A Closer, Borderless View of the Same Old Scenes

The Morgan-Greer Tarot is a seventy eight card deck created by Lloyd Morgan and Bill Greer and published by U.S. Games Systems in 1979, seventy years after the Rider Waite Smith deck it builds on first appeared in London in 1909. It keeps that earlier deck's full Major and Minor Arcana structure and its Golden Dawn and Rider Waite Smith trump order, Strength at eight and Justice at eleven, while reworking how each scene is composed: Morgan-Greer's cards are known for close up, borderless illustration that brings the traditional scenes nearer to the viewer than the Rider Waite Smith deck's own framed compositions, cropping in on the central figures rather than showing a full scene at a distance.

That close cropped approach places Morgan-Greer among the wave of tarot decks published in the 1970s that kept the Rider Waite Smith deck's underlying structure and card meanings while giving its imagery a new visual treatment, rather than inventing new settings or renaming its suits the way several later decks in this catalogue do. Read upright and reversed, it remains one of the more widely used decks built directly on that 1909 structure rather than adapting or departing from it, published by the same house, U.S. Games Systems, that would later issue Deviant Moon Tarot and the Golden Dawn Tarot decades apart.