspiration
Jury-selected work from the A' Design Award, presented fresh each morning.
