The Shadowscapes Tarot deck was published in 2010 by watercolour artist Stephanie Pui-Mun Law, with a companion book written by tarot expert Barbara Moore, editor for the Llewellyn tarot publishing company. Shadowscapes is based around the traditional art and meanings of the Rider-Waite-Smith Tarot deck, but Law's lavishly detailed watercolour illustrations for each card, accompanied by evocative poetry and narrative from the guidebook, elevate Shadowscapes to something positively numinous in its beauty.
Shadowscapes has reversible card backs, but the guidebook does not give any guidance for card reversals, leaving that as an exercise for the reader. The card art features a fusion of elements from mythologies of both East and West, and each of the four suits has a signature colour palette and category of animals depicted alongside humanoid and fairy characters. The Wands suit, signifying elemental fire in this deck, has a rosy orange colour palette, and it features foxes and lions prominently. The Swords suit, signifying elemental air, has a lilac purple colour palette, and its signature animals are birds, especially swans. The Cups suit, representing elemental water, uses a palette of cool blue, and its signature animals are fish (especially golden carp) and sea turtles. Finally, the Pentacles suit, standing for elemental earth, has a forested green colour palette, and its signature animals are western-style green dragons and chameleons.
Each suit clearly tells a continuously developing story, from Ace to Ten, with each beat of the plot laid out transparently before the reader: the Swords describe a progressive series of personal conflicts and loss, concluding with an ultimate downfall from grace, and all beginning with a stubborn impasse where there should have been healthy communication. The Cups depict a blissful romance surviving despite occasional difficulties and enjoying a "happily ever after" resolution of family contentment. The Wands show creativity and innovation that outpaces the stamina and ambition of the artist, resulting in both triumphant popularity and an eventual condition of being overburdened by a surplus of demand for the artist's works and the artist's guidance as the master to an apprentice. The Pentacles show a rags-to-riches story, personal destitution and abandonment transformed into success, stability, security, and satisfaction.
Many of the cards have subtle recurring motifs which cause certain cards to appear to be in conversation with each other, or to be separate episodes of an ongoing shared story. A Ruby-throated hummingbird] appears on many cards, for example, as does a macaque monkey, and there are many floral motifs which express shared themes between cards which the Rider-Waite-Smith system does not often associate with each other. The use of flowers as symbols does not appear to consult either Lady Mary Wortley Montagu's Le Langage des Fleurs or Japanese hanakotoba as a source for meanings, however, and Moore and Law only explain a few of the flower symbols in the companion book, leaving the rest for the reader to guess.
If you are curious about tarot but are only willing to put money into trying out one deck, let this be the deck you pursue first. Two factors working in tandem make this tarot deck both my personal favourite of any I've ever used, and the strongest deck currently on the market for a new reader to use as a learner's deck. First, the companion book characterises the meanings of the cards in evocative, highly narrative prose and poetry, setting a memorable scene in the readers mind, which contributes greatly toward actually memorising not just the meanings of the cards, but the patterns in meaning, such as how all of the Fours express a condition of stasis or stability in some way, and how all of the Tens express completion and perpetuity. Second, the art is devastatingly lovely. The cards with sorrowful meanings are actually properly sad to look at, enough to invoke the reader's own sympathy for the characters depicted in the scenes. The cards with joyful meanings visually convey elation with such perfect clarity that they virtually render the guidebook unnecessary. The cards with ambiguous emotions are so expressive and exquisitely detailed that there is no room to misunderstand their nature; the complexity is palpable. Law's art has a maximalist, hyper-detailed quality that keeps the eye roving all over the card, finding new Easter eggs every time you look again. Every card is so visually distinct and memorable, compared to every other card, that the meanings sink in easily, and they are saturated with personal nuance when they do.
Despite the "shadow" in the title Shadowscapes, the overall tone of the deck is benign and genial but not prone to toxic positivity; traditionally negative cards are clearly negative in this deck, and not given some spin to soften up their emotional impact. It does not have any "edgy" quality like one would find in shadow work decks like Patrick Valenza's Deviant Moon Tarot (2015) or Abigail Larson's Horror Tarot (2022). While some cards do depict female figures as artistic nudes, Shadowscapes is not even slightly erotic or provocative in tone, and the nudity is more implied than blatant. The only major criticisms I have personally found of Shadowscapes on tarot discussion spaces are that Law only depicts light-skinned humanoid figures, without any racial diversity to be found in this deck; this is common in most tarot decks, so it doesn't have much force in these discussions, as criticism goes.
Shadowscapes was the first tarot deck I ever acquired for my own personal use. I visited a Barnes and Noble bookstore near my university campus, I think it was in 2011 or thereabout, where foreign language texts were shelved right next to the metaphysical and occult books section, and right beside a Latin language textbook I wanted to buy, Shadowscapes caught my attention, and I knew immediately from the cover art that I wanted it to come home with me. Reading this deck feels like having a personal conversation with it; the cards might as well be speaking complete sentences, being as optimally designed as they are to incite acute apophenia and familiarity in the reader. When friends ask me to read for them on a whim, this is the deck I reach for.
In 2013, the mobile app developer The Fool's Dog released a Shadowscapes Tarot mobile app for both Android and Apple devices, and it is very nicely set up to allow a tarot enthusiast to read the cards from a smartphone, if they wish not to carry a physical deck around with them. To anyone who already has Shadowscapes and wishes to see more by this artist, I must also recommend two other decks by Stephanie Pui-Mun Law: the 44-card Tree Keepers Oracle (2023) deck with companion book by Angi Sullins, and the Verdance Tarot (2025) with contributions by tarot and I Ching expert Benebell Wen.
For a tarot artist with a very similar (and comparably gorgeous) art style, I recommend the works of Paulina Fae (pen name of Paulina Cassidy): the Magicmakers Tarot (2025), Phantasma Tarot (2021), Spiritsong Tarot (2017), The Faerie Guidance Oracle (2012), Joie De Vivre Tarot (2011), and Paulina Tarot (2009). Of these, I feel that Spiritsong has the most innately compatible art style to Shadowscapes, as it uses nonhuman animal figures exclusively on elaborate fantasy backgrounds with flower symbolism and similar colour palettes in each suit to those used in Shadowscapes.
Iron Noder 2025, 17/30