Did you know you don't have to use the entire tarot deck for every reading?
It's fairly well known that you can read tarot by taking out the major arcana cards and only using those 22 cards for a spread.
However, you can divide the deck up in all sorts of ways. This is called reading with a restricted deck. Usually, you will separate the deck out into suits and only choose which suits are relevant to the question at hand.
Everyone has their own meaning for what the suits indicate, these are mine and they are fairly common :) (see more about using suits to read in this other post!)
Pentacles reveal income and money, home life, all domestic issues, family, and platonic relationships.
Cups reveal emotions, romantic relationships, subjective experiences, and personal need.
Swords reveal mindset, objectivity, professional relationships, pain, and difficult or professional (“it’s just business”) choices.
Wands reveal passions, desires, boundaries, sexual relationships, burdens, and choices borne out of inner need.
So for example, if you are reading a question about the future of someone's romantic relationship when they move in with their partner, you can choose to take out all of the Pentacles and Cups and only use those 2 suits for the reading!
Or if you want to identify a person (identity/role/behavior), you can take all the court cards out of the deck and only draw one of them.
You can split the deck and read a special 5-card spread, where you draw 1 card from each pile (the four suits + major arcana) for each card position for an overview of the person's life in that moment.
Reading with a restricted deck is a really great way to learn and practice, since you can just focus on a certain suit and get to know it as a unit. It is really interesting to see a shift in readings when moving from suit to suit :)
