Quick Specs
- Artist: Michelle Lodge
- Format: 78-card deck with 128-page guidebook
- Card Size: 3.63 x 6.13 in
- Meanings Included: Upright and reversed
- Publisher / Manufacturer: Fair Winds Press
- Weight: 1.5 lb
Tarot Reimagined Through a Bold, Feminist Lens
Michelle Lodge built her career in comics before she turned her pen toward tarot. She trained in illustration at the Florida School of the Arts and earned a BFA in Sequential Art from the Savannah College of Art and Design, and her portfolio ranges from gritty black-and-white noir to vibrant comedic cartooning. That range shows in the Bad Witch Tarot. Every one of the 78 cards carries the confident linework and expressive color of a working comics artist, not the soft-focus photography or painterly realism you see in most decks on the shelf.
The deck reworks the classic tarot archetypes through a feminist, body-diverse lens. The figures on these cards are glamorous, alluring, and drawn with a range of bodies and presentations that most traditional decks skip entirely. Lodge’s guidebook, at 128 pages, pairs each card with playful, affirming, and direct interpretations, so you get a reading voice that sounds like a friend leveling with you rather than a distant oracle. The deck also ships in a sturdy collectible box, which makes it easy to keep the cards protected between readings or to hand off as a gift.
I think of Bad Witch as a deck built for witches who already know their own power and want a tarot that reflects it back at them, rather than asking them to translate themselves into someone else’s imagery. It reads equally well for someone picking up their first deck and for a longtime reader who wants art that feels current.
Reversals are not an optional add-on with this deck. The guidebook treats upright and reversed meanings as two halves of the same card, so learning to read reversed pulls is part of learning the deck itself rather than a technique you bolt on later. If a card lands upside down in your spread, Lodge wants you to read it, not skip it and redraw. That approach fits the deck’s whole personality: direct, unapologetic, and uninterested in softening a message just because it’s inconvenient.
Three spreads come built into the guidebook, so you have a place to start the moment you open the box. I’d point a first-time reader toward the shortest of the three for daily practice, then move up to the more involved layouts once the card meanings start to feel familiar rather than memorized. Because the artwork carries so much personality on its own, a lot of readers find they lean on the pictures for intuition faster with this deck than with a more traditional set.
I brought Bad Witch into the shop because I wanted a feminist, contemporary option on the tarot wall that didn’t feel like a reskin of the same classical imagery every other publisher runs. Lodge’s comics background gives the deck a visual voice of its own, and the guidebook’s straightforward tone makes it approachable even if tarot is new to you.
Practical Ritual Applications
A single card pulled each morning is the fastest way to get comfortable with the Bad Witch Tarot’s visual language. Read it upright first, then flip your interpretation if the card comes up reversed, using the guidebook’s paired meanings until the two start to feel intuitive rather than looked-up. Because every card includes a reversed meaning, you build fluency in both directions from day one instead of learning reversals as a separate skill later.
Once the daily draw feels comfortable, move into the three spreads built into the guidebook. They’re sized for real questions, not abstract exercises, so you can use them for anything from a relationship check-in to a decision that’s had you stuck for weeks.
If you’re building out a full reading practice rather than starting from zero, I’d browse the shop’s tarot and divination books for companion material, and if this is your first deck, the beginner-friendly picks are a good next stop for grounding the fundamentals.
How to Start Reading with the Bad Witch Tarot
Here’s a simple way to get comfortable with this deck in your first few weeks.
Here’s a simple way to get comfortable with this deck in your first few weeks.
- Study the Card Art First
Before you memorize a single keyword, spend time just looking at the cards. Michelle Lodge’s comics background means the artwork itself carries a lot of the meaning, from body language to color choices to the small details in the background of each scene. Flip through the deck slowly and notice which cards you react to immediately. That gut response is data you’ll use later. The guidebook’s interpretations will make more sense once you’ve already formed your own impression of the imagery, so resist the urge to read the book cover to cover before spending real time with the cards themselves.
- Draw One Card a Day, Both Ways
Pull a single card each morning and read it upright using the guidebook. Then take a moment to consider what it would mean reversed, even on days it lands upright, so you’re building comfort with both directions from the start. This deck treats reversed meanings as core to the card, not a bonus skill, so the sooner reversals feel normal to you, the more useful your full readings become. Keep a short note of your daily draws for a couple of weeks and you’ll start to notice patterns in how you’re actually interpreting the art, apart from what the book says.
- Work Through the Three Guidebook Spreads
Once single-card draws feel natural, move into the three spreads included in the guidebook. Start with the simplest layout and use it for a real, current question rather than a hypothetical one, since a genuine question gives you something concrete to check your reading against. Work up to the more involved spreads as you get comfortable holding several card meanings in relation to each other. Because the deck’s tone is direct rather than gentle, don’t be surprised if a spread tells you something you weren’t expecting.
Tarot Fellow Standard
I stock the Bad Witch Tarot because I wanted a deck on the wall that reads as genuinely contemporary rather than a new coat of paint on the same nineteenth-century imagery. Michelle Lodge comes from comics, not tarot illustration, and it shows in every card. I look for decks that hold up to daily use, not just decks that photograph well, and this one earns its place because the guidebook actually teaches you to read it, reversals included, instead of leaving you to guess.
Frequently Asked Questions
Yes. The guidebook that comes with the Bad Witch Tarot pairs every card with both an upright and a reversed interpretation, and reversals are treated as a core part of reading the deck rather than an optional add-on you can skip. If you’re used to setting reversed cards aside or redrawing until you land upright with other decks, this one is built specifically to have you read them, since Lodge wrote the guidebook around the idea that a card’s reversed meaning is just as important as its upright one.
The companion guidebook runs 128 pages, covering upright and reversed meanings for all 78 cards plus three spreads you can use right away. It’s sized to travel with the deck rather than function as a standalone reference book, so you can keep the guidebook and the cards together in the deck’s collectible box and pull both out at once whenever you sit down for a reading.
It’s designed to work for witches at any experience level, including complete beginners picking up their very first deck. The guidebook’s interpretations are direct and plainly written rather than steeped in traditional tarot jargon, so you don’t need to already know the classical card meanings or symbolism to start reading with it, and the three built-in spreads give you a place to start practicing right away instead of guessing at how to lay the cards out.
Michelle Lodge, an indie comics artist trained at the Florida School of the Arts and Savannah College of Art and Design, illustrated the full 78-card deck herself. Her background spans gritty black-and-white noir and vibrant comedic cartooning, and that range gives the cards a graphic, expressive style that’s noticeably different from the painterly or photographic art you find in most tarot decks on the market today.
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