Some things in life aren’t planned. They arrive because they need to exist. In that same way, our first deck, The Companion Tarot wasn’t supposed to become a published deck. It wasn’t designed with the market in mind, it wasn’t focus-grouped or trend-tested. It started as something much simpler and infinitely more complicated: a Christmas gift for my wife Michelle. A way to hold onto love after experiencing two big losses.
This is the story of how that gift came to be. How a Boston Terrier named Ganz, nearly 15 years of companionship, approaching the end of his life, became the heart of 78 cards. How I learned to design a tarot deck in five weeks with absolutely no previous experience. And how grief, when it finally arrived, transformed what I’d made into something I never expected.
If you’ve found your way to The Companion Tarot, whether you’re considering it for yourself or simply curious about where it came from, this is the story we wanted you to know. Because this deck isn’t just cards. It’s a piece of our life. And understanding that changes how you might connect with it.
Key Takeaways
- The Companion Tarot was born from double grief and the need to create something meaningful. We lost Ganz in October 2025, and only three days later, we lost our baby… In that devastating time, I needed something creative to channel the pain, and I wanted to give Michelle something that would keep Ganz’s spirit close. The deck became both things at once.
- The deck was created in five weeks with no design experience, working in secret at 5:30am. I knew tarot deeply from running this blog, but I’d never designed anything. Every morning before our children woke up, I worked on cards in our shared office, hoping Michelle wouldn’t catch a glimpse and ruin the surprise. Some cards came easily. Others fought me for days.
- Technical disasters nearly derailed everything. Blurry images. Inconsistent frames. Upload failures that lasted for days. I had to redo every card multiple times, find stronger internet to upload massive files, and pay for expensive express shipping just to get the deck in time by Christmas. Nothing went smoothly, but it got done.
- Michelle’s first reaction on Christmas morning was: “We need to share this with the world.” The Companion Tarot wasn’t meant to be a product. But the moment she saw what the deck could mean for other people who love their companions, or those who’ve grieved them, who want that bond present in their practice, she knew it couldn’t stay just ours.
- The Companion Tarot is grounded in RWS tradition while honoring the bonds we share with our animal companions. This isn’t an abstract reimagining of tarot. If you can read Rider-Waite based decks, you can read this one immediately. The symbols are preserved, and the structure is intact. What’s different is the visual language: Boston Terrier imagery that centers loyalty, presence, and unconditional love.
Before the Deck: Ganz and Michelle
To understand The Companion Tarot, you need to understand Ganz. 🙂
Michelle had Ganz for about 8 years when I came into their life about seven years ago. Until he took his very last breath, he was almost fifteen years old. Think about that for a moment. That’s most of someone’s adult life. That’s a relationship that spans moves, career changes, heartbreaks, life transformations. Ganz wasn’t just Michelle’s pet. He was her Constant. Her witness in everything. The one who was there through everything.
Boston Terriers have these expressive faces. Big eyes that seem to understand more than they should. Ganz had this way of looking at you that felt like being truly Seen. No judgment, no agenda, just pure Presence.
Any time someone in the family felt unwell or sick, Ganz would come and sit next to that person and put his little paw on their leg. Or just put both front paws on them, to support them, to let them know he was there.
Ganz 💜
He was always so Present and supportive.
When I joined their little family, I learned quickly that loving Michelle meant loving Ganz. And honestly, that wasn’t hard at all. He had this personality, this warmth, this stubborn Boston Terrier energy that made you laugh even on difficult days. He was getting older when I met him, already slowing down, but his spirit… his spirit was enormous.
Michelle has always been drawn to tarot. Not in a fortune-telling way, but in a reflective way. Tarot as a tool for self-understanding. Tarot as a mirror. Tarot as a way to sit with questions that don’t have easy answers. She understood, and knew, that the cards aren’t about predicting the future. They’re about understanding the present.
Watching her work with tarot taught me so much about the practice. About how powerful it is to have something tangible to hold when you’re processing something intangible. About how symbols can unlock what words can’t reach.
As Ganz got older, as his health started to decline, I watched Michelle prepare herself in the way you do when you know what’s coming but can’t stop it. But she was never really completely ready to let go of him.
When we lost Ganz in October 2025, the grief hit hard. And then, only three days later, we lost our baby as well, in the middle of the pregnancy.
I don’t have full words for what those first weeks were like. Two profound losses arriving together, reshaping everything. I had an extremely hard time with the baby loss. I kept breaking apart without any control over when or where it would hit me. I knew I needed to work on something creative, something to help me grieve and transform all that pain into something meaningful.
At the same time, my heart ached for Michelle and her sorrow. I wanted to do something for her too.
And that’s when the idea came to me: I could pour my grief into something creative to keep my sanity. And at the same time, I could make something beautiful for Michelle. Something that would show her that Ganz’s spirit didn’t have to disappear. That his spirit could keep living.
