A standard tarot deck contains 78 cards: 22 Major Arcana and 56 Minor Arcana. That split is not decorative. It is the reason a tarot reading can tell you both what season of life you are in and what to do on Tuesday.

The short answer

  • 78 cards total
  • 22 Major Arcana — numbered 0 (The Fool) through 21 (The World)
  • 56 Minor Arcana — four suits of 14 cards each

Four suits multiplied by fourteen cards gives 56; add the 22 Majors and you reach 78. Almost every deck you will meet — Rider–Waite–Smith, Marseille, and the great majority of modern art decks — keeps this count, which is why a reading learned on one deck transfers to another.

The 22 Major Arcana: the weather

The Majors describe conditions you are living inside rather than choices you are making this week. The Tower is not "you will drop your phone." It is a structure coming down. Death is almost never literal; it is the end of a chapter that has already stopped feeding you.

When several Majors land in one spread, the reading is telling you the question is bigger than you framed it. That is useful information on its own.

The 56 Minor Arcana: the days

The Minors are the texture of ordinary life — conversations, money, effort, feelings. Each suit runs Ace through Ten, then four court cards (Page, Knight, Queen, King).

Wands — 14 cards

Drive, creativity, momentum. Wands ask what you want badly enough to move for.

Cups — 14 cards

Feeling, relationship, intuition. Cups ask what you actually feel, as opposed to what you have agreed to feel.

Swords — 14 cards

Thought, truth, conflict. Swords are the suit most often misread as doom; more often they are describing a thought loop you are stuck in.

Pentacles — 14 cards

Body, work, money, home. The slowest suit, and the one that asks what is sustainable.

Why the number is worth knowing

Because it sets your odds, and odds shape interpretation. Drawing a single card gives you a 22-in-78 chance — a little over one in four — of pulling a Major. So a three-card spread that comes up all Majors is genuinely unusual, and worth pausing on. A spread of all Minors is not a boring reading; it is a reading telling you this is workable at the level of daily choices.

What about jokers, extra cards, and 79-card decks?

Many modern decks ship with one or two extra cards — a title card, a maker's card, sometimes a bonus card the artist added. These are not part of the traditional 78 and most readers remove them. If you are counting your own deck and land on 79 or 80, that is almost always why.

FAQ

How many cards are in the Major Arcana?

22, numbered 0 through 21, beginning with The Fool and ending with The World.

How many cards are in each tarot suit?

14 — Ace through Ten, plus Page, Knight, Queen, and King.

Is a tarot deck the same as a deck of playing cards?

They share an ancestor, but no. Playing cards have 52 with four suits of 13 and no Major Arcana. Tarot's 78 includes the 22 Majors and an extra court card per suit.

Do I need all 78 cards to read tarot?

No. Plenty of readers begin with the Majors alone to learn the arc before adding the Minors.

See the full deck

You can browse every one of the 78 cards — upright and reversed meanings, keywords, and how each reads in love, work, and daily questions — in our complete tarot card index. If you would rather start with a card than a list, draw a daily card and read its page.

Tarot is for reflection and perspective, not fixed prediction. What the cards describe is a pattern; what you do with it stays yours.