A Luxury Edition of the Tarot de Marseille

Grimaud Paris, a card-making house founded in 1848 and acquired by Cartamundi in the 1990s, relaunched in 2024 as a brand of luxury gaming objects. The Tarot de Marseille N°400 sits at the core of that relaunch.

Grimaud's tarot heritage runs deep: the house acquired the Tarot d'Arnoult — created in 1748 — in 1891, and Paul Marteau redrew it in 1930. The new edition continues that line. Creative direction was led by the agency GoodPeopleWander — identity overhaul, illustrator curation, packaging — and the studio was chosen for the tarot.

Renewing without reinventing

We worked from 18th-century decks — some held at the Bibliothèque nationale de France — softening the lines, neutralising the figures, lightening the palette, without erasing the structural memory of each card.

Laetitia Barbier, a specialist in cartomancy and art history, brought guidance that was light but decisive. Less a strict iconographic supervision than an attention to the symbolic weight of each card — letting it breathe without overloading it with a contemporary hand.

Seventy-eight cards, drawn by hand then vectorised

Each card was redrawn by hand, colourised, then fully vectorised. The process runs across all 78 cards — 22 major arcana and 56 minor in four suits (cups, swords, wands, coins) — with no shortcut. The original structure of each composition is preserved: the eye finds the tarot it knows. It is the details that shift: a less angular line, a figure rendered less gendered, a slightly raised tone.

Eight colours carry the whole deck, plus a gold-foil pass. Each was chosen to hold with the other seven — a matter of palette as much as of line. Direct tones, far from the standard four-colour process, let each shade be tuned as close as possible to the original references.

Restraint as a stance

The tension of the project lives in the constraint: 78 compositions already known, already charged, where every departure from tradition has to justify itself. Drawing to accompany rather than to sign demands a restraint that barely shows. That is precisely the point. The deck has to look as though it always looked this way.

It is probably the hardest gesture to draw: the one you don't see.

The printed object

For the final edition, Grimaud Paris printed the cards on 350g black-core casino-grade stock, in ten colours, with cold-foil and hot-stamping at the corners and on the faces. The varnish, plastic-free, is built for durability. The box was produced by Créanog, a Parisian workshop in the Bastille district, on bespoke crafted paper — it holds the card sleeve and a 141-page booklet written by Laetitia Barbier, in which she sets out the meanings and interpretations of the arcana.

Distribution

The edition retails at €280, distributed at Le Bon Marché Rive Gauche in Paris, Harrods in London, and El Corte Inglés in Spain.