What if I could give her something that kept him a little bit closer? What if there was a way for Ganz to still be part of her tarot practice, present in every shuffle, every pull, every reading? And that’s when I decided to make her a tarot deck for Christmas.
The Impossible Idea: Making a Tarot Deck
Here’s what you need to know about my qualifications for creating a tarot deck: I had the knowledge, but not the skills.
Running Tarot of the Fool with Michelle meant I was deeply familiar with the Rider-Waite-Smith system. I understood the symbolism, the structure, the meanings behind every card. Years of writing about tarot, studying spreads, and working with the cards had given me solid foundations.
But knowing tarot and designing tarot are completely different things.
I’m not an artist. I’m not a graphic designer. I hadn’t studied illustration or taken courses in visual composition. I didn’t know the first thing about print specifications, card dimensions, or how to actually get a deck manufactured.
What I had was understanding of what the cards meant, an idea of what I wanted to create, and a deadline.
The idea: create a tarot deck featuring Boston Terrier imagery that Michelle could use. A deck that would remind her of Ganz every time she pulled a card. A deck that would be just theirs, in a way no mass-produced deck could ever be.
The deadline: Christmas. Which gave me approximately five weeks to finish the deck, and 10 days afterwards for the deck to be delivered in time.
Looking back, I can see how ambitious this was. Professional deck creators spend months, sometimes years, developing their work. They have artistic training, software expertise, experience with production. I was starting the design process from zero with less than forty days.
But grief does strange things to motivation. When you’re carrying pain that heavy, you’ll do almost anything to transform it into something meaningful.
So I started.
The Five-Week Journey: Learning Everything from Nothing
I’m going to be transparent with you about how The Companion Tarot was actually made, because I think there’s value in knowing that meaningful things can come from imperfect processes.
Week One: Research and Reality Checks
The first week was about translating what I knew into what I could actually create.
I already understood the Rider-Waite-Smith system deeply. Running a tarot blog means you live with these cards, study them, write about them constantly. I knew what every symbol meant, why Pamela Colman Smith made the choices she made, how the imagery supported intuitive reading.
But knowing the meaning and creating the visuals are entirely different challenges.
I knew that if I was going to create a deck Michelle could actually read with, it needed to be grounded in this tradition. I wasn’t trying to reinvent tarot. I was trying to translate it through a new visual language while keeping its symbolic integrity intact.
According to Labyrinthos Academy, the RWS deck’s enduring influence comes from its accessible imagery that makes intuitive reading possible. That accessibility was exactly what I needed to preserve.
I also researched print-on-demand options for card games, learning about specifications, dimensions, and what would be required to actually produce physical cards. Understanding these parameters gave me concrete constraints to work within.
Weeks Two and Three: Building the Visual Language
This is where the actual creating happened.
I would start working on card designs every morning around 5:30, to get a little bit of time before our children woke up at 7. I couldn’t work on cards all the time, because Michelle and I share an office, and she could see the screens. If she caught a glimpse, the surprise would be ruined.
So I worked in those early morning hours. Quiet house. Everyone asleep. Just me and the grief and the cards slowly coming to life.
Some cards I made easily, almost like they wanted to exist. Others fought me for days…
The Minor Arcana was particularly challenging because there are so many cards. Fourteen cards per suit, four suits, each needing distinct imagery that maintained both RWS foundation and Boston Terrier presence. The Wands needed fire energy. The Cups needed emotional depth. The Swords needed that sharp, airy clarity. The Pentacles needed earthiness and stability.
I learned more about tarot in those weeks than in all previous years. When you have to translate every detail of every symbol in every single card, you have to truly understand what it means.
Every card required decisions:
- How do you show the Fool’s journey with a Boston Terrier without losing the archetypal meaning?
- How do you translate the emotional weight of cards like the Three of Swords into imagery that honors both the pain and the companion animal theme?
- How do you maintain consistency across 78 cards when you’re learning your process as you go?
The secrecy added pressure. I couldn’t ask Michelle for feedback. I couldn’t show anyone who might mention it to her. Every decision was mine alone, made in those quiet pre-dawn hours while the house still slept.
Week Four: Technical Disasters
Week four was supposed to be simple. Upload the designs. Order the deck. Wait for it to arrive.
It was not simple.
When I uploaded my card designs to the print-on-demand system, I immediately saw problems. All the cards were too blurry. Some of the frames were extending into the bleed area, which meant they’d be cut off in printing. I realized with a sinking feeling that I’d saved all the cards in too small a resolution.
Every. Single. Card.
I had to go back and resize all 79 cards, adjusting frames, fixing resolution, making sure everything fit properly within print specifications. Work I thought was finished had to be redone from the beginning.
