Three Years Building One Moonlit City

Deviant Moon Tarot is a seventy eight card deck that Long Island artist Patrick Valenza spent roughly three years creating and illustrating alone, published by U.S. Games Systems in 2008. It follows the Marseille and Continental trump order, Justice at eight and Strength at eleven, and keeps the standard Major and Minor Arcana structure while setting every card inside a single invented world, a surreal, gothic dreamscape of a fictional moonlit city populated by masked, wide eyed figures who recur across the deck rather than appearing once and vanishing.

That single sustained setting distinguishes it from decks that adapt existing folklore or religious imagery card by card. The deck's popularity led U.S. Games to issue a Borderless Edition stripped of the standard white card frame, letting Valenza's dreamscape run to the card's edge, alongside a companion book expanding on the deck's own mythology. Read upright and reversed, Deviant Moon Tarot sits within the wave of creator illustrated tarot decks that use the traditional seventy eight card structure as a fixed scaffold for a single artist's invented visual world, an approach shared by later single artist decks even where their imagery and tone differ entirely.