I am a huge fan of collage artwork and have been following this creator, Stephanie Gilbert on TikTok for a while. There are tarot decks made in studios, printed in factories, sold in boxes. Then there is the deck made with magazines, scissors, glue, and that moment when a scattered image aligns its meaning with your fingertips. Playdate with the Universe, Stephanie’s Kickstarter campaign, lives in the second category – hand-crafted, analogue, personal.
This deck emerges from a love of mixed media, colour, chaos and intuition. Over years of artistic exploration (captured on her TikTok), Stephanie has built an aesthetic of layered images, spontaneous cut-outs and surprising juxtapositions. It is no surprise that tarot drew her in: the archetypes offered a structure which her playful art could dance around and through.
Stephanie describes her campaign as a 78-card tarot deck rooted in collage art. Each card begins as torn paper, magazine fragments, textures, and layers. At some point the pieces become something else: an image that feels like it was always meant to exist. The magic happens in the “playdate” — the moment the materials meet the message.
“Art for me has always been about play,” says Steph. “I wanted to bring that to tarot, to make a deck that is intuitive, loose, unexpected.” Her approach resists the sleek polish of mainstream decks. Instead she embraces the tactile, the fragmented, the un-perfect. She sees the cards as a playground.
The deck offers a foil to the polished, pastel-perfect trend in tarot. Here you meet collage as divination, materials re-imagined as meaning, chaos rearranged into archetype. Stephanie’s method echoes her own journey: stepping away from magazine work, re-forming her tools, and finding a new path. She has said this deck came from those shifts, from uncertainty, from wanting creation to feel hands-on again.
This is definitely a deck I’m keeping an eye out for. And for readers or seekers who journal, sketch, or collect odd moments of inspiration, Playdate with the Universe offers a deck that aligns with ritual and reflection. You could pull a card, place it beside your journal, and let the torn edges remind you that meaning isn’t perfect. You might trace the collage’s cut-outs and find a memory hiding there. You might sit with what won’t fit.
The Kickstarter campaign is live now starting from $44, and invites backers to join the process. Rewards include original collage prints, early access to the deck, and behind-the-scenes glimpses of how each card came together.
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