Those early morning sessions became longer. More urgent. Christmas was approaching, and I was losing days to technical problems I hadn’t anticipated.
Week Five: Production and Prayer
The final week brought fresh disasters.
When I uploaded the newly resized cards, I noticed something else: the frames weren’t consistent. Some were wider, some were narrower. Also, the number frames and name frames on each card had different sizes too.
I’d been aware of this while making the cards, actually. But at first I thought it looked fun. My idea was that each card of the “Ganz deck” should be unique and a little bit different…
But seeing them together in the production preview, different frame sizes looked really not good. It seemed so inconsistent. Unprofessional.
So I went back into the editing software. Again. And worked on all the cards. Again…
When I finally finished and tried to upload, the files were huge. Proper resolution meant massive file sizes. The upload kept blocking, refusing to complete, failing over and over. For three or four days straight, I tried and failed to get the cards uploaded.
I was running out of time.
In the end, I had to find a better, stronger internet connection. I took my laptop somewhere with faster upload speeds, held my breath, and watched the progress bar crawl forward. It finally worked!
In the end, the cost of express shipping for one deck was way too high. But I couldn’t risk not getting the deck in time for Christmas after spending five weeks working so hard on these cards, so I did it.
And then I waited.
When Michelle opened The Companion Tarot on Christmas morning, I watched her face as she realized what she was holding. Recognition. Emotion. Ganz looking back at her from every card.
She went through the deck slowly, card by card, seeing how the imagery honored the RWS tradition while centering the Boston Terrier spirit she loved so much. Seeing Ganz’s presence woven through the Fool’s journey, through every suit, through all 78 cards.
And then she looked up and said: “We need to share this deck with the world!”
I agreed immediately!
Because she was right! Every meaningful deck connects to the person using it through personal association. The RWS imagery carries meaning because readers build relationships with those symbols over time. An indie deck offers a different doorway to the same practice, a new visual language that might resonate with readers in ways traditional imagery doesn’t.
And I thought about other people who love their companions. Other people who have Boston Terriers, or who love dogs in general, or who simply connect with imagery that centers loyalty, presence, and unconditional love.
The Companion Tarot wasn’t just our story. It was a story that could belong to anyone who understood what it meant to love an animal, or to grieve one, and to want to keep that connection alive.
So we decided to share it. Before sharing it, we decided to redesign and add to the symbolism of every single card, so we worked on that together for additional few months.
According to Little Red Tarot, one of the beautiful aspects of the indie tarot movement is that it allows for decks created from genuine personal experience rather than market calculation. Decks that carry real stories. Decks that were made because they needed to exist, not because a focus group suggested they’d sell.
That’s what The Companion Tarot is. And that’s why we made it available.
Together, Michelle and I created the 109-page digital guidebook that accompanies the deck. This wasn’t just card meanings copied from somewhere else. It was our shared understanding of each card, how the imagery in this specific deck connects to traditional interpretations, and guidance for working with the unique visual language we’d created together.
What Makes The Companion Tarot Different
Let me tell you about the deck itself, because the story matters, but so does what you’re actually getting.
Grounded in Rider-Waite-Smith Tradition
The Companion Tarot isn’t an abstract reimagining of tarot. It’s a translation of the RWS system through Boston Terrier imagery. If you know how to read Rider-Waite based decks, you can read this deck immediately. The symbols and structures are there, and the meanings are preserved.
This was intentional. We didn’t want to create something that required learning an entirely new system. We wanted to create something that readers could pick up and use, with the familiar foundations intact but a fresh visual presence that might speak to them differently.
For readers who want to bond with their tarot deck in a personal way, having imagery that emotionally resonates matters. The Companion Tarot offers that for anyone who connects with companion animals, with Boston Terriers, with dogs in general, or with imagery grounded in loyalty and love.
79 Cards: The Full System Plus Access
The Companion Tarot contains 79 cards:
- 22 Major Arcana cards capturing the Fool’s journey
- 56 Minor Arcana cards across all four suits (Wands, Cups, Swords, Pentacles)
- 1 QR code card that links to the 109-page digital guidebook
The guidebook isn’t just a brief insert. It’s a comprehensive companion to the deck, explaining each card’s imagery, connecting it to traditional meanings, and offering guidance and reflective questions for interpretation. When you scan that QR code, you’re accessing everything you need to work deeply with these cards.
Two Editions Available
We offer The Companion Tarot in two editions:
- 79 premium cards
- Deep purple velvet drawstring bag for storage
- QR code access to the digital guidebook
- 79 premium cards
- Magnetic book-style box for elegant storage and display
- QR code access to the digital guidebook
Both editions feature the same cards and guidebook access. The difference is in how you store and present your deck, and the price point that works for you. Some readers prefer the tactile intimacy of the velvet bag, and this version is about $30 CAD cheaper. Others love the substantial presence of the magnetic box (which is about $30 CAD more). Both versions protect your cards and honor the deck.
