The Tarot de Marseille is not a deck but a pattern: a standard arrangement of the seventy-eight cards, with a settled set of images, titles and numbering, that crystallised among the woodblock card-makers of northern Italy, Lyon and Marseille and was produced by many workshops over two centuries. Named surviving examples include those of Jean Noblet in Paris around 1650, Jean Dodal in Lyon around 1701 and Nicolas Conver in Marseille in 1760, the last of which became the model for most modern reproductions. The cards are printed from woodblocks and coloured through stencils in a limited palette, which gives the pattern its characteristic flat, bold look. The pips of the four suits are non-scenic: they show the suit signs arranged in geometric patterns, not illustrated scenes, which is the single clearest difference from the later English decks.
The Marseille pattern keeps the trump numbering the later Rider-Waite-Smith deck would depart from: Justice at VIII and Strength at XI, the order found in the earliest surviving Italian and French decks, which Waite reversed in 1909 to fit the Golden Dawn's own astrological correspondences. Modern practitioners of the pattern have also actively restored it: the artist Alejandro Jodorowsky and the cardmaker Philippe Camoin, a descendant of a historical Marseille card-making family, published a heavily researched restoration of the Nicolas Conver 1760 deck in 1997, correcting what they argued were centuries of accumulated printing errors and colour drift, a modern scholarly intervention into a pattern otherwise defined by anonymous workshop production over two centuries.