Last week I needed to spend just a few more dollars to get same-day delivery on some food for my parakeet and Amazon suggested this deck to me based on my algorithm. I thought, what the heck, it’s only $6.99, I’ll check this deck out… well, at least it was cheap. Let’s dive in.

The Basics

Deck Name: All-Embracing Palmistry Fortune Telling Playing Cards

Manufacturer: ZHQGYN, though on the back of the box above the age rating it says “MFRS: Han Yu Bowen”

Artist: None listed

The Product

This deck comes in a sturdy, heavy-weight box with a lid that lifts off the front. The cards are thin but have a shiny surface that makes them slick enough to shuffle, though I would shuffle them carefully because they feel like they could crease.

There is no guidebook. There are three cards with text about palmistry but no instructions on how to use or interpret the cards. This product photo from the Amazon listing is the only thing I can find that resemble instructions and they’re vague at best:

The cards are organized into English Pattern suits, Spades, Hearts, Diamonds, and Clubs with the standard Ace-10 with a Jack, Queen and King. On each card is an illustration of a hand highlighting different palm lines with a short explainer of what that line means.

Let’s look at the four Aces pictured above. Do you see the big problem? They’ve swapped Hearts and Clubs. The Ace of Hearts says “Successful Career Palmistry” while the Ace of Clubs says, “Palmistry of Social Activists.” Traditionally, clubs are the career cards and hearts have to do with social interactions. They’ve got Diamonds and Spades right, at least.

The listing claims this deck is for beginners but I find it very confusing! There isn’t really any cartomancy system in place with the imagery depicted and I’m not sure I understand how these two divination practices combine onto cards in any logical way that can be read. There’s no intuitive way to read these cards either. It’s almost like it’s supposed to be palmistry flashcards that they’ve slapped card suits onto.

Even if you do single card pulls as the product photo instructs, what good would pulling a card with a palm line be if you don’t have that line, or your line doesn’t match the line on the card? And with the switched suits you can’t trust the cartomancy interpretation either. Unfortunately, I don’t know enough about palmistry to judge whether any of what they’ve depicted is correct but I strongly suspect that there are missteps. I wouldn’t trust that the explanations of the palm lines were all accurate.

The Conclusion

There’s not a lot to say about this deck except that I am fairly certain that these cards were made with AI. There’s typos in the product photos and the side of the box reads, “Palmistry, also known as palmistry fortune-telling playing cards.” A person didn’t write that. This deck doesn’t make a lick of sense. Save your $7 unless you just want it for the novelty of collecting random cartomancy decks.