How to Shuffle and Draw a Tarot Card

If you’re new to the tarot, you may be wondering how exactly to go about drawing a card. Is there a right way? Is there a wrong way? Even if you’ve been reading tarot forever, you may still find this post interesting because it details how I do it, and isn’t it fun to learn about how other people read tarot? It can enhance and deepen your own practice.

This post has a video form! The video is also embedded below. It’s my first attempt at making a video on Youtube, so be gentle with your criticisms. In the future I will try to speak more clearly and have a better camera angle! Watching the video may be best if you’re more of a visual learner versus just reading the description written below.

So, spoiler alert, I don’t think there is any wrong way to shuffle and draw a tarot card. The one crucial element that I think is the only thing you need to know is that you should shuffle and draw in a way that feels right to you. You should do it in a manner that when you draw the card, right before you flip it over, you feel that sense of, “Ah yes, this is the one.”

That being said, here are some ways to shuffle. My preferred method is to shuffle the cards as if they were a deck of playing cards. I cut the deck, put half the pile in each hand, then rifle them together. Usually I read reversals, so I like to cut the deck so that the cards get all mixed up head to toe as well. The few decks I have for which I do not care for reversals, I will cut the deck so that they are aligned head to head and shuffle that way so no reversals appear.

The rifle shuffle works best for cards that are of the standard size, think Rider Waite Smith deck size. If you get a deck much larger than those dimensions, it may be hard for your hands to grasp the cards. I feel like I have pretty normal size hands (no facts behind this feeling!), and I can rifle a standard deck just fine. They are obviously much larger than playing cards but you will get used to the size difference in no time. Then, the next time you shuffle playing cards, you’ll be surprised at how tiny they seem!

Another thing to take note of when rifling is the card stock of the deck you are shuffling. A mass market deck like the Rider Waite Smith or Shadowscapes has a lighter card stock, more like a playing card, and is easy to shuffle. An independent deck may have a higher weight card stock and be less flexible. I’ve noticed that you can still easily rifle most heavier weight card stock decks, they just don’t have as much give.

Be careful not to bend any of your cards while shuffling! It is a real bummer to have a deck with a bent card as this tends to make that card pop out all the time. Your deck will naturally cut where the bent card is and you’ll always notice it when you’re shuffling and drawing cards. Some decks do sell single card replacements but most don’t, so you’ll end up having to repurchase the deck or be creative in how you draw cards from that deck.

I also love to do an overhand shuffle. This is when you take cards from the bottom of the deck and mix them in small amounts onto the top. To me, this doesn’t seem like it mixes the cards up as much a the rifle shuffle, so I will usually do both if the deck type allows. I like to do the overhand shuffle when I’m talking to a client and want to unobtrusively play with the cards while the client is speaking. A rifle shuffle tends to make more noise and can distract a client more than the overhand shuffle, especially if you’re doing an online reading the cards are out of sight.

Of course, there are as many ways to shuffle as there are people, right? You might like to mush the cards around with both hands on a surface. Or you may like to weave them together in a slotting manner. When I have a particularly large scale deck, I like to just pick a few and put them on top and then pick a few and put them on the bottom in as random a way as I can. Remember, the important thing is to shuffle in a way that feels right to you.

I tend to use my intuition to decide when I’ve shuffled enough. I’ve calmed my mind or I’ve repeated my query sufficiently or I’ve set my intention. Whenever makes my intuition sparks, “The cards are ready!”, I listen to that little voice from within and know that I have shuffled sufficiently. You may decide that there is a specific number of shuffles that feels right to you, or you maybe want to say a mantra a specific number of times. You could even set a timer to say, 30 seconds, and decide that is the right amount of time to shuffle. My advice is to practice using your intuition to let you know when the cards are ready. After some practice you will be able to hear the voice inside of you that says it’s time to draw a card.

Next, I align the cards so the edge of the decks are smooth. I put the deck down and feel along the edges of the cards with my left hand. As I move along the edge, I tap into my intuition again, asking it to let me know when to stop and cut. When I feel energetically like I found the “right place” I cut the deck and put the top part to the left of the bottom part. Then I use my right hand to turn over the top card on the right hand/bottom pile, and turn it over side-to-side so that the card maintains its upright or reversed orientation.

If I am drawing more than one card I will keep using my right hand to turn over cards from that bottom pile until I am done drawing cards. If I have a whole spread worked ahead of time I will say out loud what each card represents as I turn it over. I generally only do that if I’m reading for someone else, otherwise I talk to myself in my head if I’m just reading for myself. 

Another method for drawing the card that I really like is to fan the cards out along a surface. You can do this in one long line like in the photo above, or in any pattern of your choosing. Then, I will hold my left hand over the cards and slowly move it along the cards. I will sense subtle energy shifts in my hand or in my body that indicate when it is the right time to put my hand down and choose a card. It can help to shut your eyes during this practice to better tune into the energy of the cards.

I think it’s important to say that you might not feel any energy in this practice and there is nothing wrong with that. You may just count to ten while waving your hand over the cards and then put it down on a card at the end of the count. Feeling energy is not a prerequisite to making this practice work for you.

Once I have chosen a card with my left hand, I will then flip it over, edge-to-edge with my right hand. I want to make sure not to flip the card’s orientation when I am turning it so it maintains it’s upright or reversed orientation during the flip. If I’m drawing more than one card, I keep going down the lines to the card under the one I chose and flipping them with my right hand.

There it you have it! Voila!, the tarot card(s) I am going to interpret.

Now you are ready to interpret your card. I have another Tarot 101 post on interpreting a one card reading if you are interested in getting my take on how to go about doing a one card tarot reading. You can find that here.

The takeaway message from this post is that you can shuffle the cards any way that you want! The important thing is to do it in a way that you enjoy and that feels right to you. Let me know what way works best for you. Is it like me or do you have your own special practice? I’d love to hear about it! Until next week…