The Decision spread is a tarot layout of 5 cards, used for the weighing of two options and the path between them. It is a layout designed to set two choices side by side and read each to its end.
How it is laid out
In this arrangement the reader deals five cards: the situation as it stands, where option A leads, where option B leads, what must still be considered, and the recommended course.
Tarot spreads are conventions of interpretation rather than fixed rules: each fixes a set of positions, and the card that falls in a position is read in the light of what that position is held to mean. Some layouts, such as the Celtic Cross, are long established in the twentieth-century reading tradition; others, including several themed modern spreads, are more recent inventions. The Decision spread is described here as one such interpretive framework within that tradition.
Spreads built around comparing two possible courses of action side by side have an older cartomantic parallel in the general divinatory practice of drawing parallel card sequences to weigh alternatives, a structural idea common across card-divination traditions rather than specific to tarot; what a modern "Decision" spread adds is the explicit labelling of positions for each option's likely outcome and cost, a level of structured comparison not documented in older, less formalised cartomantic practice. As with several of the other modern themed spreads recorded in this atlas, no single documented author or publication can be credited with inventing this specific format, which functions as a general template rather than a historically fixed method.