This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
After years of reading and collecting other people's decks, J. R. Rivera released his own debut title, the Beautiful Creatures Tarot. The deck was illustrated by Jasmine Becket-Griffith, an established fantasy artist whose distinctive figures gave the seventy eight cards their visual identity, and it was issued with a companion guidebook explaining the imagery and how to use the deck for reading.
The collaboration paired Rivera's own decades of practical reading experience, drawn from a personal collection that by then numbered in the hundreds of decks, with an illustrator already known outside the tarot world for a recognizable fantasy style. That pairing gave the deck a following among Becket-Griffith's existing audience as well as among tarot readers looking for a fresh interpretation of the traditional seventy eight card structure.
Publishing a full deck and guidebook together, rather than a reading guide alone, meant Rivera's debut carried both his own accumulated reading experience and an illustrator's complete visual system into print at once. Beautiful Creatures Tarot stands as Rivera's first published work as a deck creator rather than only a reader and collector, marking the point at which his personal practice, built from a single premonition at age thirteen through a collection of hundreds of decks, produced a title of his own for other readers to use.