Indie Deck, Print-on-Demand
The Companion Tarot is produced through a print-on-demand service that allows independent creators to offer professional-quality cards without massive upfront inventory investments.
This means a few things:
- Each deck is printed when ordered
- Quality is consistent and professional
- We can keep the deck available without the pressures of traditional publishing
For those interested in the indie tarot community and supporting independent creators, Tarot Stack is a wonderful resource for discovering decks made with passion rather than purely commercial motivation.
The Companion Tarot and the Philosophy of Tarot of the Fool
If you’ve spent time on tarotofthefool.com, you probably know our philosophy: tarot is for everyone, and you can read for yourself.
We don’t believe tarot should be gatekept. We don’t believe you need special gifts or secret knowledge. We believe the cards are mirrors, tools for reflection, and that anyone willing to sit with them can learn to read.
We also believe tarot is like coffee.
Just like coffee drinkers range from espresso purists to decaf lovers, tarot readers exist on a spectrum. Some incorporate deep spiritual practice, seeing the cards as sacred tools connecting them to something greater. Others use tarot purely as a psychological mirror, a way to access their own intuition and examine their thoughts. Both approaches are completely valid. And everything in between is valid too.
You don’t have to be “spiritual enough” to read tarot. You don’t have to believe in anything specific. You just have to be willing to sit with the cards and see what they reflect back to you.
The Companion Tarot embodies this philosophy. It’s accessible. It’s grounded in tradition while offering fresh imagery. It comes with a comprehensive guidebook that teaches as it guides. It’s designed for readers at any level, from those just beginning their tarot journey to experienced practitioners looking for a deck that feels different. 💜
And it carries deep Meaning. Not arbitrary meaning invented for marketing purposes, but Meaning born from real love and real loss. When you hold The Companion Tarot, you’re holding something that came from a genuine place. 💜
What Readers Have Told Us
Since making The Companion Tarot available, we’ve heard from readers who’ve connected with it in ways that continue to move us.
Some are Boston Terrier lovers who immediately felt drawn to the imagery. They see their own companions in the cards, their own bonds reflected back.
Some are readers who’ve lost pets and find comfort in a deck that honors the human-animal relationship. The cards become a space where that relationship is still present, still acknowledged, still sacred.
Some are simply looking for an indie deck that isn’t trying to be edgy or trendy, a deck that feels warm and grounded, built on solid tarot foundations but with a visual language that speaks to companionship and loyalty.
Whatever brings someone to The Companion Tarot, we’re honored when they choose to work with it. 💜
Creating Something That Lasts
I want to close this story with a reflection on why creating something tangible matters.
When we lose someone we love, whether human or animal, we’re left with absence. The spaces they used to fill. The sounds they used to make. The Presence we can no longer touch…
Objects that carry their memory become precious. Photos. Collars. Favorite toys. These aren’t just things. They’re anchors to what was real, what mattered, what we don’t want to forget.
The Companion Tarot was my attempt to create that kind of object for Michelle. Not just a deck, but a container for love. Every card holds Ganz’s spirit, Boston Terrier presence infused with the symbolic weight of tarot’s ancient wisdom. Every shuffle is a kind of remembering. Every reading is a conversation that includes him still. 💜
If you’re going through something similar, if you’re approaching loss or living with grief, I hope this story offers something. Maybe it’s the reminder that creating can be Healing. Maybe it’s the recognition that keeping our companions close through meaningful objects matters. Maybe it’s simply knowing that someone else understands how profound these bonds are.
Tarot, at its best, helps us process what’s difficult to face. It gives us structure for sitting with uncertainty, images for holding emotion, practice for being present with hard questions.
The Companion Tarot was made to do that work while also honoring the companion bonds that shape so many of our lives. 🙂 💜
Your Reflection This Week
Here’s what I’d invite you to consider: what would you create if you had to hold love tangibly?
Not everyone will make a tarot deck. But everyone has the capacity to create something meaningful for someone they love, or for themselves.
Maybe it’s:
- A collection of photos arranged with intention
- A piece of writing that captures what someone means to you
- An object made by hand that carries your care
- A ritual or practice designed to honor a bond
The Companion Tarot exists because I wanted to make something that would last. That impulse, that desire to create in the face of loss, is deeply human. We all carry it.
What might you make? What love might you hold in a form that endures?
You don’t need special skills. You don’t need perfection. You just need the willingness to try creating something that matters to you.
That’s how The Companion Tarot came to be. And whatever you make, that’s enough for something meaningful to exist. 💜
Thank you for reading this story. And if you feel drawn to The Companion Tarot, we’d be honored to have you join us.
With deepest gratitude,
Vanja and Michelle – Tarot of the Fool
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