The Lubanko Tarot by E. Lubanko

Surreal, Intense, Queer & Divine

Not every tarot deck is designed to make you comfortable. Some are created to make you look.

The Lubanko Tarot by artist and designer E. Lubanko is a vivid, emotionally charged 78-card tarot deck exploring identity, transformation, desire, struggle, vulnerability and the divine through a world of surreal and unapologetically colourful imagery.

Originally brought to life through a successful independent Kickstarter project, The Lubanko Tarot developed a devoted following before finding a new home with Llewellyn.

Now available as a mass-market edition, the deck retains the extraordinary artwork and symbolic world that made the original indie creation so distinctive, accompanied by an expanded 188-page full-colour guidebook.

This is tarot with teeth.

Beautiful, strange, sensual, confronting and occasionally uncomfortable.

Exactly as intended.

🌈 The Surreal, the Intense, the Queer & the Divine

E. Lubanko created this deck to explore the enormous range of human experience without sanding down its edges.

Joy and pain exist here.

Beauty and discomfort.

Desire and fear.

Humanity and something beyond human.

The figures inhabiting these cards represent different bodies, identities and forms, while others move beyond recognisably human boundaries altogether.

Rather than presenting one narrow idea of what a tarot character should look like, The Lubanko Tarot creates a world where transformation is possible and expected.

The result is a deck filled with beings who can feel mythical, sensual, vulnerable, powerful and strange.

Sometimes all at once.

🔮 Familiar Tarot, Different Path

The Lubanko Tarot draws upon the familiar storytelling traditions of Rider-Waite-Smith tarot, but it doesn't follow them obediently.

Some cards will feel immediately recognisable to experienced tarot readers.

Others deliberately diverge.

Lubanko has approached each card by asking what its message actually needs to communicate rather than simply recreating established imagery.

That makes this a particularly interesting deck for readers who already understand traditional tarot and want to encounter those archetypes from another perspective.

The structure gives you somewhere familiar to begin.

The artwork then has other plans.

🎨 Every Card Is a Complete Painting

There are no simple pip cards hiding in the Minor Arcana.

Every one of the 78 cards is fully illustrated, with each suit developing as its own visual and symbolic journey.

Colour, movement and composition all become part of the reading language.

Look closely and you'll find layers of metaphor woven through the paintings.

Bodies move through landscapes.

Figures transform.

Mythological imagery collides with deeply human emotion.

Some cards communicate immediately.

Others demand time.

Lubanko deliberately created each illustration as both a piece of artwork and a functional tarot card, considering how the imagery would communicate at different sizes and how its visual structure could guide the reader.

This is a deck that rewards looking before reaching for the guidebook.

🖤 Tarot for the Messier Parts of Being Human

The Lubanko Tarot doesn't pretend that personal growth is always beautiful.

Sometimes transformation hurts.

Sometimes desire complicates things.

Sometimes we're frightened.

Angry.

Grieving.

Confused.

Powerful.

Completely certain.

Completely lost.

And occasionally several of those before breakfast.

Rather than avoiding emotional intensity, this deck gives it somewhere to exist.

That makes it particularly compelling for reflective readings, identity work, shadow exploration and those moments when a softer deck might simply feel too polite for the question being asked.

It doesn't exist to frighten you.

But it isn't going to put a decorative cushion over the difficult bits either.

🌙 Personal Myth & Metaphor

At the heart of The Lubanko Tarot is the idea of personal metaphor and mythos.

Tarot imagery doesn't need to have only one interpretation.

A figure might remind you of something entirely different from the person sitting beside you.

A colour might trigger a memory.

A gesture might change the emotional meaning of an entire card.

Lubanko fills the artwork with enough symbolic material for those personal associations to emerge.

Rather than asking only:

“What does this card mean?”

The deck invites another question:

“What does this image mean to me, right now?”

That's where things can become particularly interesting.

🏳️🌈 Queerness, Identity & Representation

Queerness isn't an accessory added to The Lubanko Tarot.

It is woven into its visual world.

The deck allows bodies, identities, relationships and forms to exist beyond narrow conventions, creating space for readers who haven't always seen themselves reflected comfortably within traditional tarot imagery.

At the same time, its themes aren't restricted to one identity or community.

Questions of transformation, belonging, desire, vulnerability and becoming are deeply human.

The deck simply refuses to pretend that humanity comes in one shape.

📖 The 188-Page Full-Colour Guidebook

This Llewellyn edition includes an extensive 188-page full-colour guidebook written to help readers explore Lubanko's symbolism and interpretations.

The guide provides support for understanding the cards while still leaving room for your own relationship with the imagery to develop.

