In 1991, perhaps fed up with
the paperwork needed to obtain
the bank loans needed to buy
cards, collectors collectively threw
up their hands and said, "Oy
gevalt! Enough!"

The baseball card market is cur-
rently in what economists call a
down cycle. Or as sports fans
might say, the market is currently
lying low, waiting for the right
moment to follow the lead of
Michael Jordan and Magic John-
son and come out of retirement.

No, Please,
No More Sports

Not everyone is crazy about
sports cards, of course, and card
manufacturers have always
printed alternative sets. Some of
the more famous ones have been
Mars Attacks, Wacky Packages,
Garbage Pail Kids and a little game
called Magic.

That last product was designed
by Richard Garfield and released
by Wizards of the Coast in August
1993. The original print run, sup-
posed to last six months, sold out
in six weeks. The following year,
TSR offered a collectible card game
of its own, and in 1995, dozens
of CCGs were released.

So that's pretty much the
whole card story in a nutshell.

But it still leaves you wondering:
What if cards hadn't caught on in
that fateful harem? What if all the
emperor's wives had taken up
macramé instead, and cards had
been replaced throughout history
by wall hangings and potholders?
Would anyone pay $6,500 for a
Napoleon Lajoie tea cosy?

If so, please contact Eric Black,
care of Wizard Press. Hurry while
supplies last!

Eric Black is a freelance writer living in
Los Angeles. He also has a set of hand-
knit Moxes for sale.

THE TAROT
If you've never seen tarot cards, you're missing out on one
of the most surreal things humans have ever devised, second
only to Lik-M-Ade & "Alf."

The tarot is a deck of 78 cards that in the right hands can sup-
posedly help divine the future. Fifty-six of the cards look like
standard playing cards, with four suits of 14 cards each. The
modern names for the suits are wands,cups,swords and pentacles.
The other 22 cards are known as the major arcana, and they
are major bizarro.

The major arcana are sort of like a big set of jokers: They don't
really have anything to do with the rest of the deck, they're just
there to look cool. They have such names as The Fool, The Lovers,
Temperance, The World and Death, and each has a picture to
accompany the title.

The basic tarot images are standard from deck to deck, though
each deck offers its own details and interpretations. Some of the
pictures are downright creepy.

The Tower, for example, depicts a happy little smiley-face sun
vomiting lightning on a tower that two men are falling out of face-
first. The Hanged Man shows a blissful-looking man with a halo
hanging by his foot from a tree. And strangest of all, The Wheel
of Fortune depicts a contestant actually choosing the gift certificate
instead of the prizes. (Okay, so I made that one up, but there
really is a Wheel of Fortune card.)

While the earliest known tarot packs date back to 1392, occult
legend claims the deck is much older than that. Supposedly, a
group of high priests in ancient Egypt knew their kingdom was
about to fall into the hands of barbarians and were afraid their
libraries would be burned and their wisdom lost forever. So they
encoded everything they knew into the tarot pictures and gave
them to a passing gypsy, hoping their learning would be spread
throughout the world in the guise of a common card game.

It's a cute story, but historians feel it's highly suspect. A more
likely explanation is that the cards were created by a band of 12th
century heretics called the Waldensians. The Waldensians were
outlawed by the Catholic Church and forbidden to associate with
other Christians. To continue to preach and make converts, then,
they would have had to disguise their teaching aids as something
innocuous, like a deck of cards. They may well have invented the
tarot for this purpose, but no one really knows for sure.

So there you have it. The tarot: cards for people who feel Mind-
stab Thrulls just aren't weird enough.

- Eric Black