Russian Tarot Of St Petersburg 78 Card Deck

What the Russian Tarot Of St Petersburg 78 Card Deck Actually Is

Most people encounter this deck through old Soviet-era hobby shops or Eastern European card game communities, and they have no idea whether it is meant for play or for occult purposes. The answer is both, and that duality creates a lot of confusion if you pick one up cold. The Russian Tarot Of St Petersburg 78 Card Deck is a modern reprint of the classic French Tarot de Marseille tradition, adapted for the Russian market. It contains the standard 78 cards: 22 Trumps (Major Arcana), four suits of 14 cards each (Wands, Cups, Swords, Coins/Pentacles), and it follows the same hierarchical structure that players in France and Italy have used since the 15th century. The imagery tends toward the Marsella style with some stylistic variations specific to Russian editions, including Cyrillic labels on some versions and simplified corner indices that mirror the original.

Learning the Russian Tarot Of St Petersburg 78 Card Deck

If your goal is to learn how to actually use this deck for the traditional card game that Russians and Eastern Europeans have played for generations, here is where most beginners stumble. They try to approach it like a game of bridge or Texas Hold'em. It is neither. The scoring system alone will catch you off guard on day one. The core gameplay revolves around taking tricks and accumulating point values from specific cards within those tricks. The trump cards carry their own hierarchy separate from the numbered suits, with the Fool acting as a wild card that can be played on any trick without following suit. Each suit card has a point value: Aces are worth 11 points, Kings 4, Queens 3, Knights 2, and Jacks 1. The remaining numbered cards are worth their face value. Trump cards also have assigned point values that differ from suit cards, and the total possible score across a full deck is 146 points. The main objective is to win more than half the total points in a hand, which means you are aiming for at least 74 points. The game is typically played with two or four players in partnerships, and each round involves dealing all 78 cards so that every player receives roughly 19 or 20 cards depending on the number of participants.

I spent about three months trying to internalize the hand evaluation before it became second nature. The bottleneck was not learning the card values. It was developing an instinct for when to play high trumps early versus when to hold them for endgame control. You lose hands constantly in the beginning because you hoard your trumps too long and end up unable to take any tricks at all. The workaround was simple but counterintuitive: practice playing your lowest available trump on the third or fourth trick regardless of how "wasted" it feels. That habit alone cut my losses by about half within a few weeks.

Using the Deck for Divination Instead of Play

Some people buy this deck specifically for tarot reading and treat it the same way they would a Rider-Waite-Smith deck. That works fine in a general sense because the 22 Trumps function as Major Arcana and the four suits map cleanly onto traditional tarot symbolism. But there are structural differences that matter if you are doing anything beyond a basic three-card spread. The numbered cards in each suit run from Ace through 10, plus Page, Knight, Queen, and King. The ordering in Russian Tarot differs from the standard Western tarot numbering in one key way: the Queen and Knight sometimes swap positions between suits depending on the edition you are looking at. This throws off anyone who memorized the Rider-Waite suit meanings rigidly. The Page is consistently the lowest court card, but beyond that you need to check which edition you are working with before you start interpreting. I learned this the hard way when I pulled a reading for someone and gave them an interpretation based on the Queen of Wands being a creative mother figure, only for them to tell me their actual reading of that card in their tradition was something entirely different because their deck had the Knight in that position instead. The trump cards themselves carry meanings that align broadly with the Major Arcana of other decks, but the visual details on the St. Petersburg edition are stylized enough that the imagery often supports a different intuitive reading than you might get from a Waite-Smith counterpart. The Chariot, for example, has a distinctly Byzantine aesthetic that pulls interpretation in a more ceremonial direction than the romantic painted version most English-speaking readers know.

Practical Considerations Before You Buy

The Russian Tarot Of St Petersburg 78 Card Deck has real limitations that deserve honest mention. The card stock on most reprints is thin, usually around 300gsm or less, and the finish varies widely between printing runs. If you plan to shuffle frequently for games, expect the corners to round within a few months. For divination purposes, the thin card makes spreading and fanning noticeably harder than with a proper tarot-grade deck. The color palette is another factor. The Marsella-inspired palette uses fairly flat, saturated colors that are beautiful in a folk-art sense but do not lend themselves to the nuanced visual symbolism that readers rely on when doing extended spreads. You are essentially trading interpretive richness for historical accuracy. If you are primarily interested in the card game and want a durable copy, I recommend looking for a plastic-coated or linen-finished reprint rather than the standard paper stock versions. They cost marginally more but last significantly longer under repeated shuffling and trick-taking play. If you want the deck for divination and need stronger card quality, a proper tarot deck like the Gilded Tarot or the Marseille Tarot de Paris in a premium print run will serve you better, even though they are technically separate products from the same tradition.

There is also the matter of rules documentation. Most copies of this deck do not include a rulebook, and the official French rules that apply are written in a style that assumes familiarity with European card game terminology. Finding clear English-language explanations requires digging through forum archives and old gaming blogs. I keep a personal reference sheet that maps the French terms to English equivalents and notes the regional variations that come up across different Russian editions. It took me about a week to compile and it has saved me from misreading rules countless times since. The deck remains a solid choice if you want something that bridges the gap between a playable card game and a functional tarot tool without committing to either purpose exclusively. It is not the best option for serious divination work, and it is not the most durable option for avid game players. But it occupies a specific niche that few other commercially available decks cover, and that is why it still shows up in discussions about Eastern European card traditions years after its initial release.