For each card, the artwork itself remains an important part of the reading.

Notice what catches your attention.

Notice what makes you uncomfortable.

Notice where your eye goes first.

Then explore the guidebook.

The conversation between the creator's intention and your own response is where this deck really comes alive.

🎨 About E. Lubanko

E. Lubanko is an illustrator and designer based in the Boston area whose work spans illustration, visual design, branding, UI and UX, occult artwork, traditional painting and natural illustration.

Across those different disciplines runs a fascination with communication: finding what needs to be expressed and discovering the visual language through which to express it.

The Lubanko Tarot grew from that approach.

Originally independently published through Kickstarter in 2020, the deck developed a passionate following through its vivid artwork and willingness to explore subjects that tarot sometimes approaches more cautiously.

The original indie edition ultimately sold out.

In October 2025, The Lubanko Tarot returned in a new mass-market edition published by Llewellyn Worldwide, making Lubanko's extraordinary tarot world available to a much wider audience.

✨ Why You'll Love The Lubanko Tarot

• Complete 78-card tarot deck
• Created, illustrated and written by E. Lubanko
• Originally independently published through Kickstarter
• Surreal, vivid and highly detailed artwork
• Every Major and Minor Arcana card fully illustrated
• Inspired partly by Rider-Waite-Smith storytelling
• Deliberately diverges from traditional imagery where appropriate
• Explores queerness, identity, transformation and divinity
• Rich representation of bodies, beings and forms
• Strong themes of personal myth and metaphor
• Ideal for intuitive and reflective tarot work
• Particularly powerful for deeper and shadow-focused readings
• Includes a substantial 188-page full-colour guidebook
• Published by Llewellyn Worldwide

🔥 The Reading Experience

This isn't necessarily the deck you reach for when you'd like tarot to pat you gently on the head and tell you everything is fine.

The Lubanko Tarot is particularly at home with questions that have some weight behind them.

Use it for:

Identity • Transformation • Relationships • Desire • Shadow work • Personal growth • Creativity • Self-reflection • Difficult decisions • Emotional exploration • Life transitions

It can absolutely answer an everyday question.

But give it something complicated and there is plenty within the imagery to work with.

The richness of the paintings also makes it particularly rewarding for slow readings.

Draw one card.

Put the guidebook down for a moment.

Look.

What is happening?

Where are the figures looking?

What is changing?

What feels beautiful?

What feels uncomfortable?

And why?

Sometimes the part of a tarot card we'd rather not look at is precisely where the reading begins.

🌿 Perfect For

Experienced tarot readers • Intuitive readers • LGBTQ+ tarot readers • Queer tarot collectors • Shadow work practitioners • Art tarot collectors • Surrealism lovers • Contemporary tarot enthusiasts • Readers exploring identity • Readers navigating transformation • Lovers of vivid artwork • Collectors of unusual tarot decks

Newer tarot readers can absolutely work with the deck too, particularly with the extensive guidebook alongside them.

Just don't expect beige.

This deck appears to have rejected beige at a philosophical level.

📦 In the Box

• 78 fully illustrated tarot cards
• 188-page full-colour companion guidebook
• Presentation box

📖 At a Glance

Title: The Lubanko Tarot

Creator & Artist: E. Lubanko

Publisher: Llewellyn Worldwide

Cards: 78

Guidebook: 188 pages, full colour

System: Rider-Waite-Smith influenced with intentional divergences

Artwork: Fully illustrated Major & Minor Arcana

Themes: Queerness, identity, transformation, divinity, personal mythology & emotional exploration

Original Indie Publication: Kickstarter, 2020

Mass-Market Edition: October 2025

Language: English

Product Type: Tarot Deck & Guidebook Set

🖤 Why We Love It at Oneness Emporium

Some tarot decks whisper.

The Lubanko Tarot has apparently decided that whispering is somebody else's department.

And we rather love it for that.

The colours are glorious, but beneath them is a deck willing to explore considerably more complicated territory.

Identity.

Desire.

Pain.

Transformation.

Vulnerability.

Power.

The parts of ourselves that don't always fit comfortably into neat little boxes.

There is representation here without the deck feeling as though it has been assembled from a diversity checklist.

There are queer bodies, human bodies and bodies that have cheerfully abandoned being human altogether.

And throughout it all, Lubanko gives the reader an enormous amount of visual symbolism to explore.

That's what makes this deck particularly interesting to us.

It isn't unusual merely for the sake of looking unusual.

There is substance underneath the spectacle.

It's bold.

It's strange.

It's beautiful.

Occasionally challenging.

And very definitely itself.

Which feels rather at home at Oneness.